jgnfld wrote:runsforcelery wrote:...
I probably shouldn't say this, but in this instance you don't know what you're talking about.
First, yes, Charisian merchantmen trade almost everywhere, but that's almost everywhere. Do you think that the British admiralty had detailed charts of every bay and harbor on the entire planet in 1800? If so, I have some bottomland I want to sell you: just don't ask me what it's on the bottom of. Do not be thinking that anyone on Safehold has anything remotely like the maritime charting resources that we take for granted today...
I know where you're coming from BUT...As a a sailboat owner and avid reader of old charts, I can say that the Admiralty did, in fact, have charts of every major bay like where the battle occurred by 1880, or so. They had many very good charts in the 1700s. We still use late 19th century Admiralty charts to this day in certain areas where they were then and where no one with the resources has been since. This does cause wrecks from time to time especially with people who overrely on GPS and fail to use bearing sights and depth soundings to crosscheck including a recent minesweeper, as I remember, and certainly the yacht Cork that wrecked during a recent round the world race.
So partly, I guess, it depends on where in the 19th Century we are!
As I said, I study historical charts regularly. Here is a chart of Deception Island that was published in 1829. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... nd-Map.jpg Note the difficult areas are well marked including shallow bar areas.
Cook produced wonderful charts of Newfoundland. On Page 18 of http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/cns/Jame ... 2_1767.pdf
the upper 2 charts, made in the mid 1760s, are charts of some difficult harbors I sail to regularly. Harbour Grace (upper right) if one expands the chart a bit shows a SEVERE mud/gravel bank below Bears Cove with sighting lines included so as to find the rather small channel on the northern edge of the entire bay. I recognize some of the rocks on the SW outer parts of the bay to this day.
Trinity (upper left chart) has all sorts of problems, all well marked. These charts could be used--with caution!--to this day.
As I said, I realize where you're coming from, truly do, but navigators spent a LOT of time charting and recording those observations from early times. This is a _named_ feature. That is, it was a stable, known feature in the area. This is an important point, I think. A named feature such as was the case here is going to be logged at some level and should have appeared on their charts as there was trade before the war.
Now...If you are talking Sable Island off Nova Scotia, or some such as mentioned above like river deltas, as the analogue here, where the bottom can change greatly after every storm or tide there is a very good point to be made. But this does not seem to be a Sable Island sort of area.
Basically, I would have felt better had the feature not been a named feature.
You're absolutely right about the Admiralty Charts, and my original post — before I revised it — said "Queen Victoria's Admiralty." I revised it before posting to 1800, although it might've been better for the purposes of my argument and my analogy to make it 1750, or even earlier. I made the revision to get to the very beginning of the nineteenth century in an effort to establish that even the ICN is only in the "learning to crawl" stage of assembling its own version of the Admiralty Charts.
The Admiralty Charts are the result of a deliberate, very long-term project on the part of the Royal Navy. They didn't just spontaneously happen, and one of the primary duties of RN ships was to continually survey and update their charts and forward the updates to the Admiralty for correlation and distribution.
Pre-Merlin, however, there was no navy, on Safehold, which would have been doing that. Even the Royal Charisian Navy was primarily a coastal force that wasn't intended to project power at blue water distances. The Charisian merchant marine had grown to be the largest in the world, but before the naval adoption of galleons, navies didn't do that sort of thing.
Now, there was a facility in Charis — in Tellesberg, in fact — where merchant skippers' charts and sailing directions were collected. That facility was the original Royal College, and all of their records burned when the College was torched. So even if a chart of this particular passage had been in the College's files, it was no longer available.
In other words, what I'm saying here is that once again we need to be careful about drawing a parallel between Safehold and any particular period in our own world's history. In a lot of ways, from an infrastructure perspective, pre-Merlin Safehold was a combination of Age of Exploration and satellite mapping. The original charts and maps provided by the "Archangels" were incredibly detailed, which meant that Safeholdians knew exactly what their world's major geophysical features looked like. At the same time, however, they were expanding from a (relatively) few initial population enclaves, which meant that they didn't get a look at the reality "on the ground" in many cases for hundreds and hundreds of years. In addition, they've had all of those hundreds and hundreds of years for features to change — or to be changed by human action — and nobody bothered to give them detailed topological maps of underwater features to begin with. So for all intents and purposes, mariners on Safehold have always known where they were going; the problem was in figuring out how to get there, which is where the evolution and compilation of the Charisian merchant marine's sailing directions came in. Charisian skippers were essentially sailing DRT courses allowing for observed currents and wind patterns, which was really the case in our own world until well into the late-eighteenth or even nineteenth century.
