A Plan · The Cartographer's Daughter · Pulse Beat
She did not sleep that night. She sat at the drawing table with all the evidence spread before her: the three charts, the photocopies, the letters, the memory stick, her mother's photograph. She had…
She did not sleep that night. She sat at the drawing table with all the evidence spread before her: the three charts, the photocopies, the letters, the memory stick, her mother's photograph.
She had the facts. She did not have a way to use them. A single chartmaker's word against a company with a hundred lawyers would not stop a port. But she had learned from her father that a chart is a public thing. If it were published, accurately, with her father's name on it and the soundings checked by independent surveyors, no ship's master would use the false sheet, and no insurer would cover a vessel that did.
She wrote to the Hydrographic Office in Dehradun. She wrote to the harbour authority at Kolar. She wrote to the Marine Pilot, the magazine that every mariner on the coast read, and to a retired naval surveyor she found listed in a directory.
By dawn she had seven letters, each one different, and each with a copy of the soundings.
She took them to the post office herself, one by one, and stood watching as each was stamped. Then she went home, and slept for fourteen hours.