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.

Like Ferdinand Hassler, George Davidson was an immigrant. He was born in Nottingham, England, in 1825. His family came to Philadelphia in 1832, seeking a fresh start. In 1841 he enrolled at Central High School, a uniquely ambitious scholarly enterprise founded by Alexander Dallas Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Bache could spot talent, and Davidson had it. Soon he was employed in Bache's astronomical observatory at the school, and then later in Bache's magnetic observatory, the first in the country.

Davidson was a success, and he seemed bound for a scholarly and sedentary career as an astronomer. But in 1843, Ferdinand Hassler of the Survey of the Coast died in action, tumbling off a hill in New Jersey as he tried to protect one of his instruments during a dramatic lightning storm. After some maneuvering, Bache succeeded Hassler as head of the Survey. He brought his best students with him, including Davidson.

The constraints of the Survey and its work changed Davidson's life. Instead of building a career at an observatory that doesn't move, he soon became the greatest expert in the Coast Survey on how to turn any given spot anywhere into an observatory for the purpose of determining the latitude and longitude of that specific spot. Originally this required two different instruments for finding latitude and longitude. Eventually Davidson combined them into the Davidson Meridian and Equal Altitude Instrument, a legendary telescope. It was small enough and humble enough to be carried by mules on a trail, but it allowed a Point of the Beginning to be established almost anywhere on earth.

The Coast Survey Goes to War
The Coast Survey was a civil scientific agency, but many of its key staff members were politically liberal or even radical. The native-born American members were Abolitionists, while many of the scientifically trained immigrants were social progressives who quickly took up American causes. Davidson and his compatriots worked vigorously along the West Coast during the 1850s, but when the Civil War loomed, the entire organization decamped for the East to assist the Union in the struggle to come.

The basic Union naval strategy was to impose a blockade on the entire coast of the Confederate states, to prevent movement of ships and supplies. Then the Union armies and navy would fight their way up the Mississippi and other strategic rivers.

Bache was a member of the secret committee in charge of the naval blockade. In preparation for the battles ahead, he had commissioned a set of secret documents to be compiled and published, called the Notes on the Coast. The Survey had participated in a long tradition of publishing coast pilots, sailing directions, and notices to mariners. These guides described how to get from here to there. The Notes on the Coast broadened this to encompass what the strategic significance of there was--how there related to railroads and fortifications, for example.

Much of the work that Davidson and his compatriots performed during the Civil War amounted to ordinary practices of coastal mapping performed under extraordinary circumstances. The coast is, famously, where the land meets the water, and the Coast Survey measured and mapped both domains at once. On land they mapped the immediate nearshore environment, always, and then gradually mapped inland, particularly the terrain that was visible from a ship. The network of triangles provided positions for the land features. These were mapped onto t-sheets, "t" standing for topography.

In the water they mapped hydrography, meaning the water above the shape and composition of the bottom. Their two major tools were, first, another set of triangles, between the survey boat and two flags or signals on shore, and second, a lead weight on a hemp line. By triangulation to the signals they could determine the position of the boat, which they then correlated with the depth of the water gauged by the lead line. They entered this data on a map on the boat, the boat sheet. Once back in camp or on the steamship, the data was corrected and cleaned to produce the smooth sheet. The smooth sheets for the water were combined to make h-sheets (for hydrography) and then merged with the t-sheets to create the master for an engraved chart covering water and land. Especially for the war effort, photographic transfers of simplified versions of the engraved charts were produced rapidly and cheaply by lithography. By the end of the war, Coast Survey personnel were the finest cartographers in the country.

When George Davidson first arrived in San Francisco in 1850, it was a raw and perilous town. By the time he and his wife Elinor returned in 1867, as head of the Survey on the West Coast, San Francisco had become one of the world's great port cities. It was his home for the rest of his life, but he left it regularly for scientific journeys around the world.

Davidson observed transits of Venus and other astronomical phenomena, including a total solar eclipse in Alaska, a vast region he had played a major role in securing as an American possession. While in Alaska for the 1869 eclipse, he met the distinguished Chilkat leader Kohklux, which led to a major ethnographic project of the Coast Survey (see sidebar ).

The Pacific Coast Pilot
Davidson's work with Bache on the Notes on the Coast during the Civil War had a lifelong impact on him. In 1862 he worked up his travel diary notes and other materials to produce the Directory of the Pacific Coast, which was his version of the Notes, applied to the Pacific. The rest of his life he continued to update and expand the Directory, later called the Pacific Coast Pilot. His magnum opus is the fourth revised edition of that book, published in 1889.

