Crown & government
Chart Office
Also called the office · the British office
Britannia's hydrographic office, which compiles, grades and corrects the realm's charts from ships' logs, field surveys, consular despatches, mission letters and foreign charts obtained by purchase or exchange. Its doctrine is that a chart states its own uncertainty, and it keeps a family of marks for ground that is 'reported and not recommended' whose meaning it never prints.
The office that grades and prints the realm's charts and sailing directions, including the western coast and the Basin.
Named with it
- Hydrographer Royal Edmund Perceval
- Chart Office Examiner Rosamund Thwaite
- Chart Office Superintendent Ignatius Merriweather
Ties
- receives field surveys from the naval surveying service
- exchanges charts with the Pruss hydrographic service
- receives marking petitions from the Order of the White Eagle
- has sought access to the map vaults of the Archivum Magnum Sacrae Sedis
- reads the letters and registers of the British missions
- prepares the Admiralty's sailing directions
At the table
Grants some requests to leave things off public sheets (never a shoal) and records every petitioner, ground and decision in the comptroller's memoranda; religious bodies are the largest class of petitioners. Keeps a register of lapsed private lights and bells. Grades 'unaccountable' log entries low but sends clusters to an examiner, and masters are sometimes questioned about them years later. Its examiners consult mission letters before sending a survey party anywhere. It prints what to do and not what it is for; it grades the Five Isles below anything else on that water, holds that the old sheets showing one island were wrong, and will neither print nor state in writing that such sheets are false. It refuses to print the popular name Colombia. It listens to returned travellers from Konstantinopolis.