From Surveying to Surveillance: Maritime Cartography and Naval (Self-)Tracking in the Long Nineteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, ‘ship tracks’, lines recording vessels’ movements on charts, facilitated wayfinding, hydrographical surveys and territorial claims. During the long nineteenth century, however, their main function shifted from surveying of the marine environment to surveillance of officers’ movements and actions. Using textual and cartographical sources produced by British naval officers, this article argues that geosurveillance and the continuous visual tracking of individuals with reference to mapping systems were developed at sea, long before the aerial and digital revolutions, and independently of panoptical models. In the nineteenth century, most cartographical tracking was disciplined self-tracking, actively performed by the surveilled themselves. This required their employers (notably the state) to emphasize honour, training, conscientiousness and procedure. The Admiralty used tracks for testing performance, verifying accounts, establishing responsibilities and co-ordinating movement. Monitoring individuals through their record was the natural inverse of a pattern discussed by historians of science: data verification through authorial ‘credibility’. The two-way bond between the surveilled and their track was eventually broken in the twentieth century by technological innovations that allowed external and non-consensual geo-tracking. This changed the import of surveillance, discipline and the sea itself, no longer a space where human movement would be inevitably lost from sight.