In every edition of the work, he introduces Point Conception this way: "Once seen, it will never be forgotten." The volume distills the knowledge and wisdom of many decades spent sailing the waters along California, Washington, and Oregon. It is voluminous but elegantly written, with a keen eye for the sum of experience of each place, the historical changes Davidson had seen directly, as well as matters like which reefs to avoid, where breaks in the kelp are, and what sailing tack would work under which wind. All told, it is a remarkable achievement for a man who spent most of his life in coastal waters yet never learned to swim.

The Pacific Coast Pilot is the last hurrah of an important type of nautical information, coastal views. In 18th-century sailing guides, these began as engravings showing ships under full billowing sail, with generic coastal features to the side and in the background. Over time, the sails billowed less, and real, specific headlands were rendered. The waves and foam diminished, and eventually the ships disappeared entirely.

From the beginning on the West Coast, Coast Survey artists sketched masterful views of specific headlands, such as William MacMurtrie's view of Point Conception published in 1853. Vantages of individual headlands eventually evolved into "roll-out" coastal views, taking advantage of the fact that on the West Coast the Survey always worked from steam-powered ships that could sail steadily in any wind or current. The steamer maintained a steady speed relative to the coast, and the Survey artist made a series of rapid progressive sketches of the coast looking straight at it from offshore. Later, back on shore, the geodetic framework established by the triangulation network allowed those views to be combined into one continuous drawing that could encompass dozens of miles along the coast.

Davidson supplied many sketches himself, then later commissioned Ferdinand Westdahl, a gifted Swedish immigrant hydrographer. Westdahl had a naturally elegant and spare graphic style, very moderne. In preparation for the 1889 edition of the Pacific Coast Pilot, Westdahl completed hundreds of roll-out views, some of which were then reduced and transferred to engraved views published in the book. Westdahl's coastal views are particularly important documents because they display the California coast before it was transformed by roads and modern coastal development.

Davidson and Westdahl also experimented with integrating photography and sketches, as Davidson predicted that photographs of the coastline would eventually supplant sketches. Photography never substituted for the roll-out views; instead, in the 20th century coastal view sketches disappeared. In the 21st century, coastal views have returned, particularly through the remarkable images obtained by the California Coastal Records Project (www.californiacoastline.org). Those sets of images can be usefully compared. (See the next issue of Coast & Ocean for a story on the Coastal Records Project.)

A Continental Network
George Davidson lived through the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He removed the telescope from his private observatory in the city to allow the building to be used as emergency shelter for women and children left homeless by the fire. There were extensive geodetic re-surveys of the primary triangulation network made, to discern earth movements along the San Andreas Fault. One set of measurements supported Davidson in a dispute that went back decades. He had surveyed the peak of Mount Tamalpais in the 1850s. A subsequent survey, in the 1870s, found a discrepancy in his positioning. He asserted that his measurements were accurate, but that the mountain had moved. The re-survey after the 1906 earthquake confirmed that he had indeed been correct.

A hundred years ago, in 1907, Davidson made his last journey to Alaska, exactly 40 years after his initial trip in 1867. He made the first trip because he had been asked to advise Congress whether the nation should purchase Russian America, as it was then called, from Imperial Russia. His favorable report tipped the balance. The United States acquired Alaska, and, of course, the Coast and Geodetic Survey then was given responsibility for charting its coast and islands.

How might he have reflected about his life in his steamship cabin on that last long voyage back to San Francisco? By that point he had received every honor imaginable in California--president of the California Academy of Sciences, regent and professor of the University of California, a member of the state's Earthquake Commission, a senior advisor to the state on water systems and irrigation, and more. From his letters and published writings, however, these matters paled compared to the pride he felt in the quality of the geodetic network he created to describe the state's topography.

All his initial local networks, starting with the tent observatory site at Point Conception, had been corrected and connected into a continental network that, in evolved form, is the framework for all geopositioning today. When we press a button on a GPS receiver to find out where we are, we do so relative to Davidson's geodetic framework. Davidson also took enormous pride in the visible expression of the network, the many changing editions of the maps and charts produced by the Coast Survey. The coast is the most dynamic environment on the planet, and every chart of it is a complex snapshot of changes continually underway.

