MARINE CHARTS Navy Department’s Work .

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29177, 11 April 1960, Page 17

MARINE CHARTS Navy Department’s Work .

“Th* Press" Special Service

AUCKLAND, April 10. The Navy Department is slowly building up its own marine charts. It has 38 charts now and, at the rate of six a year, hopes to have charted New Zealand completely in 20 years. New Zealand charts are different from Admiralty charts, the standard guides of thousands of navigators all over the world. Dominion charts are coloured and cover greater areas in greater detail than Admiralty charts do. The survey ship H.M.N.Z.S. Lachlan is resurveying Tauranga Harbour. The survey should be completed by the end of June and the chart will be compiled by the end of the year. It will cost 10s, like other charts made by the New Zealand Hydrographic Service, formerly under the superintendence of Commander F. W. Hunt, R.N., now under Commander W. L. J. Smith, R.N.Z.N. The records of soundings taken during a survey are sent to Navy Office, Wellington, where a team of draughtsmen compile the ehart. The prototype is eventually tent to the Government Printer, who produces the required number of copies. Dozens are sent free to foreign countries under mutual exchange agreements and others are circulated through agents in London, Liverpool, Melbourne, and 50 in New Zealand. Variety on File

The chart depot for the Dominion is an old military hut on North Head. Here there are eharts from all over the world—old ones, new ones, Japanese and Russian charts, charts of reirfote coral atolls “compiled by Lieutenant . . „ R.N„ H.M.S 1902,” and a framed chart of “Juno" area, Normandy, where D-Day landings were carried out on June 6, 1944. A former Army officer from Ireland, Mr Dermot Wright, is in charge of the depot. He has two section officers, Mr I. Lamont, formerly a second officer in the Merchant Navy, and Mr P. Toynbee, a former Royal Navy officer. Nine Wrens of the Navy do the painstaking job of marking in each alteration on every chart which comes in the regular “Notice to Mariners.”

This work is double-checked. ae staff in the chart depot, rking away quietly, knows lives depend on its accuracy. The work sometimes piles up but the staff cannot hurry. Once the Otago Harbour Board changed all its buoys. There were W alternations to innumerable charts.

finally, a new chart was compiled to save time. The meticulous accuracy of the charts, the artwork and their utter reliability are all in the tradition of the work of one of the first great hydrographers the world knew—a man with close New Zealand connexions— Captain James Cook.