Foreword

This guide began with a single survey contract on a half-acre parcel above Marigot Bay. Inside a week, the parcel had four different shapes depending on which file you opened.

It was not that anyone had lied. It was that the parcel had been read by different hands, in different decades, with different reasons to draw it the way they did. The eldest version, an estate map from the 1880s, treated the same land as part of a much larger sugar holding. The 1970s cadastral version cut it into three parts and gave one to a road that has since shifted. The 2010s planning file showed two parts and a footnote about a third that was, by then, considered informal.

None of those readings were wrong on their own terms. They were each correct for the question being asked at the time. The trouble is that present-day planning treats them as if they were one continuous record of the same place.

What this guide is

A field guide written from the working notes of one researcher, on one island, in one office, with one set of recurring frustrations. Most chapters are short. Most of them describe a habit or a check or a piece of vocabulary that I needed years ago and learned the hard way.

What this guide is not

It is not a survey textbook, not a GIS manual, not a history of the plantation system in the Eastern Caribbean. People have written those better than I could. It is also not a policy document — I am a researcher, not a planner, and I try to keep that line visible.

“The parcel had four shapes by Friday. None of them were wrong on their own terms.”

If a chapter helps a surveyor explain to a client why two perfectly correct maps say two different things, the guide will have done its job.