Free Creation by Katherine Govier

water. Water is a most unreliable surface. Beyond that, the survey marks the channels that are safe for navigating. The Admiralty wants our charts quickly now, as the number of shipwrecks in the Gulf is rising, he had explained, even as he spoke, feeling a rising urgency to be off.
    Briefly, Collins’s head appears out of the mist covering the deck. His voice rises and falls, saying what, Bayfield cannot quite grasp. He thinks of the time they were both young assistants under William FitzWilliam Owen in 1814. He, Bayfield, had expected to fight a war and had been selected not for valour but for the neatness of his handwriting. Collins, a midshipman at the time, was relieved to have steady occupation that did not involve the use of violence. They cut their teeth on the Thousand Islands, verifying the American boundary from Montreal to Kingston in anticipation of another war with the United States. In fact, there are more than one thousand islands. There are 1,768 between Brockville and Kingston, ranging from a size of one acre to twenty-two square miles, to be precise. Owen drove them to exhaustion, day and night, even in winter, until even he had to concede it was too difficult to pierce the ice and handle the frozen lines.
    And the islands! So many that the naming of them became a delirium. They began with groups: the Old Friends, the Hydrographers (half a dozen named after each other), the Statesmen, the Admiralty (all the British Lords), the Navy Isles, and the Lake Fleet (including nineteen vessels or types of vessels including the Punts, the Cutters, Gig and so on). But soon they ran out of words. It is a solemn act to confer a name; it gave one the feeling of being a god.
    That has been his story.
    Come for a war and found a boundary.
    Come to survey a boundary and found nothing so simple as a line through water: found land smashed up and broken to bits, humped and rising out of water, shallow and sometimes disappearing. Irrational, useless and obstructing land, needing to be made sense of.
    With Collins’s help, he finished in August 1816 and presented his masterpiece, “A Chart of Lake Ontario, Scale 0.835 Inches to a Mile of Longitude, or about 1.65432. Particular Places on a Scale of 1.12,000” to the Lords of the Admiralty. But the Lords were fickle; the survey was no longer essential, as peace had been achieved, and the longest undefended border in the world had been established by the Treaty of Ghent. The Lords sent Owen off to Africa and suggested abandoning the Great Lakes survey, “unless you want to leave Bayfield to do it.”

“ Bayfield had been selected not for
valour but for the neatness of his handwriting .”

So Bayfield became lieutenant and almost by default went on to complete the survey himself. Lakes Erie, Ontario, Superior and Huron with its enormous sidecar, “la mer douce,” Georgian Bay, followed. He did it all in two small boats, with only Collins to help. The waters were capricious, festering with granite teeth both above and below the waterline. In the early 1820s, they were granted chronometers to determine longitude. Now he had the means to make his survey perfect, and he was determined to. There were more islands, including a long archipelago in Georgian Bay.
    He arrived in London in 1825 with the product of their immense labour: the completed surveys of Lakes Huron, Erie and Superior, including charts of no fewer than twenty thousand islands. He thought perhaps he would be sent to Africa, where Owen was, or the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific, where Cook was. But no.
    Instead he was promptly put on half pay. Half pay meant ten shillings and sixpence a day. What was worse was that he had nothing to do. He took up residence in his brother’s Chelsea house, and paced the banks of the Thames. His mother wrote from Bayfield Hall that she feared he was wearing himself out in “the fleshpots of London.” He could not visualize a fleshpot, but he would not tell his mother that. He read