Nautical Charts Mediterranean
Desiderato Chouinard
F - Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea - These nautical paper charts that are print-on-demand (POD) and are fully up-to-date with the latest NTM corrections available. The Admiralty's standard nautical paper charts comply with Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) regulations and are ideal for professional, commercial, and recreational use.
From Port-Vendre to Marseille, or from Martigues to Menton, without forgetting the Corsican coast... Find a large choice of nautical charts SHOM or NV-CHARTSof the French coasts of the Mediterranean and Corsica on our site. Looking for a particular nautical chart ? Contact us ! We will order it for you!
Confidently navigate with Raymarine chartplotters and compatible electronic nautical charts. Our chartplotters bring your marine charts to life with high-definition displays and fast quad-core performance. Experience fully-featured vector charts and advanced features like underwater bathymetry, satellite overlays and automatic routing options. Choose Raymarine LightHouse Charts or navigate with even more mapping choices from our nautical chart partners.
The next generation of nautical charts for boats has arrived. Raymarine LightHouse Charts offer a superior visual presentation, combined with rich mapping detail and accurate navigation sourced from official hydrographic sources across the globe.
Raymarine LightHouse Charts offer a superior nautical chart visual presentation, combined with rich detail and accurate GPS navigation from official hydrographic sources, including NOAA. Choose between various nautical chart styles, matched with color pallets for any time of day. For even more detail, subscribe to LightHouse Premium and unlock data-rich points of interest (POI), high-resolution satellite aerial overlays from Mapbox, and regular chart updates.
With a growing pool of free chart data available around the world, it is getting easier and easier for sailors to escape the magnetic pull of the big chart providers: C-Map, Navionics/Bluechart and now Raymarine Lighthouse.
The main advantage of choosing open source is to avoid the high costs of buying digital nautical charts; costs which have been raised by the possibility of getting digital updates performed automatically on a subscription basis.
A very well-specced user interface includes: a full AIS system, with target tracking, selectable MMSI numbers and support for DSC; route planning using tidal data, weather and great circle geometry; plus GPS, alarms, GRIB overlays and support for 20 languages.
It also supports radar images from Garmin and Navico (B&G, Simrad, Lowrance), but not yet Raymarine. Complex installation is now a thing of the past on PCs and Macs, but you do need to download charts separately for the areas you want to cruise.
Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions. The word portolan comes from the Italian portolano, meaning "related to ports or harbors", and which since at least the 17th century designates "a collection of sailing directions".[1]
Several definitions of portolan chart coexist in the literature. A narrow definition includes only medieval[5] or, at the latest, early modern sea charts (i.e. maps that primarily cover maritime rather than inland regions) that include a network of rhumb lines and do not show any indication of the use of latitude or longitude coordinates.[6] The geographic scope of these mostly medieval portolan charts is limited to the Mediterranean and Black Seas with possible extensions to West European coasts up to Scandinavia and West African coasts down to Guinea. Some authors further restrict the term portolan chart to single-sheet maps drawn on parchment,[7] whereas books that contain several sea charts are called nautical atlases.
The straight lines shown criss-crossing portolan charts represent the sixteen directions (or headings) of the mariner's compass from a given point, which became thirty-two directions from around 1450.[11] The principal lines are oriented to the magnetic north pole.[12] Thus the grid lines varied slightly for charts produced in different eras, due to the natural changes of the Earth's magnetic declination.[12] These lines are similar to the compass rose displayed on later maps and charts. "All portolan charts have wind roses, though not necessarily complete with the full thirty-two points; the compass rose ... seems to have been a Catalan innovation".[13]
The portolan chart combined the exact notations of the text of the periplus or pilot book with the decorative illustrations of a medieval T and O map. In addition, the charts provided realistic depictions of shores. They were meant for practical use by mariners of the period. Portolans failed to take into account the curvature of the Earth; as a result, they were not helpful as navigational tools for crossing the open ocean, and were replaced by later Mercator projection charts.[12] Portolans were most useful in close quarters' identification of landmarks.[12] Portolani were also useful for navigation in smaller bodies of water, such as the Mediterranean, Black, or Red Seas.
