This guest post is by James Poskett, an MPhil student at the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge. The air there is evidently so full of all things longitude, that James found his way, by accident or design, toward a sounding machine in the Whipple Museum made by Edward Massey, a man who had a number of dealings with the Board of Longitude.
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“Could you, as far as your information of the depth of water enabled you to judge, have got near enough to those ships to have destroyed them?” It was on this question that the court martial of Lord Gambier depended. He was accused of failing to follow up an attack on the French fleet at the Battle of the Basque Roads in 1809. A number of French ships had run ashore and Gambier feared for the safety of the British fleet in following them too close to the shoals, HMS Imperieuse having run aground on the night of April 12th.
It’s easy to think of navigation as all about, well, navigation. But my current research picks up on incidents such as Lord Gambier’s court martial and considers other ways of thinking about the history of depth measurement at sea (or sounding, as it is known). My aim is to show how shifting approaches to naval discipline interacted with the introduction of mechanical sounding equipment.
To start with, I’ve been looking at a brass sounding machine patented by a Mr Edward Massey in 1802. It consists of two numbered dials, unmistakably the product of Massey’s watchmaking background, along with a rotor. This machine would have been attached to a line and thrown overboard, the rotor spinning the dials before locking at the seabed. On hauling in, the depth could be read off the dials as one would read a clock.
Massey’s wasn’t the first mechanical sounding design but it was the first to be widely adopted by the Royal Navy. In 1807, following a recommendation from the Board of Longitude, the Navy Board ordered 500 of Massey’s machines followed by another 1250 between 1808 and 1811. That’s at least one machine for every Royal Navy ship in commission during the Napoleonic Wars.
What’s intriguing about the adoption of Massey’s machine is how it both relied upon and reinforced new approaches to discipline developing within the Royal Navy at the time. To take one example, naval authorities felt that negligence was hard to identify given that navigational practices often happened out of sight. Prior to the introduction of Massey’s machine, sounding was a case in point. Groups of sailors arranged themselves on the outside of the ship with a lead and line (a simple coil of rope, knotted at set intervals, with a weight attached). This line would then be thrown overboard, out of sight of the officers on the quarterdeck. As the line was hauled in, one of the sailors would either observe or feel for the number of knots. The depth would then by relayed to an officer on deck in the form of a song, “by the mark ten” for ten fathoms and such.
All this changed with the introduction of Massey’s machine. The average sailor in the Royal Navy did not have experience in reading clock-like dials. For this reason, when Massey’s machine was hauled in, it would be taken to the quarterdeck so that an officer could read and record the depth measured. This simple change in practice made the results of sounding more visible to the officers; they no longer had to rely on a song emanating from out of sight. It also made sure that the officer on the quarterdeck took greater personal responsibility for the depths recorded, something the Admiralty considered crucial if they were to successfully court martial disobedient commanders. (Lord Gambier, incidentally, got off the hook.)
Over the summer, I’m going to be taking up a research internship at the National Maritime Museum, exploring in further detail how other sounding devices slotted in to early-nineteenth century naval discipline. At the time, indiscipline was also considered to be a problem related to travel, court martials citing ease of access to Caribbean rum as a cause of lawlessness in the Lesser Antilles. With this in mind, I’ll also be looking at how attempts to keep order in different regions influenced the adoption and use of different sounding machines. Which device faired best in the hands of a drunken sailor still remains to be seen.
[Images: E. Massey, Sounding Machine, NMM NAV0673; 'Measuring the depth of water from a frigate', Wikimedia Commons.]
Over a year ago I wrote a post ‘Sympathetic vibrations‘ that mentioned a 1688 pamphlet that included (as satire) a means of finding longitude by using a ‘Powder of Sympathy’. The idea was that this could be used to enduce an on-board dog to yelp at a pre-determined time at a known reference point, thus allowing a comparison with local time and, hence, a calculation of longitude. I noted there the fact that this story has often been presented as a genuine longitude scheme, probably because it is useful in getting across the basic point about time difference.