That doesn't tell you what "lies beneath," especially not in regions that your merchant marine doesn't normally penetrate and in which your navy has never operated or sent even a single cruiser. In other words, there was — literally — no archive of charts which could have been consulted prior to Sharpfield's deployment to retake Claw Island. Which, by extension, means that no charts were available to the squadron carrying out this operation. They pieced together what they could out of the limited merchant Marine-derived charts they had (or could get their hands on in the available timeframe), and because of the "angelic" maps in the Holy Writ they had an excellent idea of the land features — including islands and above water tidal shoals. Those maps in the Writ, however, certainly contained no named features if those features were named by colonists/settlers moving into the area.
I thought long and hard before I named the shoal at all, mostly for the very reasons you mentioned in your post. In the end, I named it after all for two reasons, one of which had to do with internal storytelling constraints and one of which had to do with external constraints.
Internally, I wanted the screw-galley's commanders (who, by the way, had access to very good [for certain values of the word "good"] Harchongian charts which had been denied — for obvious reasons – to the Charisians) to be in a logical position to suspect/intuit/deduce what had happened. For that, they needed to know there was a shoal there, and if they did, then (logically) it was a named feature, even if the Charisians (who never operated in the vicinity) didn't know about it.
Externally, I wanted both to present that knowledge on the Dohlarans' part to the reader and to avoid the "mysterious single pinnacle rock shoal placed there geographical ages ago by the author specifically to catch this ship" syndrome.
Apparently, despite my best efforts, I failed in that second endeavor for at least some of my readership.
Oh, and on another point that someone else made about making this passage in the dark.
Given the width of the passage — which they knew from their first trip through it on their way to the target — and the fact that they had no clue the shoal existed, there was no reason why they shouldn't have made the passage in darkness. They'd been through the very same waters once already without encountering the shoal. They weren't on exactly the same track on their way home — again, these are sailing ships, not steamers, and they navigate by the Mark One Eyeball, not GPS, radar, or sonar — but they knew they were in safe water. They were wrong about that, but to the extent that any professional mariner is going to take anything for granted about a particular passage, they had pretty fair grounds for believing it would be as safe to sail through Egg Drop Pass in darkness as in daylight.
It could even be argued (although, admittedly, it wasn't part of my own thinking when I wrote this scene) that they encountered the shoal because in the darkness they were giving Egg Drop Island a wider berth than they'd given it on their way south precisely to give themselves a wider safety margin from the land features they knew about. That is, they stayed farther off Egg Drop Island, which moved them deeper into the channel, which is why they hit the shoal in the first place. As I say, I didn't think about that at the time (because, frankly, this was all a non-issue for me, given what I knew about the information available to the characters), but I could probably deploy that argument ex post facto if I wanted to.
There really wasn't any need for it though, because it's very seldom been the practice of any merchant or naval skipper to say "Oh, my. This channel in front of me is only 25 miles wide. I'd better anchor until daylight before I enter it." And, for what it's worth, the actual channel between Beggar Island and Egg Drop Island is (just coincidentally) 25.85 miles across, and Shingle Shoal lies roughly 15 miles from Beggar Island and just under 10 miles from Egg Drop Island. In other words, it's not quite smack in the middle of an otherwise deep water channel that's the next best thing to 30 miles across. That being so, I don't see any reason for a squadron commander — especially a squadron commander who didn't know Shingle Shoal even existed — to consider for a moment not making the transit as expeditiously as possible, especially when he already knew he might have to fight his way through a pursuing fleet along his voyage home.
) It's not a major trading port because of the coastal canals moving trade goods from and to the larger coastal port (Gorath). Foreign traders will go into Gorath which is well to the west of our port/shoal in question. The Dohlaran Navy may be expected to have knowledge of the shoal but I find it most dubious that they would be sharing this information with heretics. Any information they might have shared pre-heresy went up in smoke with the Royal College.
But the truth is, he has a point . . . which is precisely why I waffled back and forth when I was writing the book between naming it and 