The cartographer's maps of the delta were prized less for their accuracy than for what colleagues called their honesty about inaccuracy. Where the channel braided into six shifting threads, she did not choose one authoritative course and ink it boldly; she rendered all six in a fading gray, letting the paper itself admit that the river had outrun her survey. A rival mapmaker mocked this as timidity dressed up as method. Yet ships that trusted her faded, tentative lines home more often than they trusted his confident, single-channel charts, which had been drawn from a survey already three seasons out of date by the time it was printed. Her gray lines were not a failure to decide; they were a decision—to let the map's uncertainty match the river's.