The other day I came across a genuine attempt to locate a longitudinal position that makes this time difference = longitude difference point just as forcefully. While it would today be discounted as pseudo-science, just as the powder of sympathy, it relates to real events and a story that has a number of nice resonances with ours, despite being a few decades later: Arctic exploration, magnetism (or mesmerism), and longitude.
I found this story in the recent edition of Wellcome History (available online PDF) in a ‘work in progress’ piece by Shane McCorristine on ‘The “Bolton Clairvoyante” and Arctic exploration’. This was on the attempt by some individuals, including Capt Alexander Maconochie, to use clairvoyance (what we might now call ESP) to aid the search for John Franklin, missing with his crew in the Arctic from 1845. Franklin had, of course, begun his Arctic career with an 1818 expedition heading for the north pole, at the same time as Ross and Parry were searching for the North West Passage (see Sophie’s post on Thomas Young’s role in the Board and its ‘Arctic turn’).
In September 1849 Maconochie, a naval officer, professor of geography and friend of Franklin’s, contacted a Lancashire surgeon-apothecary called Joseph W. Haddock, who had been carrying out mesmeric experiments on his patients and had discovered an apparent clairvoyante talent in his maid, ‘Emma L’. She was described by Haddock as of a “nervous-bilious temperament”, and by Harriet Martineau as “a vulgar girl, anything but handsome, and extremely ignorant”, but it was claimed that she could travel – virtually – across the globe in search of someone if she had a sample of their handwriting.
Maconochie provided the necessary sample and Emma apparently declared that Franklin was still alive, and “spoke of the snow, ice, &c, of the place where the writer was; said that many with him were dead, but that he was alive, and expected to get away in about nine months, but that she could not say whether he would be able to do so, but that it appeared to her he would get home again”. This was enough to prompt Maconochie to travel to Bolton and undergo several sittings with Haddock and Emma.
While the sittings gave further hope that Franklin was alive, locating him was, of course, the aim, and so Emma was also presented with maps of Northern America. While her ability to deal with maps, especially a detailed Admiralty Chart, was limited – she “appeared to have lost this instinctive sort of power to mark the place, and I found that no reliance could be placed on her in this respect” – Maconochie sensibly asked her to tell him the time of day during her visions. This naval officer knew well, of course, that time difference would provide longitude difference, although he had to assume that Emma’s visions were exactly concurrent with events in Bolton, and that she, or those she was visualising, knew the local time.
Apparently she did, more or less. It was reported to Lady Franklin that Emma suggested a time difference of six hours, placing the expedition somewhere between 85 and 90 degrees west and she had also pointed to Hudson’s Bay on a large-scale map (85 degrees). Perhaps Emma was not as ignorant as Haddock liked to suggest, for this did at least place the expedition somewhere near the relevant region, although it was considered unlikely. It turned out to be a little too far east, and much too late. Traces of the expedition were found on Beechey Island (91 degrees) in August 1850. Much later it was established that Terror and Erebus were trapped in ice off King William Island (97 degrees) in September 1846 and that Franklin had died there on 11 June 1847.
For McCorristine, this episode is useful for revealing the “interrelated histories of affectivity and Artic exploration”, the connections of intimate spaces, imagined regions and the public interest in Franklin’s fate. He writes, therefore, of “an emergent ‘polyvocal’ Arctic” that challenages “the dominance of imperial histories that focus too closely on the naval, scientific and biographical”. But my thanks too for drawing my attention not only to this intruiging episode in the history of Arctic exploration, but to this 19th-century attempt at establishing longitude-at-a-distance.
Readers of this blog may be interested to listen to a talk I gave at the Royal Society last week. Audio and slideshow versions are available here. The talk was entitled “Hero or villain? Nevil Maskelyne’s posthumous reputation” and, while pointing out that ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are hardly historiographically useful categories I discussed how Maskelyne has come to be most commonly known as the villain of the story of longitude.
I began by briefly introducing the man and his life, before discussing the two early and influential accounts of his life, which demonstrate the range of Maskleyne work and his high international reputation. These were a 1812 article in Rees’s Cyclopaedia by Patrick Kelly, who was master of Finsbury Square Academy and an author on nautical astronomy, and the Eloge produced for the French Institute in 1813 by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, permanent secretary for mathematical sciences, director of the Paris Observatory.
