Click to enlargeChart Of The Indian Ocean
James Imray's large "blueback" chart of the entire Indian Ocean — the working navigation between the Cape of Good Hope and China, Australia and New Zealand — compiled from the surveys of the East India Company and the British, French and Dutch governments. The Victorian merchant marine's ocean, this copy still bearing a ship's pencilled track.
Authorship and object
Published in London by James Imray in 1853, this is a "blueback" — one of the large, blue-paper-backed working charts produced commercially for the merchant marine. It spans the Indian Ocean from the east African coast and the Cape across to Southeast Asia, China, Australia and New Zealand, compiled from "the most approved authorities," including East India Company and British, French and Dutch government surveys, with soundings, shoals, reefs, banks and anchorages throughout, and numerous compass roses and rhumb lines.
A chart in use
This is not an atlas plate but a tool. It lays down the great-circle routes and tracks across the ocean, and the present copy carries pencilled tracings of an actual ship's progress, with notations of its daily run — the chart caught in the act of guiding a voyage.
The gaze
By the mid-nineteenth century the Indian Ocean had become a thoroughly worked navigational space, its surveys pooled from rival empires into a single commercial chart. India sits within it as one shore on a vast web of sea-routes binding the Cape to China. The room that began with a Portuguese chart claiming the ocean ends with the ocean fully charted and in daily use — the sea-road to India reduced to soundings, bearings and a pencilled wake.