Most extant portolan charts from before 1500 are drawn on vellum, which is a high-quality type of parchment, made from calf skin. Single charts were normally rolled whereas those that formed part of atlases were pasted on wood or cardboard supports.[14]
The earliest surviving explanations of how to draw a portolan chart date from the 16th century,[15] so the techniques used by medieval mapmakers can only be inferred. The instruments available in the Middle Ages are believed to have been a ruler, a pair of dividers, a pen, and inks of various colors. Drawing probably started with the windrose lines and then the mapmaker copied the coastal outlines from some earlier chart. Place names, geographic details and decoration were added in the end.[16]
Two main families of portolan charts were distinguished by origin, according to 19th-century historians: Italian, developed mainly in Genoa, Venice and Rome; and Spanish, with Palma de Mallorca as a main center of production. Portuguese charts were believed to be derived from the Spanish. Arab portolan charts were not recognized until the second half of the 20th century.
The copious number of Italian portolan charts begins in the mid 13th century, with the oldest called Carta Pisana, which is kept in the National Library in Paris. To the next century belong the Carignano Chart, disappeared from the National Archive of Florence where it had been conserved for a long time; cartographic works of the Genoese Pietro Vesconte, the illustrator of the work of Marino Sanudo; the chart of Francisco Pizigano (1373), with stylistic influence from Mallorca; and those of Beccario, Canepa and the brothers Benincasa, natives of Ancona. The fifteenth-century Luxoro Atlas, whose authorship is anonymous, is held at the Biblioteca Civica Berio in Genoa.
The Spanish introduced a novelty in nautical cartography, with geographical maps having common stylistic representation of certain accidents and locations. The masterpiece of the Majorcan portolan charts is the Catalan Atlas made by Abraham Cresques in 1375, and kept in the Bibliothque Nationale de France in Paris.
Abraham Cresques was a Majorcan Jew who worked at the service of Pedro IV of Aragon. In his "buxolarum" [=magnetic compass] workshop he was helped by his son Jafuda. The Atlas is a World Map, that is, world map and regions of the Earth with the various peoples who live there. The work was done at the request of Prince John, son of Pedro IV, desirous of a faithful representation of the world from west to east. 12 sheets form the world map on tables, linked to each other by scroll and screen layout. Each table measures 69 by 49 cm. The first four texts are filled with geographical and astronomical tables and calendars. The newest of the Cresques World Map is the representation of Asia, from the Caspian sea to Cathay (China), which takes into account information from Marco Polo, and Jordanus .
In the 14th century, also highlights the work of Guillem Soler, which cultivates both styles, the purely nautical and nautical-geographical. To the 15th century corresponds the famous portolan chart by Gabriel Vallseca, (1439), kept in the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, notable for its delicacy of execution and lively picturesque details, masked by a spot of ink left by Frdric Chopin and George Sand.[17]
The Portuguese portolan charts come from the Majorcan tradition,[18] and as traditional portolan charts did not fulfill the requirements demanded by the expansion of the geographic horizons attained by Portuguese and Spaniards, they superposed the astronomical lines of the equator and tropics on top of the wind line network, and they continued being elaborated over the 16th and 17th centuries.
In addition there is a detailed description of a nautical Arab map of the Mediterranean in the Encyclopedia of the Egyptian Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari, written between 1330 and 1348.[19] There are also descriptions limited to smaller geographic regions, in a work of Ibn Sa'id al Maghribi (13th century) and even in the work of Al-Idrisi (12th century).[21]
The origins of portolan charts are obscure, having no known predecessors.[22] One study[23] concludes that portolans originated from earlier charts drawn on what is now called the Mercator projection, states that portolans are mosaics of smaller charts, each with their own scale and orientation, and suggests that the cartographic capabilities of whichever civilization produced the antecedent charts was more advanced than is currently acknowledged.[24] These ideas are rejected by established researchers in the field, however, who find ample evidence of medieval origins and construction methods.[25][26]
The earliest portolan charts focused on the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, with only partial and sometimes sketchy depiction of Atlantic coasts up to Scandinavia. In the 15th and 16th centuries, with the beginning of the Age of Discovery, the scope of portolan charts expanded south down to the Gulf of Guinea. Charts also started to be drawn by Portuguese and Spanish mapmakers for the newly explored seas in Africa, America, South Asia and the Pacific.
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