Kelly was one of Maskelyne’s close acquaintances and Delambre, according to Lalande in a letter to Maskelyne held in the NMM’s Caird Library, once considered Nevil “le dieu de l’astronomie”. It’s unsurprising that Maskelyne comes out well of these accounts, but it is typical that early 19th-century biography should be sympathetic to its subject and that it should be produced by friends, family or colleagues. They are the sources that were taken up, and thus my talk explored why and at what point the image of this significant figure of British science, who was acclaimed for his dedicated hard work and for making the Royal Observatory useful to the public, became one of elitism and obstructiveness.
As I hope I show, it can’t all be blamed on Sobel’s Longitude but, rather, dates back to earlier rediscoveries of John Harrison, and to horological histories that have tended to ignore significant aspects of the contemporary context.
My talk also dwells a little on my dual response to this. On the one hand there is an academic one that seeks to avoid historical goodies and baddies, to explore fully contexts and motivations and to replace simplistic accounts with more nuanced ones. On the other, there is a sense of injustice which, of course, must mirror that felt by those championing Harrison. There seems to be ample evidence that Maskelyne was a pretty nice, and fair, man but it’s difficult to know what to do with this knowledge! I hope, at least, that future displays at the Royal Observatory – Maskelyne’s home – can take advantage of the objects, manuscripts and accounts that the Museum has to reflect something of Maskelyne’s significance in his own time and his life with friends, colleagues and family as well as antagonists.
While over at the Royal Society’s list of history of science podcasts, do take a look at some of the others on offer. 18th-century enthusiasts will enjoy James Sumner’s ”‘How should a chemist understand brewing?’ Beer and theory around 1800″; material culture/materials folk should listen to Susan Mossman on plastics; more on someone closely connected to the history of the Royal Observatory can be found in Frances Willmoth’s talk on Jonas Moore; early 17th-century instruments and clocks are discussed by Rebecca Pohancenik. And much, much more. Many thanks to Felicity Henderson at the Royal Society for inviting me to join them.
While much of this blog has been squarely set in London - in and between the Royal Society, Admiralty, Board of Longitude, Royal Observatory and instrument-makers’ workshops - we have also from time to time strayed out to the Pacific or Arctic, following Captain Cook in 1769 and the move of the 1818 Longitude Act to incorporate previous rewards for locating the North West Passage. What was found in Arctic by John Ross, William Parry and their crews was not, of course, the long-sought route to the Pacific but data, specimens and a testing ground for new techniques and instruments.
While it would make no sense to suggest that such things would not have been accessed without the availability of chronometers and Nautical Almanacs, these expeditions and their collections are necessarily part of our story. There is the same confluence of people and interests, and the longitude technologies added to the precision of, and confidence in, the data brought home. While botanical specimens seem a long way from testing and using navigational instruments, they represent the way in which expeditions were helping to bring the faraway and unfamiliar near, just as they allowed the possibility of taking well-known things long distances. They each reveal the ambition of knowing, recording, collecting, measuring, cataloguing and, essentially, stating a claim for things in the world.
In thinking about how to represent these things in exhibitions, I have recently had a look at some of the botanical specimens collected in the Arctic on Parry’s expeditions. It was a great treat to see inside the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and to see a range of specimens that, in some cases, closely represented how they were originally arranged by the Arctic voyagers and, in others, demonstrated how working Herbaria incorporate historical specimens into their modern taxonomic arrangements. I have written another post elsewhere which muses on some of what such collections can tell historians, and with another image of a set of specimens from the Parry collection.
The image below represents what happens to specimens when they are incorporated into the Herbarium proper. Two specimens have been cut from their original paper mounts and placed on the same piece of paper of a standard size, used across the Herbarium. They are not type specimens – these are marked out with a red stripe on the paper – but exist as a representation of a species in a particular time and place. The bare historical information remains: the specimen on the left came from the Rocky Mountains (I see the names Drummond and Harkes(?) but am unsure who these people were or when this expedition occurred), the one on the right was collected at Melville Island on Parry’s first voyage – the place that British Arctic explorers first overwintered.