Changing Priorities
In 1869, Henry Mitchell, who was the chief hydrographic scientist in the Coast Survey, published a treatise on reclamation of tidelands as an appendix to the Survey's annual report. He described the context of change well under way on the Atlantic Coast, but only then beginning in California. In the East, Mitchell said, the rapid development of railroads and wagon roads was changing every aspect of coastal life, previously based exclusively on large and small boats. Estuary channels that had been major thoroughfares became literal backwaters once the villages near them could be reached easily by land. This made for great cultural and ecological stresses, as watercourses began to be seen as potential agricultural land, once the waters were drained away. Rival and incompatible uses of the coast were proposed. Local preferences had also to be balanced with larger constituencies, as draining wetlands in one place could affect flooding in another. As Mitchell noted:
"Were the entire value of a water-course always to be measured by its service, as an avenue for 'market men,' the conversion of its territory from commercial to agricultural uses would be generally popular as soon as the bed of a stream became more valuable than its water, and no strife would occur; but in most cases there are other interests involved which are antagonistic to this change, viz: the trade in foreign or distant products, the fisheries, &c. Sometimes, too, an arm of the sea which has ceased to be of use to the residents upon its banks has still a national value as a harbor of refuge or as a thoroughfare."

The California coast that Davidson and his fellow surveyors found in the middle of the 19th century is now utterly changed, as are human needs and priorities. In the 21st century, the value of watersheds is measured by their capacities for ecological services. Many areas of coastal California now are seen as hugely valuable harbors of refuge for steelhead and salmon if not humans, and as thoroughfares for migrating waterfowl and marine mammals. The patterns revealed by George Davidson and the Coast Survey in the 19th century are among the best templates for ecological restoration and coastal management in California in this new century. In this bicentennial year of the Survey of the Coast, those maps and charts are being brought back to life as digital images for contemporary use in restoration planning.

George Davidson's achievements are many. He persuaded the wealthy James Lick to endow the great telescope of the Lick Observatory, and also urged Anthony Chabot to endow the Chabot Observatory in Oakland, the first great public observatory on the West Coast, linking him firmly to California astronomy and very big telescopes. But the most important telescope Davidson ever looked through was the first one he set up in a cow pasture by Point Conception, the Point of the Beginning for much of the subsequent history of California and for its potential future.

John Cloud is a geographer who received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara. He never saw the ocean until he was 18 years old, but is now making up for that with his Adirondack guideboat. He is currently working under contract with NOAA to write the history of the Coast and Geodetic Survey; for this he developed a scanning project to recover Coast Survey treasures now in the National Archives. Many of the original charts, like Kohklux's map of the terrain from Chilkat to the Yukon, had not been seen for more than a century.

