Jules Verne — Chapter 4: A forgotten maritime map in an attic — Novella Movement 1

On the eleventh of October, at seventeen minutes past four by the clock of the Hôtel de Ville at Saint-Malo, the barometer stood at seven hundred and fifty-seven millimetres, the wind held steady out of the north-east at perhaps four metres a second, and I climbed, for the first time in eleven years, the narrow stair of my late granduncle's house in the rue des Vieux-Remparts.

Casimir Fromentin had served the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine for thirty-four years, had drawn soundings off three continents, and had left behind, besides seven hundred and twelve francs and a barometer of his own devising, an attic of some forty square metres stacked to the beams with rolled charts, brass dividers gone green at the hinge, and a smell of linseed oil that eleven years had not aged by a single day. "Catalogue everything, Monsieur Fromentin, down to the last pin," the notary Maître Le Bihan had instructed me, in a tone that did not admit of a reply, "for the heirs are three, and three men do not agree easily on the worth of paper."

I set to my inventory as a naturalist sets to a dissection: methodically, and without haste. Behind the chimney flue, wrapped in oilskin gone stiff as slate, I found a chart unlike the others — soundings of the Chaussée des Pierres Noires, dated 1861, corrected in a second hand, finer than my granduncle's, that had added figures in red where the original ink had faded to the colour of weak tea.

A word here on the instrument of such a document, for its beauty is chemical before it is picturesque. The projection is Mercator's, distorting latitude to preserve the compass bearing as a straight line; the soundings are given in fathoms of six feet English, not metres, the Dépôt not having adopted the metric sounding until 1889; the lead and line that took them could err by a tenth of a fathom in calm water, by a full fathom in a sea running four feet. What is drawn as a shoal, then, is not a fact but an average of many uncertain facts, patiently reconciled — and reconciled here with a precision my granduncle's own hand, elsewhere in the attic, never approached.

I was still turning the sheet toward the skylight when a voice behind me remarked,

"—that is worth considerably more than the house, monsieur, though not, I think, to you."

I turned. He stood at the head of the stair, a compact man of perhaps forty, his boots too clean for an attic and his card already extended between two fingers before I had asked for it. Anatole Kerguen, it read, agent, Câbles et Données Atlantique. His voice was pleasant; his eyes, while he spoke, moved twice across the chart in my hands and not once to my face.

He had come, he explained, on behalf of a consortium laying a fibre trunk from a landing station three kilometres east of the Chaussée des Pierres Noires to a data exchange outside Frankfurt, where it would terminate, ultimately, in a room of racked servers executing trades in fractions of a millisecond for houses whose names he was not at liberty to give. The route survey was contracted, the underwriters engaged, the cable ships chartered for the fourteenth of the month. A single point of the modern survey, he said, disagreed with the depot's older record by some four fathoms, and a discrepancy of that order, once flagged, could delay a project of this scale by a season and a considerable sum. He had heard, through the notary's clerk, that old Fromentin's attic held charts of the ground. He would take the lot off my hands, he said, for eleven hundred francs, cash, before the estate was even settled — a kindness, he called it, to spare the heirs three men's quarrelling over paper.

I did not answer at once. I have observed, in thirty years of reading soundings, that a man lying about fathoms betrays himself as surely as a man lying about money; and I set myself, therefore, to read him as I would read a lead line — by increments, and without haste. His hand, extended for the chart, trembled at the second knuckle. His breath came shallow, perhaps sixteen to the minute, more than a stair of forty steps warranted in a man his age. His eyes, when I turned the sheet toward the light and let him see the red-inked corrections along the reef's south-western horn, ceased their movement entirely and fixed there for a count of three, which is a longer stillness than curiosity requires and a shorter one than honesty affords.

"This is not the depot's chart," I said. "This is a private correction, made by a second hand, some years after the original survey, and it does not merely disagree with your four fathoms, monsieur. It doubles them. Where your survey shows six fathoms of clearance, this shows two, at low water springs, over a bottom of loose shingle that a cable would not sit upon without chafing through its armour inside a decade."

He proposed, with admirable speed, that such an old correction, unsigned and unwitnessed, could carry no weight against a modern survey run by satellite; that I should sell him the sheet regardless, as a curiosity, for the honour of the family name; that we might settle the matter, in short, without troubling the underwriters at all. It was, I confess, cowardly of me to feel the pull of eleven hundred francs against seven hundred and twelve inherited ones; but a chart corrected in a second hand, finer than my granduncle's, is not a curiosity, and I had begun, without quite deciding to, to love it as one loves a difficult fact.

I sent the sheet, the following morning, not to Monsieur Kerguen but to the Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine, successor to my granduncle's depot, with a note describing its provenance to the pin. Their reply came in eleven days: an echo-sounder run over the position had found the shingle bank precisely where the red ink had placed it, shoaling to two fathoms nine at low water, a hazard the satellite survey's spacing of soundings had stepped neatly over, as a man's stride may clear a crack too narrow for his eye to have marked it.

Monsieur Kerguen did not call again. The cable, I am told, was routed four degrees north of the black rocks, at a cost the consortium's engineers had budgeted for from the start, the four fathoms having troubled only the men who had never troubled to look twice. I had the chart mounted, framed in the same oilskin that had kept it from the damp for sixty years, and it hangs now above my desk, its soundings, six feet to the fathom, older than the century that finally believed them.