‘Life on the ocean, representing the usual occupations of the young officers in the steerage of a British frigate at sea’, by Augustus Earle, c.1820–37 (NMM BHC1118)
Fig. 5
Navigational workbook compiled by John Marshall, 1810 (NMM NVT/4)
Fig. 6
‘Landing the Treasures, or Results of the Polar Expedition!!!’, by George Cruikshank, 1819 (NMM PAG8511)
Fig. 7
‘Discoveries of Capts Ross, Parry & Franklin in the Arctic regions from the year 1818 to 1827’, from John Thomson’s New General Atlas (London, c.1830) (NMM G285:1/2)
Fig. 8
Commander James Clark Ross, by John R. Wildman, 1834 (NMM BHC2981)
Fig. 9
Marine chronometer, by George Margetts, c.1790 (NMM G241:4/38)
Fig. 10
‘West Coast of Africa, Sheet VII, ... surveyed by Captain W. F. W. Owen, Commander E. Belcher, and Lieutenant W. Arlett’, 1836 (NMM ZBA0672)
Fig. 11
Advertisement for Price’s candles, c.1850 (Lambeth Archives #4248)
Fig. 12
The Beagle in the Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego, by Conrad Martens, c.1834 (NMM PAF6228)
Fig. 13
The south-eastern part of Tierra del Fuego, 1877 (NMM STK244:2/2(3))
Fig. 14
Portrait Cove, Beagle Channel, by Conrad Martens, c.1834 (NMM PAF6242)
Fig. 15
Parallel rule, made by Nathaniel Worthington, c.1836 (NMM NAV0605)
Fig. 16
The Victoria River, 1845 (NMM STK262:8/3)
Fig. 17
Theodolite by J. Dollond & Son, c.1840, and sextant by Worthington & Allen, c.1831 (NMM NAV1461, NAV1174)
Fig. 18
Marine chronometer no. 294, by John Roger Arnold, c.1807 (NMM ZAA0292)
Fig. 19
‘Chart of the World, showing Tracks followed by Sailing and Low Powered Steam Vessels’, 1888 (NMM G201:1/62)
Fig. 20
Visualization of international shipping routes, based on the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1800–1850 (CLIWOC)
1 ‘The Royal Observatory, Greenwich’, The Weekly Visitor, 24 February 1833.
2 Richard Owen, ‘Essay on Chronometers’, in W. F. W. Owen, Tables of Latitudes and Longitudes by Chronometer (London, 1827), pp. 1–34 (p. 3).
3 Nautical Magazine, 28 October 1833, p. 680, quoted in Howse, Greenwich Time, p. 83.
4 Reproduced in H. W. Dickinson, Educating the Royal Navy: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Education for Officers (London and New York, 2007), p. 14.
5 Quoted in Christopher Lloyd, ‘The Royal Naval Colleges at Portsmouth and Greenwich’, Mariner’s Mirror, 52 (1966), 145–65 (p. 148).
6 Captain Montagu Burrows, quoted in Lloyd, ‘The Royal Naval Colleges’, p. 148.
7 John Croker, on the ‘Longitude Discovery Bill’, 6 March 1818, Hansard, 37 (1818), cc. 876–80, col. 876.
8 John Barrow, A Chronological History of the Voyages into the Arctic Regions (London, 1818), pp. 364–65.
9 Barrow, A Chronological History, pp. 368–69.
10 W. E. Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London, 1821), p. 72.
11 W. F. W. Owen, A Narrative of a Voyage to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia and Madagascar (London, 1833), p. 8.
12 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
13 Ibid., p. 7.
14 Ibid.
15 Richard Owen, ‘Essay on Chronometers’, p. 3.
16 Ibid.
17 Quoted in Jordan Goodman, ‘The Hell-Borne Traffic: William Owen and the African Slave Trade’, Geographical, 79 (2007), 63–65 (p. 64).
18 Philip Parker King et al., Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle ... , 4 vols (London, 1839), I, p. xvii.
19 ‘South America West Coast Original Directions by Captain FitzRoy HMS Beagle, 1834–5’, UKHO OD44 SA.2.6.
20 John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, with an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, in the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43, 3 vols (London, 1846), II, pp. 526–27.
21 Robert FitzRoy to Francis Beaufort, 10 May 1833, UKHO, in R. D. Keynes (ed.), The Beagle Record: Selections from the Original Pictorial Records and Written Accounts of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (Cambridge, London, New York and Melbourne, 1979), p. 131.
22 Robert FitzRoy, ‘Appendix’ to King et al., Narrative of the Surveying Voyages, II, p. 331.
23 FitzRoy to Beaufort, 26 October 1833, UKHO, in Keynes (ed.), The Beagle Record, p. 162.
24 Ibid., p. 163.
25 ‘South America West Coast Original Directions by Captain FitzRoy HMS Beagle, 1834–5’, UKHO OD44 SA.2.6.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, II, pp. 359–60.
