forest fire, the Court, by a decided majority (7 to 2), vacated the judgments of both lower courts and held the intent of Congress to be that losses caused by the negligence of such employees be “charged against the public treasury." Id. at 320.38 In holding that firefighting is not immune and that liability can attach to "uniquely governmental" activities, the Supreme Court to this extent overruled the Dalehite case. A significant facet of the Rayonier case was the Court's holding that "the very purpose of the Tort Claims Act was to waive the Government's traditional all-encompassing immunity from tort actions and to establish novel and unprecedented governmental liability." (Emphasis added.) Id. at 319.39 The liberal trend in favor of claimants, evidenced in Indian Towing by a narrow margin (see note 32 supra), was given positive and unmistakable direction in Rayonier.

United States v. Muniz and Winston, 374 U.S. 150 (1963), is the most recent pronouncement by the Supreme Court on the scope and construction of the act. By a unanimous decion (one justice did not participate) the Court refused to read into the act an implied exception which would have barred federal prisoners from recovery for the negligent conduct of prison employees. It cited and endorsed the Rayonier case, by stating: "There is no justification for this Court to read exceptions into the Act beyond those provided by Congress. If the Act is to be altered, that is a function for the same body that adopted it." Id. at 166. The Court thus affirmed the finding of the Court of Appeals. It emphasized, however, that the Government is not without defenses since the act relieves it from liability if the claim is based upon "the exercise or performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the Government, whether or not the discretion involved be abused." Id. at 163. (The question involved was on the right to sue and not on the merits of the case.)

6315. Implications for Federal Charting Agencies

The recent Supreme Court cases hold important implications for all service agencies of Government, particularly those that deal with the safeguard and control of marine and air commerce. The present temper of the Court appears to be to hold these agencies to a stricter accountability for acts of negligence that result in injury to the public, and therefore pose new responsibilities for them, both in the matter of an exercise of greater care on the operational level and in the matter of duly warning the public of potential dangers. But neither is the navigator absolved from taking all necessary precautions to avoid disaster, for, in the final analysis, monetary recovery will depend upon the causal connection between the alleged negligence of the Government and the accident, and such matters as the claimant's failure to use the latest nautical charts, Coast Pilots, and Notices to Mariners, or to have Tide Tables and Tidal Current Tables aboard, or his failure to listen to daily broadcasts concerning aids and dangers to navigation, will directly affect the outcome. (See, for example, the Indian 38. The lower courts had dismissed the complaint on authority of the Dalehite case (see text at note 31 supra). This was prior to the Indian Towing case.

39. This statement is in conflict with the Court's statement in Feres v. United States (see note 33 supra). Since Rayonier did not overrule Feres, the latter must now be taken as limited exclusively to members of the Armed Forces on active duty.

Towing case on remand (note 34 supra) and the Kline case (text at note 36 supra), where, in denying Government liability, these criteria of prudent care were raised by the trial court.)

For the federal charting agencies, the decisions raise some interesting questions. In the gamut of operations involved in the publication of nautical charts and related data-from the inception of the field survey to the final printing-there are many levels of responsibility, below the overall policy or planning level, where matters of judgment and discretion arise. It is doubtful whether the doctrine of the Indian Towing case, limiting federal immunity to the exercise of the initial discretion, would be applicable in such situations. Since this case has not overruled the Dalehite case with respect to the level at which liability attaches, perhaps the true interpretation of the Tort Claims Act lies in the direction of both doctrines, and in considering each case on an ad hoc basisin the light of the particular facts involved-keeping in mind the overall purpose of the act as expressed by Justice Frankfurter, namely: "The broad and just purpose which the statute was designed to effect was to compensate the victims of negligence in the conduct of governmental activities in circumstances like unto those in which a private person would be liable and not to leave just treatment to the caprice and legislative burden of individual private laws." 40

As a result of actions brought under the Tort Claims Act involving Coast and Geodetic Survey charts, two practices have been adopted by the Bureau for safeguarding navigation—the addition of a "power" cable note on the charts (see chart 572 at Bush River), which grew out of Thompson v. United States (see 6313); and the addition of a warning note ("Danger Unexploded Bombs and Shells") and a special warning symbol marking the San Marcos wreck in Chesapeake Bay (see chart 1223)."

The Coast and Geodetic Survey has been responsive to the implications of the Federal Tort Claims Act in another area. In the early part of March 1962, the Bureau was faced with a critical charting situation growing out of one of the most turbulent, wind-driven tidal storms ever to strike the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Long Island. The storm was equally devastating to the nautical charts of the Bureau which were made obsolete by the radical

40. Indian Towing Co. v. United States, supra note 32, at 68. For a recent treatment of various aspects of the Tort Claims Act, see Hunt, The Federal Tort Claims Act: Sovereign Liability Today, MILITARY LAW REVIEW I (Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 27-100-8, Apr. 1960).

