International Hydrography

It is perhaps appropriate, on this the exact 187th anniversary of the death of Admiral Lord NELSON at Trafalgar and in the year in which so many celebrations have taken place, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher COLUMBUS's arrival somewhere in the West Indies, to consider the progress which has been made towards international co-operation and achievements in hydrographic surveying and nautical cartography, particularly since the formation of the International Hydrographic Bureau in 1921, and to look at the problems facing international hydrography in the immediate future. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to look briefly at the earlier advances in hydrography and navigation. Two years after COLUMBUS had reached the West Indies, Spain and Portugal agreed to divide between them those parts of the world which had not then been reached and annexed by Europeans - an agreement which was later approved by His Holiness The Pope. This led to a great flurry of voyages of exploration and annexation of distant lands by the European powers. Within 8 years, the Genoese explorer, John CABOT, sponsored by the English King Henry VII, had visited Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (believing them to be part of Asia) and Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached Calicut in India - thanks, it should be noted, to Arabian pilots whom he met in East Africa. Too often, Europeans tend to ignore the voyages made by Asian navigators, notably from the Persian Gulf states and from China, many years before any Europeans reached the Indian and Pacific oceans