29 Ibid.
30 Francis Beaufort to John Barrow, 20 December 1836, UKHO MB2, pp. 345–46.
31 John F. W. Herschel, ‘Address of the President’, in Report of the Fifteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1846), pp. xxvii–xliv, xxxiv, xxix.
PROLOGUE
page 10
A map of the world, by Paolo Forlani, published by Fernando Bertelli, 1565 (NMM G201.1/35)
1 An Act for providing a Publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea (13 Anne, c. 14), 1713.
EPILOGUE
page 224
‘The Great Western riding a tidal wave, 11 December 1844’, by Joseph Walter, 1845 (NMM BHC2379)
1 George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, Complete in One Volume (London, 1837), p. 7.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
The archives of the Board of Longitude are held in the Royal Greenwich Observatory manuscripts at Cambridge University Library. Along with papers of the Astronomers Royal, Nevil Maskelyne and John Pond, from Cambridge and the National Maritime Museum, they have been digitized and are freely available as part of the Cambridge Digital Library at: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude
References to manuscript and contemporary printed sources, most of which can be found at Eighteenth Century Collections Online, are given in the endnotes. The following abbreviations have been used:
BL
British Library
BoL
Board of Longitude
CDL
Cambridge Digital Library
CUL
Cambridge University Library
HBCA
Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Manitoba
NMM
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
RGO
Royal Greenwich Observatory Archives
TNA
The National Archives of the UK
UKHO
United Kingdom Hydrographic Office
Further Reading
General Background
The longitude story, particularly its British context, is perhaps best introduced in Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (London, 1997). Dava Sobel’s bestselling Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (London, 1996) provides a quick read that gives the story from John Harrison’s perspective. Deriving from the conference that inspired Sobel’s work, W. J. H. Andrewes (ed.), The Quest for Longitude (Harvard, 1996) has a strong focus on horological developments but also contains useful essays on the international background and some of the other methods for determining longitude. The French side of the story is told in more detail in F. Marguet, Histoire Générale de la Navigation du XVe au XXe Siècle (Paris, 1931) and in the essays in Vincent Jullien (ed.), Le Calcul des Longitudes (Rennes, 2002).
John Harrison’s life and work have been dealt with in full in Humphrey Quill, John Harrison: The Man Who Found Longitude (London, 1966), and more briefly in Jonathan Betts, Harrison (London, 2007). Harrison’s work is pu
t into its horological context in Rupert Gould’s still largely authoritative The Marine Chronometer: Its History and Development (London, 1923) and Jonathan Betts, Marine Chronometers at Greenwich (Oxford, forthcoming). David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (2nd edition, London, 2000) and Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300–1800 (Oxford, 2009) have also discussed how marine timekeepers fit into a longer economic, industrial and social history. For more detail on the economic background, see Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven and London, 2009).
A good overview of the history of the Board of Longitude can be found in Peter Johnson, ‘The Board of Longitude 1714–1828’, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 99 (1989), 63–66. Derek Howse wrote a biography of one of the most significant figures in the Board’s history, in Nevil Maskelyne: The Seaman’s Astronomer (Cambridge, 1989). The history of the Royal Observatory, where Maskelyne and the other Astronomers Royal worked, is told in Eric G. Forbes, A. J. Meadows and Derek Howse, Greenwich Observatory: The Royal Observatory at Greenwich and Herstmonceux, 1675–1975, 3 vols (London, 1975).
Charles H. Cotter, A History of Nautical Astronomy (London, 1968) provides a comprehensive account of celestial navigation, while Peter Ifland, Taking the Stars: Celestial Navigation from Argonauts to Astronauts (Malabar, 1998) and J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford, 1987) concentrate on the development of the instruments. The history of navigation more generally is covered in E. G. R. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art (London, 1956), W. E. May, A History of Marine Navigation (Guildford, 1973) and Donald S. Johnson and Juha Nurminen, The History of Seafaring (London, 2007), among others.
Many of the essays in John B. Hattendorf, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History (Oxford, 2007) provide excellent starting points for a range of relevant topics. The definitive works on British naval history more specifically are N. A. M. Rodger’s The Wooden World (London, 1986) and The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London, 2004). For the history of exploration, many useful pieces can be found in Derek Howse (ed.), Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook (Berkeley, 1990) and David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook (Beckenham, 1985), while Glyn Williams, Arctic Labyrinths: The Quest for the Northwest Passage (London, 2010) offers a very readable narrative of maritime exploration in one part of the world.
The relationship between navy and science that developed in the eighteenth century is discussed in John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 1998). Banks and his context also form a core thread in Richard Holmes’s Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2009). For a more general background, see Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History of Science Vol. 4: Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 2003).
An essential source for most of the British individuals mentioned in this book is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edition, Jan 2008). Additional works that were particularly useful in the writing of individual chapters are listed below.
