Vintage Nautical Chart

As a gift idea for a relative who really likes pirate-related lore and media, I plan to fully create a period-styled nautical chart portraying the waters around Nassau, the Bahamas, a former pirate haven during piracy’s Golden Age.

The plan to create this item comes in three stages:

  • Create the chart to be technically correct, featuring bathymetric contours and landmasses,
  • Stylize the map with period-inspired illustrations and text, and
  • Have the map printed on poster-size paper, and artificially age it.

After finding a NOAA chart of the entire collective Caribbean, and tracing out the islands and 1000- and 100-fathom marks in Illustrator, I have managed to get this result:


…and will need to start the second step soon.

This thread exists mostly for feedback purposes and advice, as I need direction on art style and how to portray certain technical details (especially soundings) in a form that appears era-accurate, and anything historical or geographic that I may be forgetting.

Any feedback is appreciated.

I gave the map quite a few more hours of work, and managed to get this:


I gave it a border, complete with coordinate markings, and filled the landmasses with white rather than black. Then I gave them a woodcut-style drop shadow (which may be denser in the final version), and played with and added some text. It’s actually starting to look halfway authentic now, and I can’t wait to see what I can do with it yet.

If you have any recommendations, I’d advise making them soon. It’s going to start getting difficult to move things around.

Maps usually come with other bits and bobs like compass, legend and so on…on the more museum types of pieces, there are even illustraions too. Your work has given me inspiration to give my images a gimp-touch up.

Indeed, charts would often contain a compass-rose and so-called “rhumb lines.” It might also have depth-soundings in fathoms. However, you should study actual charts to see what would be navigationally accurate and appropriate for a chart of this type. A chart is a tool.

The reef(?) line that you call “Tongue of the Ocean” seems a little odd to me for being an enclosed shape, and the “sounds” and “channels” feel a little odd, too. Would underwater topography really be like that? Now, if these are plot-points in the story that you’re planning to tell, then they need be that way, but they need to “ring true.”

Nassau … real place? Real chart? If so, does it look like a real chart of that place? Exactly like a real chart? People will know.

It looks like you’ve mapped about 4º latitude and longitude on this map. About 69 miles per degree of longitude, give or take, and from the smaller number of degrees latitude, I surmise that this is fairly equatorial. What map-projection are you using, or simulating, here?

Because you have done an extraordinary job with this map(!), do you anyone who’s an experienced … say, commecial … sailor? (Could be a river-captain.) Have them take a look at it, if you can.

Yeah, I’ve updated the map a bit:


Just bear in mind that Gimp may not be the best means by which to recreate the above. This is more of a vector thing, so Inkscape or Illustrator may be preferable.

The original intention with this map was to capture both an aesthetic appeal, as well as being technically correct and navigationally useful. I was not aware of the terms “compass-rose” or “rhumb lines,” but they may be useful in further studying how these charts were made in the day. Thanks.

All of the locations and bathymetry shown above are real; Nassau is the capital and largest city of the Bahamas, and a former pirate haven. The Tongue of the Ocean is the negative of a large upheaval of rock (sandstone? I think?) from the Caribbean floor, on which most of the shown islands sit. Both are located due southeast of Miami and due east of Key West. As stated above, I intended to be technically accurate, and that includes history and geography.

Most of the technical details are retrieved from a NOAA Mercator-projected nautical chart showing the north Caribbean (from Tampa to Cuba). The bathymetric lines are representative of 1000 and 100 fathoms’ depth, taken near-verbatim from the chart. I’ll fill in on the shallower sounding information as I go on. The original chart also includes a plethora of soundings floating freely in open bodies of water, but I figured that may make the map too busy, and may not have been the preferred method of reflecting soundings at the start of the 18th century. In fact, I may be making the map too accurate, given the sounding methods of the times.

Sadly, I don’t. That was kind of my intention with this thread, to see from persons with a variety of backgrounds if the map was up to par.

Okay, I’ve finished up with basically all of the illustration, and plan to have it printed within the coming weeks. I’ve also changed the size to fit snugly within the boundaries of a tabloid-size sheet.


I’ve decided against having free-floating soundings in the image; the result looks far too busy.