The Arctic,
as known in 1845.

A map with two different clocks.

The title looks back to 1845. The sheet itself was published in 1858. That distinction matters: later routes and notes sit on top of an earlier picture of the Arctic.

Switch to Overlay to see a digitized detail of King William Land. The green lines follow the historical coast as drawn. The red dashed line follows Brown’s later route annotation. You can turn that route off to see the distinction.

Keep the uncertainty.

Digitizing a map shouldn’t quietly repair it. Our linework stays in the chart’s own image coordinates. A conjectural coast remains conjectural; a dotted line remains dotted. This preview is not a modern coastline comparison or a navigational map.

Modern geography may eventually sit alongside the chart as a separate, documented layer. It will never silently replace what the historical map says.

Sources, rights & what’s still open.

The source is the hand-coloured 1858 chart used by Historical Map Studio, carrying a British Museum stamp dated 1860. The historical work is public domain. The scan provider and any separate reproduction terms are still being documented; this preview does not establish commercial-use clearance.

The vector preview comes from the project’s King William Land reference annotation. It is a regional work-in-progress example, not a released or independently validated research dataset. The downloadable catalog record includes the scan checksum and this provenance status.