Chapter 1
H. V. Bowen, John McAleer, Robert J. Blyth, Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London, 2011)
K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978)
Mike Dash, Batavias’s Graveyard (London, 2002)
Gillian Hutchinson, Medieval Ships and Shipping (Leicester, 1994)
María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago & London, 2009)
Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind. The Life of William Dampier: Explorer, Naturalist and Buccaneer (London, 2004)
Rachel Souhami, Selkirk’s Island (London, 2002)
David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London, 1958)
Chapter 2
D. J. Bryden, ‘Magnetic inclinatory needles: Approved by the Royal Society?’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 47 (1993), 17–31
Karel Davids, ‘Dutch and Spanish global networks of knowledge in the early modern period: Structures, connections, changes’, in Lissa Roberts (ed.), Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and around the Netherlands during the Early Modern Period (Münster, 2011), 29–52
Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London, 2008)
Lisa Jardine, ‘Scientists, sea trials and international espionage: Who really invented the balance-spring watch?’, Antiquarian Horology, 9 (2006), 663–83
A. R. T. Jonkers, Earth’s Magnetism in the Age of Sail (Baltimore, 2003)
Kevin C. Knox and Richard Noakes, From Newton to Hawking: A History of Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professors of Mathematics (Cambridge, 2003)
Stephen Pumfrey, Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (London, 2002)
Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago and London, 2010)
Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1983)
Frances Willmoth (ed.), Flamsteed’s Stars: New Perspectives on the Life of the First Astronomer Royal, 1646–1719 (Bristol, 1997)
Chapter 3
Daniel A. Baugh, ‘The Sea-Trial of John Harrison’s Chronometer, 1736’, Mariner’s Mirror, 64 (1978), 235–40
Silvio A. Bedini, Thinkers and Tinkers: Early American Men of Science (New York, 1975)
J. A. Bennett ‘Catadioptrics and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century London’, History of Science, 44 (2006), 247–87
J. G. Burke (ed.), The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton (Berkeley, 1983)
Markman Ellis, The Coffee House (London, 2004)
Alan Ereira, ‘The Voyages of H1’, Mariner’s Mirror, 87 (2001), 144–49
E. G. Forbes, The Birth of Navigational Science (London, 1974)
E. G. Forbes, Tobias Mayer (1723–62): Pioneer of Enlightened Science in Germany (Göttingen, 1980)
Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1992)
Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge (Farnham, 2010)
Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans (London, 1999)
Chapter 4
J. A. Bennett, ‘The Travels and Trials of Mr Harrison’s Timekeeper’, in M.N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe and H. O. Sibum (eds), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London, 2002), 75–95
Mary Croarken, ‘Tabulating the Heavens: Computing the Nautical Almanac in 18th-Century England’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 25:3 (2003), 48–61
Alan Morton and Jane Wess, Public and Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford, 1993)
D. H. Sadler, Man is Not Lost: A Record of Two Hundred Years of Astronomical Navigation with the Nautical Almanac, 1767–1967 (London, 1968)
A. J. Turner, ‘Berthoud in England, Harrison in France: The transmission of horological knowledge in 18th century Europe’, Antiquarian Horology, 20 (1992), 219–39
Chapter 5
John Bach (ed.), The Bligh Notebook (Sydney, 1987)
J. C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, 3 vols, (Cambridge, 1955–67)
J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London, 1974)
Andrew David, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Carlos Novi and Glyndwr Williams, The Malaspina Expedition 1789 to 1794: Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina (London, 2001–2004)
Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge, 1992)
Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology (Carlton South, Vic., 1995)
Miriam Estensen, The Life of Matthew Fl
inders (Crows Nest, 2003)
Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds), Captain James Cook and His Times (Vancouver, 1979)
Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (eds), From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (Vancouver, 1993)
John Gascoigne, Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds (London, 2007)
Derek Howse and Beresford Hutchinson, The Clocks and Watches of Captain James Cook (AHS, 1969)
Wayne Orchiston, Nautical Astronomy in New Zealand: The Cook Voyages (Wellington, 1998)
E. G. R. Taylor, Navigation in the Days of Captain Cook (London, 1974)
Glyndwr Williams, Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Woodbridge, 2004)
Chapter 6
William J. Ashworth, ‘The calculating eye: Baily, Herschel, Babbage and the business of astronomy’, British Journal for the History of Science, 27 (1994), 409–41
John Brooks, ‘The circular dividing engine: Development in England 1739–1843’, Annals of Science, 49 (1992), 101–35
Andrew Cook, ‘Alexander Dalrymple and John Arnold: Chronometers and the representation of longitude on East India Company charts’, Vistas in Astronomy, 28 (1985), 189–95
Richard Dunn, ‘Scoping Longitude: Optical Designs for Navigation at Sea’, in G. Strano et al. (eds), From Earth-Bound to Satellite: Telescopes, Skills and Networks (Brill, 2011), 141–54
Humphrey Jennings, Pandæmonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (London, 1995)
Finding Longitude Page 21