California Coast & Ocean

One morning in 1850, George Davidson and a small survey crew watched the morning fog part to reveal Point Conception, the most dangerous coastal promontory in California. Their small steamship, the Ewing, maneuvered past the wave-dashed headlands to leeward, as the crew looked for any small refuge from the booming surf. Their objective was to row to the beach in whaleboats loaded with supplies and two heavy brass telescopes. Davidson and his men were beginning the work of the U.S. Coast Survey in Pacific waters.

It is now 200 years since Congress authorized President Thomas Jefferson to organize a Survey of the Coast. It began on the Atlantic Coast as an exercise and developed into an institution. The Survey of the Coast became the Coast and Geodetic Survey and then the oldest element of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

In Jefferson's time, travel by water played a role in human affairs we can now scarcely imagine. There were no railroads, and beyond the East Coast there were not yet many roads. Accurate charts of the coast and sea routes were vital, but also very rare. Jefferson accepted the proposal of a Swiss immigrant named Ferdinand Hassler to survey the coast in a certain way.

Hassler's survey methodology was such that George Davidson and his men, once ashore, addressed the mighty headland of Point Conception by turning their backs to it. Instead, on a quiet vernal pool as much out of the wind as could be found, they set up a tent, with a hole in the middle, to serve as an observatory. Repeated observations of stars using one of Davidson's two telescopes could yield their latitude, the other their longitude. The near constant wind and fog of the cape required Davidson to wait 50 nights to acquire enough data to determine his position with sufficient accuracy. That spot in a cow pasture near the Coxo anchorage in Santa Barbara County was the POB, the Point of the Beginning, for the Coast Survey on the Pacific coast.

A Twist of Fate
A generation before Davidson, Ferdinand Hassler, a skilled scientist, had left the Old World looking for a better life and a different society. He arrived with a locket from his mother and his own personal iron-bar copy of the French meter, which was then the most precise measure of the length of one meter. The proposal he made to Jefferson for the Survey of the Coast was in another league from the other proposals, and Jefferson the scientist recognized this. Instead of charting the coast immediately, Hassler proposed that the United States develop a geodetic network to accurately locate headlands and capes like Point Conception.

Geodesy is the ancient science of the size and shape of the Earth, and the location of specific points on its surface. The flag of the Coast Survey featured a bright red triangle, because the triangle is at the heart of geodesy.

From the Point of the Beginning by Coxo Rancho, Davidson and his men measured a long straight baseline. From both ends of the baseline they measured the angles to a nearby hilltop. Using trigonometry, with two angles and one side they could calculate the lengths of the other two sides of the triangle. From the hilltop they could measure angles to the next hills to create another triangle, and then another. Those triangles marched up and down the Pacific Coast, creating a geodetic skeleton upon which to map the undulations of the coastline and the intricate estuaries and coastal wetlands of California. Then the triangles went inland. Eventually, George Davidson and his crew, including his friend John Muir, scaled peaks in the High Sierra and down into Nevada, marking triangles over a hundred miles on a side, as the Pacific Coast survey marched east to link to the Atlantic survey to become the continental geodetic network.