SOUNDINGS

Notes on this chart

About Soundings

A small atlas of twelve shipwrecks, drawn in the manner of an old Admiralty chart.

What it is

Each page follows one ship through her last hours and then straight down, through water that darkens with depth, to the wreck as it was found. The order is chronological, from a Roman-era merchant ship to a Great Lakes ore carrier.

Most of these wrecks are graves. The drawings show the ships and where they lie, never the people lost with them, and the words stay with what is known.

The chart

The world chart and the small locator charts are drawn from Natural Earth coastlines (public domain), in a Mercator projection like a real sea chart. Wrecks are marked with the international chart symbol for a dangerous wreck: a hull line struck by three masts, inside a dotted danger line. The scattered figures on the world chart imitate the soundings of an old chart and are decorative, not real depths. The bottom letters on each wreck page follow chart usage: M for mud, S for sand, R for rock, Co for coral, Cy for clay.

Positions are the published wreck positions. Some are approximate on purpose: the exact sites of HMS Erebus and Bismarck are withheld to protect them.

The drawings

Every ship is drawn for this site, in code, as a starboard elevation from published dimensions, photographs, models and plans. They are faithful in proportion and arrangement but simplified: read them as an illustrator's plates, not as builder's drawings. The ship on the Antikythera page is a merchantman of the period, since nothing of that ship's own shape survives.

On each page the ship is drawn to scale; in the water column below her, depths are drawn to scale against one another. Ships that sank in shallow water (Mary Rose, Vasa, Batavia, Erebus) are shown with the seabed in view, at the same scale as the ship. The wrecks lying on their sides are drawn as survey plans, seen from above.

The facts

Dates, numbers and positions were checked against museums and heritage bodies (the Vasa Museum, the Mary Rose Trust, Parks Canada, Historic England, the Western Australian Museum, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and others) and against encyclopedia articles. Where sources disagree, as they do over how many people were aboard Titanic or Mary Rose, the page gives a range. Each wreck page lists its main sources.

Photographs

Type and tools

Set in Libre Caslon Display and Libre Caslon Text by Impallari Type (SIL Open Font License). Built with Astro and d3-geo. Part of the Whyarium, a library of small encyclopedias.