It was clear from the Edinburgh Herbarium alone that a large number of specimens were brought back from the Arctic on these voyages. The British Museum was the primary repository – its plant collections now part of the Natural History Museum – but duplicate, triplicate and more specimens could be sent to other Herbaria and collectors. This was not only because the surgeons, the chief naturalists on such voyages, were assiduous in their work, but because many other officers were collecting too. One of the Parry collections was put together by Lt William Hooper, the Purser, but across the whole Herbarium many other individual collectors can be identified. In some cases brief field notes, recording the scarcity or otherwise of the plant, have also been kept, revealing adherence to Parry’s scientific instructions to write down as much as possible.
Despite this, only one 1820s specimen that I saw (for which, sadly, I have lost the photograph) attempted to record a precise location. Ironically, perhaps, it gives Latitude to the second but the space next to ‘Longitude’ was left blank. TBC, perhaps.
I’ve mentioned before how everything I do seems to end up relating to our longitude project. Last Wednesday, I went to a ballet at Sadler’s Wells in London, an adaptation by the Pet Shop Boys of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Most Incredible Thing. I did not know of this fairy tale previously, so didn’t know that the story’s hero is a clock maker!
The modern adaptation of the story by Matthew Dunster, turns it into a particularly contemporary mixture of Communist state control and an X-Factor-style talent contest. The ballet starts with the citizens, like automatons, following the dreary round of their daily lives. The king proclaims a contest to find ‘the most incredible thing’ in the state, the reward for which will be half of the kingdom and his daughter’s hand in marriage. After thousands of entries, the prize is won by ‘Leonardo’, a young clock maker who has invented and built an extraordinary tiny clock. This expands to produce 12 visions, which appear for each number of the clock: four seasons, five senses, seven deadly sins and so on. Leo is helped to construct it, alone in his impoverished studio, by the physical embodiments of his three muses: concentration, love and courage. After the clock is destroyed by ‘Karl’, the Orwellian villain of the piece, Leo is helped to reconstruct it by the same muses. The power of this act causes Karl’s death, and overturns his brief victory in the contest, in which his destruction of the wonderful clock becomes itself ‘the most incredible thing.’
The idea of the lone genius, aided by divine inspiration, creating an extraordinary one-off instrument which, once destroyed, can only be saved by further supernatural aid, is of course interesting to us in our ideas on John Harrison. I was especially struck by the idea that destroying such an object becomes itself an incredible act. Leo’s watch here became the ‘object of virtue’ par excellence. But, what particularly interested me was the representation of the incredible clock within the staging of the ballet. The physical object was a small, traditional pocket watch, not dissimilar from H4, which was treated as fragile and jewel-like, crushed simply in Karl’s hands in the destruction scene. Yet, in the invention scene, it expands into a wonderful paper ‘castle in the air’ dreamed up by Leo, and composed of cut-out paper showing parts and diagrams (see the photo gallery of the Sadler’s Wells site), not unlike Harrison’s drawings in The Principles of Mr Harrison’s Time-keeper. Further, when the visions appear from the clock, they do so from a huge dial face-cum-projection screen which dominates the stage, and from which the images and dancers appear and expand. These representations and understandings of the clock were the twins of those I have been finding on the part of longitude pamphleteers in the eighteenth century.
I have just been reviewing a new book, The World of John Secker (1716–95), Quaker Mariner, for the Journal for Maritime Research. I came across some interesting passages in it that describe how seafarers navigated in the early eighteenth century but which also left me slightly puzzled.
One of them describes sailing in the 1730s:
After we had left Tercera & it was concluded to run for Madera we stood to the eastward till by the reckoning of the captain & mate we were in the longitude of Madera, then steering a south course to get into the latitude they expected to have fell in with the middle of the island. I keeping a journal my own self was pretty certain we had not run far enough to the eastward & told the captain & mate so, but they were too positive in their own accounts to give credit to my estimation till they found by sad experience it was too late for after we got into the latitude of the island, & could see nothing of it: they to their error concluded we were to the eastward of the island and notwithstanding all I could say to the contrary would stand to the westward in hopes of making the island.
