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This striking global chart was produced by the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Office to guide commercial and military steam navigation during the high era of coal- and oil-powered maritime expansion. Printed just before the outbreak of World War I, it charts optimal routes—referred to as “tracks”—between major global ports based on the shortest navigable distances, and provides extensive tabular data in thousands of nautical miles for use in voyage planning.
The map presents the world on a Mercator projection, with fine blue lines radiating between ports across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans. Dense matrices of printed distances occupy all oceanic margins, with sections for:
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East and west coasts of the Americas;
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Shores of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea;
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Islands of the Pacific;
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New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan.
Strategic information is also provided on the relative merits of various global routes—by the Suez Canal, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, Magellan Strait, and Panama Canal (still under construction in 1913 but near completion). Each route table includes comparisons for different classes of vessels: full-powered steamers and mixed steam/sail craft.
This edition reflects the global commercial geography of the early 20th century, with major empires still intact (British India, the Russian Empire, the German Empire), and highlights the logistical infrastructure that underpinned global capitalism, imperial administration, and wartime mobilization.
Issued under the authority of the Secretary of the Navy, this chart is part of the U.S. Navy’s broader effort to support merchant marine navigation and military logistics. As both a technical instrument and a document of imperial-era maritime control, it is a key artifact of American naval hydrography in the pre-WWI period.
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