Shipwreck and salvage in the tropics: the case of HMS Thetis, 1830–1854

In 1830, the British frigate HMS Thetis was wrecked at Cabo Frio, on the Brazilian coast. A British naval force was subsequently despatched to undertake a major salvage operation which lasted for well over a year. The substantial textual and visual archive associated with the case of the Thetis raises wider questions about the entanglement of naval, scientific, artistic, financial and legal concerns in an age of British maritime expansion. If the loss of such a ship brought into question the capacity of the British to act at a distance, it also provided an opportunity to mend and strengthen the networks of power and knowledge. The sources of error exposed by the disaster were to be subject to investigation by numerous authorities, including hydrographers keen to refine their charts and sailing directions and Fellows of the Royal Society seeking to advance the claims of science, as well as the Admiralty itself, in the judicial setting of a court martial. We focus here especially on narratives of the wreck and the salvage of the Thetis, and the significance of their repeated tellings of the story after the event; and on the evidential and representational status of the visual images of the scene in sketches, maps, charts, diagrams, engravings and paintings

Panoramic Images for Situational Awareness in a 3D Chart-of-the-Future Display

Many early charts featured sketches of the coastline, providing a good picture of what the shore looked like from the bridge of a ship. These helped the mariner to distinguish one port from another during an approach and establish their rough position within that approach. More recent experimental 3D chart interfaces have incorporated 3D models of land topography and man-made structures to perform the same function. However, topography is typically captured from the air, by means of stereophotogrammetry or lidar and fails to present a good representation of what is seen from a vessel’s bridge. We have been conducting an investigation of ways to present photographic imagery to the mariner to better capture the utility of the early coastline sketches. Our focus has been on navigation in restricted waters, using the Piscataqua River as a test area. This is part of our “Chart-of-the-Future” project being conducted by The Data Visualization Research Lab at the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. Through our investigation, we have developed a new method for presenting photographic imagery to the mariner, in the form of a series of panoramic images progressing down the channel. The panoramas consist of images stitched almost seamlessly together into circular arcs, whose centers are intended to be close to the position of a vessel’s bridge during transit. When viewed from this center, there is no distortion, and distortion increases to a maximum between two panorama centers. Our preliminary trials suggest that panoramas can provide an excellent supplement to electronic navigation aids by making them visible in the context of what can be seen out the window. We believe panoramas will be especially useful both in familiarizing a mariner with an unfamiliar approach during planning, and in enhancing situational awareness at times of reduced visibility such as in fog, dusk, or nightfall

Supporting Intelligent and Trustworthy Maritime Path Planning Decisions

The risk of maritime collisions and groundings has dramatically increased in the past five years despite technological advancements such as GPS-based navigation tools and electronic charts which may add to, instead of reduce, workload. We propose that an automated path planning tool for littoral navigation can reduce workload and improve overall system efficiency, particularly under time pressure. To this end, a Maritime Automated Path Planner (MAPP) was developed, incorporating information requirements developed from a cognitive task analysis, with special emphasis on designing for trust. Human-in-the-loop experimental results showed that MAPP was successful in reducing the time required to generate an optimized path, as well as reducing path lengths. The results also showed that while users gave the tool high acceptance ratings, they rated the MAPP as average for trust, which we propose is the appropriate level of trust for such a system.This work was sponsored by Rite Solutions Inc., Assett Inc., Mikel Inc., and the Office of Naval Research. We would also like to thank Northeast Maritime Institute, the MIT NROTC detachment, the crew of the USS New Hampshire, and the anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved the paper

Conceptual design for Mobile Geological Laboratory position and heading fix system

Conceptual design of position fixing system for Mobile Geological Laboratory in Lunar Mobile Laboratory simulatio

A Review of the Relationship of the ENC and DNC Hydrographic Vector Data Products

This document discusses the level of harmonization between the S-57 and DIGEST standards and the relationship between the ENC and DNC products. It is shown that the military and regulated commercial navigation have different needs, and that it is natural to have two different standards. However, in those areas where the needs overlap the standards should be equivalent. Commercial navigation requires "official" data whereas the military require a broad range of the "best available data". These needs are complementary. At the content level ENC data can be a pure subset of DNC data, however additional harmonization is required to achieve this

Unit organization of five topics in pre-flight aeronautics for twelfth grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1945. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

St. Cloud State Teachers College Bulletin (Volume 6, Number 1)

Article featured: Applications from Aerial Navigation in the Teaching of Mathematics and Geography by Rowland Anderson The Bulletin was St. Cloud State\u27s in-house academic journal. Faculty, administrators, and staff wrote a wide variety of articles based on many different aspects of education, mostly based at St. Cloud State

Meteorological interpretation of Nimbus High Resolution Infrared /HRIR/ data

Nimbus satellite high resolution infrared photographic data analysi

Istanbul viewed : the representation of the city in Ottoman maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 361-395).Starting from the premise that maps are essentially about visualizing space, this dissertation examines what the Ottoman maps of Istanbul reveal about the city's perception, as it evolved in connection to urban development after the conquest. The maps that form the subject of this study appear as illustrations in three manuscript books. The Istanbul maps contained in Mecmu'-i Menazil (1537-8) and HiinernAme (1584) respectively mark the beginning and the accomplishment of the city's architectural elaboration. The other twenty maps, featuring in manuscript copies of Kitab-i Bahriye (1520s), roughly span the period between 1550 and 1700. The variants of a design fixed around 1570 offer an image that fulfills its topographic elaboration in the late-seventeenth century. While the making of this map's design relates to Istanbul's sixteenth century urban development, its topographical elaboration reflects a new perception of the city. These picture-maps, produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, form a unique group of documents as the only known Ottoman pictorial representations showing the city as a whole. As revealed by the context of the books containing them, their making relates both to Ottoman Empire's territorial expansion and to the appropriation of Constantinople as its new capital. Their cartographic language combines, in different manners, the familiar conventions of Islamic miniature painting with artistic forms encountered and assimilated during territorial expansion, particularly in contact with Venice.(cont.) Especially the making of the Istanbul maps in Kitfb-i Bahriye copies illustrates the crucial role of the Mediterranean seafaring culture, its navigation manuals, nautical charts and island books. These images of Istanbul can be related to the development of the urban landscape and its symbolic function. Their study as cartographic representations pays attention to both accuracy and emphasis in their topographic contents. Supported by contemporary European visual sources and travel accounts as well as Ottoman topographic and poetic descriptions of Istanbul, the viewing directions, the depictions of buildings, and the overall cartographic composition in these maps are interpreted as features shaping a symbolic landscape that developed from an ideal vision to an actual garden-like urban environment, structured by land, water, and architecture.by İffet Orbay.Ph.D