Machias Seal Island
Machias Seal Island
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One of my favorite stories of boundaries is the dispute between Canada and the United States over Machias Seal Island. The island lies just off the coast of eastern Maine, but close to Grand Manan Island, part of New Brunswick. The dispute over ownership dates back to British land grants in the 1600s and ambiguous language in the much later treaty that ended the American Revolution. Modern legal concepts concerning international boundaries fail to provide a resolution, as the United States and Canada continue to argue over issues of whether the island is geologically connected to either nation and whether historic patterns of use establish clear sovereignty. A few years ago, I wrote some short notes on the history of the boundary dispute and illustrated them with four simple black-and-white maps. The layout was busy; the maps and the text competed for the reader's attention. So I redrafted the story, with text and map image together. The map, incidentally, was designed to be printed on a single sheet of 11 x 14 inch paper, so it will look a bit small on a small computer monitor.
Here is the original version, with the maps illustrating the text rather than being integrated with the text.
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