Secker goes on to describe how they ran low on food and water during the prolonged search for their destination, but what struck me was that the process he describes is slightly different from what I was expecting. What we normally assume is that because navigators were less confident in their determinations of longitude, they would do something called ‘running down the latitude’. This involved sailing well to either the east or west of the destination until its latitude was reached, then sailing west or east (depending on which side they were) while maintaining the same latitude (which could be measured fairly well from the Sun or Pole Star) until the destination came into sight.
I’m slightly puzzled that Secker describes something that sounds more prone to error, in that they were trying to sail to the destination’s longitude, then sail directly towards it on a southward course.
I’d love to hear of other similar examples.
Will Thomas, Rebekah Higgitt and I began discussing the effect of international conflict upon the British search for the longitude in the comments after my last blog post. I’ll post about that subject as well in case other readers want to participate – it would be especially nice to hear about the effect of war or international competition upon other areas of early ‘science’ and technology – and in case other project members want to chime in, especially about the later decades of the Board’s history. Will asked whether we can trace the ebb and flow of foreign longitude visitors like La Condamine through peace and wartime, since for example the aging explorer and his fellow Frenchmen tried to attend the planned ‘discovery’ of John Harrison‘s timekeeper H4 (seen below) in 1763 directly after the Seven Years’ War. He also asked if there was any diplomatic significance or sense of threat attached to such visits, or whether it was mainly ‘business as usual’. Becky suggested that perhaps instead of national defense, ‘free trade was, in the end, seen as the most important thing to protect and champion, and that this included knowledge and the right of individuals to sell their products and ideas’.
This appears to me to have largely been the case at least during the eighteenth century. Many British longitude actors talked about the importance of knowing the longitude at sea to national security, as well as to trade and the safety of sea travel and sometimes to the good of all mankind. This was true from at least the seventeenth century on and in an increasingly formulaic manner after 1713-1714. Some of the actors who mentioned national security and defense clearly meant it, as we saw in Hannah’s recent post about Ralph Walker. However, in truth international communication and collaboration seldom seem to have been an issue in the eighteenth-century search for the longitude, even during and directly after war – and especially amongst the central individuals and institutions involved rather than amongst the wide array of individual projectors and commentators. The central actors continued to communicate and to collaborate with foreign correspondents such as the French during conflicts by letter and memorial and, once outright fighting had ended, through visits in person as well. Of course, the mechanics of postal communications were changed by war, as when letters had to take longer and more roundabout routes to their recipients, and French projectors could no longer use the British ambassadors or representatives in Paris as a route for initial contact.
There were some occasional expressions of institutional concern about foreigners and especially the French gaining access to British longitude innovations. For example, the Board of Longitude questioned Thomas Mudge (seen below) in 1767 because the clockmaker had discussed H4 with the Swiss-born clockmaker Ferdinand Berthoud while visiting and dining with the Saxon Minister, using said Count as a translator and making some ‘rude Sketches of some parts’ of the timekeeper in pencil. Berthoud had in fact returned in England in 1766 with the intent of learning the ‘secrets’ of H4 for the French and was told by James Short that Harrison would provide them for a large enough reward – which he could not offer. Mudge said that he had not been aware of that attempt, and that he had essentially been under the impression that those who attended the discovery in 1765 were supposed to spread knowledge of Harrison’s innovations to all nations as well as to English workmen. Berthoud apparently never made use of what he gleaned from Mudge, anyway. The foreign appropriation of British longitude innovations seems to have been more of a concern with technology, and especially with a more proven and long-esteemed technology like Harrison’s timekeepers, than it was with a method like the lunar-distance – over which the British often collaborated with their French counterparts and with other foreigners such as Tobias Mayer. This was partially down to the different lines of thought and legal protections which existed with respect to concepts for material objects rather than purely intellectual property during this period.
