The summer of 1812 was wet and cool, bringing some relief to the small staff of the Hydrographical Office on the often-stifling top floor of the Admiralty Building in Whitehall. Every space in the passageways was taken up by the boxes which they laboured to fill with charts destined for ships of the war-time Royal Navy deployed from the Baltic to the Cape of Good Hope, and from the East Indies to an unwelcome new theatre on the borders of the USA. On Thursday 1 July, during a lull in superintendence of this work, the Hydrographer returned to his desk to consider a letter and a manuscript survey, one of over 30 which were rendered from the fleet during the year.

Captain Thomas Hurd examined these eagerly as they were passed up by the clerks to the Board of Admiralty. It was generally a mixed bag. Many were swift reconnaissance surveys made in the heat of operations, sometimes recorded as a sketch in the remark books which captains and masters were required to render. They might supply a few soundings which could be dropped into smaller-scale published charts. This inspection was, however, the only opening for Hurd to spot talent for the vision which he would represent repeatedly to the Board and eventually bring to fruition: ‘ an establishment […] of officers and scientific young men […] capable of making nautical surveys in whatever part of the world their future services may happen to place them in’.

Hurd's vision had been shaped by his own experience in the front line. His reputation in the Admiralty had been made by a remarkable survey which enabled the creation of a naval base in the hazardous waters of the Bermudan archipelago. Consequently, he had been the immediate choice to undertake an examination of another complex of islets and rocks in the approaches to the French naval base of Brest following the loss of a 74-gun ship of the Royal Navy's Inshore Squadron in 1804.

When he came to reiterate his vision in 1814, he would stress ‘the great deficiency of our nautical knowledge in almost every part of the world, but more particularly on the coastline of our own Dominions’.