Abstract
Cecil Charter had taught botany and biology in China and Antigua for five years, when in 1931 he was engaged to conduct a soil survey of the sugarcane-growing areas of Antigua. This was followed by similar surveys elsewhere in the Caribbean. In 1944, he joined the West African Cacao Research Institute in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to carry out soil investigations in the forest zones of West Africa. In 1949 he moved to organise the soil survey unit in the Gold Coast Department of Agriculture, and, in 1951, to found and direct the new Soil and Land Use Survey Department. He rapidly built up a highly professional unit that produced many practical and useful reports of high quality. He based the surveys on ecological principles, selecting river basins as mapping regions. In the initial absence of qualified soil scientists, he subdivided the soil survey process and trained school leavers as technicians for separate tasks. Teams of these technicians examined soils, vegetation and land use at regular intervals on regularly-spaced traverses cut across the topography. Charter’s contributions to soil science included his recognition of non-residual tropical soils formed in material brought to the surface by soil fauna and treefall. Also, he differentiated between highly acidic upland Oxysols in high-rainfall areas, which he considered unsuitable for cocoa cultivation, and less acidic Ochrosols, which were more suitable. Based on farmers’ experience and his ecological background, he differentiated between forest, thicket and savannah soils within these groups. He strongly advocated genetic and contextual classification of tropical soils.
Highlights
After 12 years of soil surveying in the Caribbean, Cecil Frederick Charter established modern systematic soil survey in the Gold Coast ( Ghana) in the late 1940s
We review Charter’s career in the Caribbean and in the Gold Coast, and discuss his influence on methods of survey, and on tropical soil classification and pedology
We use a range of unpublished materials that came to one of the authors (HB) per sonally from Charter himself and later from his family, and draw from legacy items held in the World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue (WOSSAC) at Cranfield University, UK
Summary
After 12 years of soil surveying in the Caribbean, Cecil Frederick Charter established modern systematic soil survey in the Gold Coast ( Ghana) in the late 1940s. Charter took advantage of the territory’s relative prosperity and the administration’s progressive resourcing of agricultural devel opment services, and built up a large and productive Soil and Land Use Survey This rapidly produced a stream of practical and relevant soil maps, reports and land assessments of high quality. He was a gifted teacher and trained teams of local school leavers in separate soil survey tasks. Charter lacks Milne’s wide recognition, as he left no simple catch-phrase con cept His written output consisted mostly of reports and conference papers of high quality but with limited distribution, and he did not parallel Milne in authoring papers in mainstream academic journals. We use a range of unpublished materials that came to one of the authors (HB) per sonally from Charter himself and later from his family, and draw from legacy items held in the World Soil Survey Archive and Catalogue (WOSSAC) at Cranfield University, UK (www.wossac.com; Hallett et al, 2017)
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