	George Davidson and the Point of the Beginning John Cloud
	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. Like Ferdinand Hassler, George Davidson was an immigrant. He was born in Nottingham, England, in 1825. His family came to Philadelphia in 1832, seeking a fresh start. In 1841 he enrolled at Central High School, a uniquely ambitious scholarly enterprise founded by Alexander Dallas Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin. Bache could spot talent, and Davidson had it. Soon he was employed in Bache's astronomical observatory at the school, and then later in Bache's magnetic observatory, the first in the country. Davidson was a success, and he seemed bound for a scholarly and sedentary career as an astronomer. But in 1843, Ferdinand Hassler of the Survey of the Coast died in action, tumbling off a hill in New Jersey as he tried to protect one of his instruments during a dramatic lightning storm. After some maneuvering, Bache succeeded Hassler as head of the Survey. He brought his best students with him, including Davidson. The constraints of the Survey and its work changed Davidson's life. Instead of building a career at an observatory that doesn't move, he soon became the greatest expert in the Coast Survey on how to turn any given spot anywhere into an observatory for the purpose of determining the latitude and longitude of that specific spot. Originally this required two different instruments for finding latitude and longitude. Eventually Davidson combined them into the Davidson Meridian and Equal Altitude Instrument, a legendary telescope. It was small enough and humble enough to be carried by mules on a trail, but it allowed a Point of the Beginning to be established almost anywhere on earth. The Coast Survey Goes to War The Coast Survey was a civil scientific agency, but many of its key staff members were politically liberal or even radical. The native-born American members were Abolitionists, while many of the scientifically trained immigrants were social progressives who quickly took up American causes. Davidson and his compatriots worked vigorously along the West Coast during the 1850s, but when the Civil War loomed, the entire organization decamped for the East to assist the Union in the struggle to come. The basic Union naval strategy was to impose a blockade on the entire coast of the Confederate states, to prevent movement of ships and supplies. Then the Union armies and navy would fight their way up the Mississippi and other strategic rivers. Bache was a member of the secret committee in charge of the naval blockade. In preparation for the battles ahead, he had commissioned a set of secret documents to be compiled and published, called the Notes on the Coast. The Survey had participated in a long tradition of publishing coast pilots, sailing directions, and notices to mariners. These guides described how to get from here to there. The Notes on the Coast broadened this to encompass what the strategic significance of there was--how there related to railroads and fortifications, for example. Much of the work that Davidson and his compatriots performed during the Civil War amounted to ordinary practices of coastal mapping performed under extraordinary circumstances. The coast is, famously, where the land meets the water, and the Coast Survey measured and mapped both domains at once. On land they mapped the immediate nearshore environment, always, and then gradually mapped inland, particularly the terrain that was visible from a ship. The network of triangles provided positions for the land features. These were mapped onto t-sheets, "t" standing for topography. In the water they mapped hydrography, meaning the water above the shape and composition of the bottom. Their two major tools were, first, another set of triangles, between the survey boat and two flags or signals on shore, and second, a lead weight on a hemp line. By triangulation to the signals they could determine the position of the boat, which they then correlated with the depth of the water gauged by the lead line. They entered this data on a map on the boat, the boat sheet. Once back in camp or on the steamship, the data was corrected and cleaned to produce the smooth sheet. The smooth sheets for the water were combined to make h-sheets (for hydrography) and then merged with the t-sheets to create the master for an engraved chart covering water and land. Especially for the war effort, photographic transfers of simplified versions of the engraved charts were produced rapidly and cheaply by lithography. By the end of the war, Coast Survey personnel were the finest cartographers in the country. When George Davidson first arrived in San Francisco in 1850, it was a raw and perilous town. By the time he and his wife Elinor returned in 1867, as head of the Survey on the West Coast, San Francisco had become one of the world's great port cities. It was his home for the rest of his life, but he left it regularly for scientific journeys around the world. Davidson observed transits of Venus and other astronomical phenomena, including a total solar eclipse in Alaska, a vast region he had played a major role in securing as an American possession. While in Alaska for the 1869 eclipse, he met the distinguished Chilkat leader Kohklux, which led to a major ethnographic project of the Coast Survey (see sidebar ). The Pacific Coast Pilot Davidson's work with Bache on the Notes on the Coast during the Civil War had a lifelong impact on him. In 1862 he worked up his travel diary notes and other materials to produce the Directory of the Pacific Coast, which was his version of the Notes, applied to the Pacific. The rest of his life he continued to update and expand the Directory, later called the Pacific Coast Pilot. His magnum opus is the fourth revised edition of that book, published in 1889. In every edition of the work, he introduces Point Conception this way: "Once seen, it will never be forgotten." The volume distills the knowledge and wisdom of many decades spent sailing the waters along California, Washington, and Oregon. It is voluminous but elegantly written, with a keen eye for the sum of experience of each place, the historical changes Davidson had seen directly, as well as matters like which reefs to avoid, where breaks in the kelp are, and what sailing tack would work under which wind. All told, it is a remarkable achievement for a man who spent most of his life in coastal waters yet never learned to swim. The Pacific Coast Pilot is the last hurrah of an important type of nautical information, coastal views. In 18th-century sailing guides, these began as engravings showing ships under full billowing sail, with generic coastal features to the side and in the background. Over time, the sails billowed less, and real, specific headlands were rendered. The waves and foam diminished, and eventually the ships disappeared entirely. From the beginning on the West Coast, Coast Survey artists sketched masterful views of specific headlands, such as William MacMurtrie's view of Point Conception published in 1853. Vantages of individual headlands eventually evolved into "roll-out" coastal views, taking advantage of the fact that on the West Coast the Survey always worked from steam-powered ships that could sail steadily in any wind or current. The steamer maintained a steady speed relative to the coast, and the Survey artist made a series of rapid