Coast Survey

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The Office of Coast Survey, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1970, is one of the U.S. federal government's oldest scientific organizations. For two centuries, Coast Survey has been the nation's nautical chartmaker.

Survey of the Coast

The work of the agency dates from 1807 when President Thomas Jefferson signed “AN ACT TO provide for surveying the coasts of the United States.” While the bill’s objective was specific – to produce nautical charts – it reflected larger issues of concern to the young nation: national boundaries, commerce, and defense.

The new agency experienced some growing pains in the early years. Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, who was eventually to become the agency’s first superintendent, went to England to collect scientific instruments and was unable to return through the duration of the War of 1812. After Hassler returned, he started work on a survey of New York Harbor in 1817, but Congress stepped in to suspend the work because of tensions between civilian and military control of the agency. After several years under the control of the U.S. Army, the Survey of the Coast was reestablished in 1832, and President Andrew Jackson appointed Hassler as Superintendent.

The U.S. Coast Survey was a civilian agency but, from the beginning, officers and men from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army were detailed to service with the Survey, and U.S. Navy ships were also detailed to its use. In general, Army officers worked on topographic surveys on the land and related maps based on the surveys, while Navy officers in general worked on hydrographic surveys in coastal waters.^[1]

The Civil War

Alexander Dallas Bache, great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was the second Coast Survey Superintendent. Bache was a physicist, scientist, and surveyor who established the first magnetic observatory and served as the first president of the National Academy of Sciences. Under Bache, Coast Survey was quick to apply its resources to the Union cause during the Civil War. In addition to setting up additional lithographic presses to produce the thousands of charts required by the Navy and other vessels in government service, Bache made a critical decision to send Coast Survey parties to work with blockading squadrons and Armies in the field, producing hundreds of maps and charts. Bache detailed these activities in his annual reports to Congress.

U.S. Coast Survey cartographer Edwin Hergesheimer created the 1981 map showing the density of the slave population in the Southern states.^[2]

Bache was also one of four members of the government's Blockade Strategy Board, planning strategy to essentially strangle the South, economically and militarily. On April 16, 1861, President Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring the blockade of ports from South Carolina to Texas. Bache’s Notes on the Coast provided valuable information for Union naval forces.

In the centuries before Google Earth, maps in wartime had special military significance. As Bache pointed out in his annual report, on Nov 7, 1862:

“It is certain that accurate maps must form the basis of well-conducted military operations, and that the best time to procure them is not when an attack is impending, or when the army waits, but when there is no hindrance to, or pressure upon, the surveyors. That no coast can be effectively attacked, defended, or blockaded without accurate maps and charts, has been fully proved by the events of the last two years, if, indeed, such a proposition required practical proof.”

The people of the Coast Survey

U.S. Coast Survey (known as the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey beginning in 1878) attracted the best and brightest scientists and naturalists. Coast Survey commissioned famed naturalist Louis Agassiz to conduct the first scientific study of the Florida reef system. James McNeill Whistler, who went on to paint the iconic “Whistler’s Mother,” was a Coast Survey engraver. The great naturalist John Muir was a guide and artist on “Survey of the 39th Parallel” across the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah.

The agency’s men and women (Coast Survey hired women professionals as early as 1845) led scientific and engineering activities through the decades. In 1926, they started production of aeronautical charts to meet the requirements of the new air transportation age. During height of the Great Depression, Coast and Geodetic Survey (C&GS) organized surveying parties and field offices that employed over 10,000 people, including many out-of-work engineers.^[3]

In World War II, C&GS sent over 1000 civilian members and more than half of its commissioned officers to the military services. They served as hydrographers, artillery surveyors, cartographers, army engineers, intelligence officers, and geophysicists in all theaters of the war. Civilians on the home front produced over 100 million maps and charts for the Allied Forces. Eleven members of the C&GS gave their lives during the war.

Today's Office of Coast Survey

President Richard Nixon formed NOAA in 1970, bringing C&GS into the new scientific agency.^[4]

Today, the Office of Coast Survey continues its traditional commitment, providing the nation with navigation products and information that improves ocean-going commerce, keeps people safe, and protects coastal environments. The office produces the nation's nautical charts and the United States Coast Pilot, among other products and services.

References

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