Entry No. 41 · October 1926

On moving sand

Why the house re-surveyed the harbour bar twice in one spring, and what the double line on the Saltwick plate is really saying.

The bar at Saltwick does not hold a position. Ask any pilot and they will tell you the same thing in different words: the bar is where you find it, and you find it by watching the water break. But a chart has to commit. A chart that says the bar is roughly somewhere near here is not a chart; it is a rumour with a border.

In the spring of 1926 the house was asked, politely, by the harbour board, whether our plate was still to be trusted. The senior partner took it as an insult. The junior partner, who had actually walked the flats at low water that February, took it as a fair question. They compromised by doing both: the plate was re-surveyed, and the insult was engraved into the margin.

The survey found the bar forty yards east of where our plate, cut nine years earlier, put it. The easterly gales of the previous January had rolled the whole shoal along the bank like a carpet being adjusted under furniture. Nothing dramatic had happened. The sea had simply done what it does.

The second state shows the old bar in broken rule and the new one in full. We could have quietly corrected it. We chose instead to make the correction visible, because a chart that silently forgets where it once thought things were teaches its reader to stop asking.

There is a principle in there that has outlived the plate. When a measurement changes, the honest thing is not to replace the old line but to keep both, dated, where the reader can see that the world moved and so did we. Collectors call the double line charming. Pilots call it the only honest bar chart on the coast. Both are right.

The plate was cut, re-cut, and printed in a first state of sixty and a second state of a hundred and eighty. The first state, with only the old bar, is the scarcer and less useful of the two, which is a lesson in itself: scarcity is not the same as value, whatever anyone at a print fair tells you.

Filed in the daybook, 14 October 1926. Saltwick Reach, second state, remains in print.