progressive sketches of the coast looking straight at it from offshore. Later, back on shore, the geodetic framework established by the triangulation network allowed those views to be combined into one continuous drawing that could encompass dozens of miles along the coast. Davidson supplied many sketches himself, then later commissioned Ferdinand Westdahl, a gifted Swedish immigrant hydrographer. Westdahl had a naturally elegant and spare graphic style, very moderne. In preparation for the 1889 edition of the Pacific Coast Pilot, Westdahl completed hundreds of roll-out views, some of which were then reduced and transferred to engraved views published in the book. Westdahl's coastal views are particularly important documents because they display the California coast before it was transformed by roads and modern coastal development. Davidson and Westdahl also experimented with integrating photography and sketches, as Davidson predicted that photographs of the coastline would eventually supplant sketches. Photography never substituted for the roll-out views; instead, in the 20th century coastal view sketches disappeared. In the 21st century, coastal views have returned, particularly through the remarkable images obtained by the California Coastal Records Project (www.californiacoastline.org). Those sets of images can be usefully compared. (See the next issue of Coast & Ocean for a story on the Coastal Records Project.) A Continental Network George Davidson lived through the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He removed the telescope from his private observatory in the city to allow the building to be used as emergency shelter for women and children left homeless by the fire. There were extensive geodetic re-surveys of the primary triangulation network made, to discern earth movements along the San Andreas Fault. One set of measurements supported Davidson in a dispute that went back decades. He had surveyed the peak of Mount Tamalpais in the 1850s. A subsequent survey, in the 1870s, found a discrepancy in his positioning. He asserted that his measurements were accurate, but that the mountain had moved. The re-survey after the 1906 earthquake confirmed that he had indeed been correct. A hundred years ago, in 1907, Davidson made his last journey to Alaska, exactly 40 years after his initial trip in 1867. He made the first trip because he had been asked to advise Congress whether the nation should purchase Russian America, as it was then called, from Imperial Russia. His favorable report tipped the balance. The United States acquired Alaska, and, of course, the Coast and Geodetic Survey then was given responsibility for charting its coast and islands. How might he have reflected about his life in his steamship cabin on that last long voyage back to San Francisco? By that point he had received every honor imaginable in California--president of the California Academy of Sciences, regent and professor of the University of California, a member of the state's Earthquake Commission, a senior advisor to the state on water systems and irrigation, and more. From his letters and published writings, however, these matters paled compared to the pride he felt in the quality of the geodetic network he created to describe the state's topography. All his initial local networks, starting with the tent observatory site at Point Conception, had been corrected and connected into a continental network that, in evolved form, is the framework for all geopositioning today. When we press a button on a GPS receiver to find out where we are, we do so relative to Davidson's geodetic framework. Davidson also took enormous pride in the visible expression of the network, the many changing editions of the maps and charts produced by the Coast Survey. The coast is the most dynamic environment on the planet, and every chart of it is a complex snapshot of changes continually underway. Changing Priorities In 1869, Henry Mitchell, who was the chief hydrographic scientist in the Coast Survey, published a treatise on reclamation of tidelands as an appendix to the Survey's annual report. He described the context of change well under way on the Atlantic Coast, but only then beginning in California. In the East, Mitchell said, the rapid development of railroads and wagon roads was changing every aspect of coastal life, previously based exclusively on large and small boats. Estuary channels that had been major thoroughfares became literal backwaters once the villages near them could be reached easily by land. This made for great cultural and ecological stresses, as watercourses began to be seen as potential agricultural land, once the waters were drained away. Rival and incompatible uses of the coast were proposed. Local preferences had also to be balanced with larger constituencies, as draining wetlands in one place could affect flooding in another. As Mitchell noted: "Were the entire value of a water-course always to be measured by its service, as an avenue for 'market men,' the conversion of its territory from commercial to agricultural uses would be generally popular as soon as the bed of a stream became more valuable than its water, and no strife would occur; but in most cases there are other interests involved which are antagonistic to this change, viz: the trade in foreign or distant products, the fisheries, &c. Sometimes, too, an arm of the sea which has ceased to be of use to the residents upon its banks has still a national value as a harbor of refuge or as a thoroughfare." The California coast that Davidson and his fellow surveyors found in the middle of the 19th century is now utterly changed, as are human needs and priorities. In the 21st century, the value of watersheds is measured by their capacities for ecological services. Many areas of coastal California now are seen as hugely valuable harbors of refuge for steelhead and salmon if not humans, and as thoroughfares for migrating waterfowl and marine mammals. The patterns revealed by George Davidson and the Coast Survey in the 19th century are among the best templates for ecological restoration and coastal management in California in this new century. In this bicentennial year of the Survey of the Coast, those maps and charts are being brought back to life as digital images for contemporary use in restoration planning. George Davidson's achievements are many. He persuaded the wealthy James Lick to endow the great telescope of the Lick Observatory, and also urged Anthony Chabot to endow the Chabot Observatory in Oakland, the first great public observatory on the West Coast, linking him firmly to California astronomy and very big telescopes. But the most important telescope Davidson ever looked through was the first one he set up in a cow pasture by Point Conception, the Point of the Beginning for much of the subsequent history of California and for its potential future. John Cloud is a geographer who received his Ph.D. from U.C. Santa Barbara. He never saw the ocean until he was 18 years old, but is now making up for that with his Adirondack guideboat. He is currently working under contract with NOAA to write the history of the Coast and Geodetic Survey; for this he developed a scanning project to recover Coast Survey treasures now in the National Archives. Many of the original charts, like Kohklux's map of the terrain from Chilkat to the Yukon, had not been seen for more than a century.