Scott's New Coast Pilot for the Lakes

Summary

Scott’s New Coast Pilot for the Lakes is a mariner’s reference compiled by George Scott of Mt. Clemens, Michigan, “Licensed Pilot of all the Lakes,” covering every light, fog signal, buoy, harbor and life-saving station on both the American and Canadian shores of the Great Lakes, together with compass courses, distances and sailing directions “corrected for magnetic variation of the compass.”¹ The copy held here is the sixth edition, “revised and enlarged, with maps, diagrams and illustrations,” printed in Detroit by the Free Press Printing Company in 1902, running to 393 pages. It is the primary documentary source this knowledge base holds for the exact light characteristics, fog signals and sailing directions around the Beaver Island group circa 1902.

History

The title page states the work was “compiled from the most reliable sources, and from personal notes and observations of over forty years’ experience on the lakes” by George Scott.¹ The digitized copy carries a Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan) bookplate noting its conservation was funded in part by the Friends of the Michigan Historical Collections; it was digitized by Google as part of a library-preservation program.²

Contents relevant to Beaver Island

Within the volume, Beaver Island group content is concentrated on pp. 139-141 (Straits of Mackinac / Lake Michigan light-house listings, including Beaver Island Harbor Light and Beaver Island Light Station), p. 169 (Squaw Island Light Station), pp. 262-265 (compass sailing directions to and from Beaver Harbor, including the prose description of the anchorage in “the bight on the east side of the island” and the warning on Gull Island Reef: “This very dangerous shoal, with only 5 feet of water… bears S.S.E. ¾ E., 4 miles, from the south point of Gull island”), pp. 273-276 (further Lake Michigan compass courses referencing Beaver Island light as a bearing mark, and a table of magnetic declinations giving “Beaver Island Light 0°.2 E.” for 1900), and p. 310 (Appendix, the Life Saving Service district list naming Owen Gallagher as keeper of the Beaver Island station — see Beaver Island Life-Saving Station).³

Significance

This is the single richest primary source held for the mechanical detail of the three Beaver Island group light stations — exact tower heights, colors, light characteristics, fog-signal timing, and compass bearings between them — and for the composition of Great Lakes sailing routes threading the archipelago. Cross-referencing it against the independently-surveyed North End of Lake Michigan Including the Beaver Island Group (1855 Lake Survey chart) (47 years earlier) shows at least two lights (the Beaver Island Harbor Light and the Beaver Head Light) were re-equipped between the two dates, and that the Squaw Island light did not yet exist as of the earlier chart.

Open questions

• Digital OCR of this PDF is clean and machine-extractable (confirmed by spot-checking multiple pages against the source image conventions), unlike some other Great Lakes navigation texts in this corpus which suffer word-order scrambling; no such defect was found here.
• The volume’s earlier (1st-5th) editions are not held; changes in light characteristics between editions cannot be traced without them.

See also

• Beaver Island Light Station
• Beaver Island Harbor Light
• Squaw Island Light Station
• Beaver Island Life-Saving Station
• Gull Island Reef
• North End of Lake Michigan Including the Beaver Island Group (1855 Lake Survey chart)

Sources