New Terms and New Reading on the “Battle of Chelsea Creek”

Last week I attended Victor Mastone’s lecture at the Boston Public Library about his team’s investigation into the “Battle of Chelsea Creek,” a latter-day name for the amphibious fight over Hog Island, Noddle’s Island, and the Chelsea shore on 27-28 May 1775.

Mastone started by saying that his position as Director of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources was more impressive if you assumed he had any staff to direct. But for this National Park Service project he oversaw a team of people from different disciplines to explore how the north of Boston harbor looked in May 1775, and how the Royal Navy managed to lose a ship to a military force that didn’t even have a navy. The presentation was very visual, so I can’t do justice to it here, but I came away with three new verbal gems.

K.O.C.O.A. analysis. The N.P.S. has taken this term for examining battlefields from the U.S. military. As the Gettysburg park website explains, K.O.C.O.A. stands for:

• Key terrain
• Observation and fields of fire
• Cover and concealment
• Obstacles (both natural and man-made)
• Avenues of Approach

Note how adding the adjective “key” to the first term allows for a pronounceable acronym.

Viewshed. Wikipedia says: “A viewshed is an area of land, water, or other environmental element that is visible to the human eye from a fixed vantage point.”

Bathygraphic. Describing or charting the depth of a body of water at different points, just as topography studies the height of features above sea level.

The team’s Technical Report on the Chelsea Creek fight, hundreds of pages long and no doubt containing lots of maps, is downloadable through this state webpage. Team member Craig J. Brown wrote his master’s thesis on applying K.O.C.O.A. analysis to that landscape, and it’s available here. Finally, Brown, Mastone, and Christopher V. Maio published an article about the event in the latest New England Quarterly.