41. This resulted from Thomson v. United States, 266 F. 2d 852 (1959), in which the court found the San Marcos wreck (the wreck of the old U.S.S. Texas) to be improperly marked but found the captain of the Moby Dick also negligent and therefore applied the admiralty rule of divided damages. On recommendation of the Justice Department to the Coast Survey, following the decision, the danger note and symbol were added to the chart.

changes in the shoreline and the underwater features. Recognizing the need for immediate action to safeguard the navigation of sealanes along the coast, the Survey mobilized a special land, sea, and air task force of about 300 men to resurvey the coastline. Photography was begun on March 13, less than a week after the storm had subsided, and on the following day emergency charting was begun. On March 28, the first 9 chartlets were issued and covered areas of significant change and importance to the mariner, commercial fisherman, and pleasure boatman. By April 13, or one month after the first aerial photographic film was available, 27 such chartlets were distributed for use as overlays on the existing nautical charts (see text following note 36 supra).*2

Under Department Order No. 70 (Amended Oct. 26, 1959), the Director of the Survey, subject to approval of the Secretary of Commerce, may settle any claims against it arising out of the Federal Tort Claims Act, where the total amount of the claim does not exceed $2,500. Regulations, Coast and Geodetic Survey, at 02502D(1). Department Order No. 70 (Revised May 24, 1963) continues this limitation of amount of claim and sets out the procedures for making such claims.

64. PROJECTIONS FOR NAUTICAL CHARTS

The base or framework for any chart is the projection, that is, the systems of lines that represent the parallels of latitude and the meridians of longitude on the surface of the earth. Without this framework, the chart would lack the property that enables the navigator to plot his position readily and to lay down the ship's course with accuracy and ease. Since it is physically impossible to flatten the surface of a sphere without tearing, it is obvious that a strictly accurate representation of a portion of the earth's surface is not possible on a flat sheet of paper. Some distortion is inevitable, but the smaller the area embraced, the less appreciable will be the errors of representation. The underlying problem in map or chart projection is how to represent a portion of the spherical or spheroidal earth on a flat surface with the least amount of distortion (see 31, 32). This is resolved by preserving certain properties inherent in a spherical surface, but at the expense of others. The question of which properties to retain and which to sacrifice depends upon the purpose the map or chart is to serve.

42. For a fuller account of this emergency charting project and some results of the storm, see Emergency Charting of Storm-damaged Atlantic Coast, and New Atlantic Seaboard Chartlets, 54 THE MILITARY ENGINEER 276, 372 (1962).

641. THE MERCATOR PROJECTION

It was previously noted that the Mercator projection belongs to the conformal class where correct shape is preserved rather than correct size (see 613). Some of its characteristics and limitations were there noted. Although often referred to as a cylindrical projection with the cylinder tangent at the equator, it is best to consider it as derived by mathematical analysis, the spacing of the parallels bearing an exact relationship to the spreading of the meridians along a corresponding parallel. This expansion of the latitude and longitude scales approximates the secant of the latitude. The contrast between a perspective projection upon a tangent cylinder and a Mercator projection is shown in figures 76 and

From the standpoint of the user, the Mercator projection has a number of advantages, among which are simplicity of construction, the existence of a general table applicable to any part of the globe, convenience in plotting and scaling positions by latitudes and longitudes from the border divisions of the chart, and the fact that on it a course can be laid off from any meridian or compass rose within its borders. Its principal advantage (see 613), however, and the one responsible for its worldwide use for nautical charts, is that a straight line drawn on it in any direction is a rhumb line, or loxodromic curve. The track of a ship on a constant course is a straight line on the projection and will, at least theoretically, pass all features along that line exactly as charted. This is of great value in coastal navigation because the straight line representing a constant course to be made good will indicate at once the distance abeam that dangers will be passed.

Disadvantages of the Mercator projection are that it exaggerates areas appreciably seriously when large differences of latitude are involved-and that the scale is constantly changing with latitude, so that a graphic scale cannot be used on the smaller-scale charts, and for measuring distances recourse must be had to the border scale for the latitude in which the distance lies (see 692). These disadvantages are in addition to that discussed previously regarding the plotting of radio bearings (see note 9 supra and accompanying text).

43. The only similarity that a Mercator projection has to a cylindrical projection is that meridians may be conceived as formed by passing planes through the earth's meridians, the intersections of the planes and the cylinder tangent at the equator forming straight, vertical lines. If the cylinder is now cut vertically and spread out, the projected lines will form the meridians on the Mercator projection. The dissimilarity between the two types of projections is emphasized in Special Publication No. 68 as follows: "It is thus misleading to speak of the tangent cylinder in connection with the Mercator projection, and it is better to discard all mention of its relation to a cylinder and to view it entirely as a conformal projection upon a plane. . . . The distances of the various parallels depend upon an integral, and the required values are not obtained by any simple formula." DEETZ AND ADAMS (1944), op. cit. supra

note II, at III.