As different HST authors have described with respect to industrial spies like the Dane Jesper Bidstrup (1763–1802) – Alison Morrison-Low, Dan Christensen, Anita McConnell, etc. – there was actual legislation in place during different periods to try to prevent the knowledge of how to make British technologies from falling into foreign hands. On the side of the government, such actions was taken to protect British innovation, trade and in some cases national defense. On the side of individual craftsmen, the control of and profit from their personal inventions was typically of central importance. Whereas national and international communication about ‘science’ and about the uses and ‘amateur’ invention and adaptation of technology could be extremely open, full-time craftsmen understandably tended to keep their secrets close to the vest, whether they were a shop-owning instrument maker or a more unusual specialist maker like Harrison. With the personal ownership of ideas and inventions and the need for profit, longitude projectors could often vacillate when it came to national ‘loyalties’ – whether in earnest or more as a bargaining tool.
For example, William Whiston and Humphry Ditton threatened to take their new method of finding longitude to other countries when at first it did not look as if the British would establish their rewards in 1714, despite having previously emphasized the importance of it to the security and trade of their beloved nation. Although John Harrison made it clear at various times that he was proud to be an Englishman, his main motivation in keeping people like the French delegates from seeing the workings of his timekeepers was to preserve his sole right to the innovations therein – and he was willing to at least consider turning to other nations during the later decades when he didn’t feel that his own was willing to properly rewards his efforts. It wasn’t uncommon for projectors, and for newspaper commentators acting on behalf of projectors, to threaten the loss of an innovation to foreign hands when trying to push for a reward or other recognition.
In terms of diplomatic significance having been attributed to cases like the different visits of French intellectuals during the 1760s, they so far do not seem to have stirred up much of a reaction from the British despite having sometimes closely followed war between the two nations. For example, the Académie des Sciences sent their representatives to attend Harrison’s discovery in early 1763 even before the Treaty of Paris had been ratified! This relatively blasé attitude on the part of British authorities was presumably to the overall benefit of such foreign visitors, as some were acting with the support or outright direction of their government, sometimes covertly. In the 1763 case, it appears that the French thought they could send their own representatives to the planned ‘discovery’ of H4 because of communications with high-placed fellow astronomers and correspondents in Britain rather than because of an official invitation – a conflict between the interpersonal and institutional sides of international relations and of government during the early modern period. The Earl of Morton later told the mathematician Camus that he was not aware of such an invitation, but that he personally would have been pleased for the French delegates to attend.
As we can see in cases like this, conflict and competition between nations do not seem to have had that great of an effect upon foreign communications and contributions to the British search for the longitude, beyond blocking visits in person and changing the routes and presumably the delivery times of postal communications. They also do not seem to have much affected central actors’ views or treatment of individual foreign actors and of institutions like the Académie. As remarkable as it seems, given how often the longitude was touted as being of vital importance to national security, it was typically a swift return to ‘business as usual’ after the conclusion of war.
Image sources: H4 – National Maritime Museum, Mudge – Wikimedia Commons.
Following a previous guest post, Hannah Salisbury has sent us some further thoughts on Ralph Walker and the compass he submitted to the Board of Longitude:
The invention of his variation compass was just one episode in Walker’s busy and varied life; as well as being an inventor, he was a mariner, a Jamaica planter and in later life an engineer, working principally on the construction of London’s new wet docks. When I first began researching Walker’s life, these career changes all seemed rather sudden and disconnected, yet during my research, it became clear that there were common threads running through each of them.
Designing the West India Docks was Walker’s first engineering job, begun in 1795. They were the biggest project of their kind in the world at the time.
'An elevated view of the West India Docks', by William Daniell, 1802 (NMM PAI7124)
Improving navigation and the accommodation of shipping were by no means isolated pursuits for Walker. He keenly felt that in order to compete with other nations in trade and in war, Britain needed to have a strong navy and merchant fleet. Walker’s career at sea had given him an international scope, and he saw Britain within the context of international networks of war, trade and diplomacy. This understanding of Walker’s political worldview provides a backdrop to his work as an inventor and engineer.
Our best insight into Ralph’s political worldview comes from two letters he wrote to Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, then Secretary of State for War, in 1795 and 1796, the first of which was addressed from the Jamaica Coffee House, a haunt of West India merchants and captains. Walker was clearly a staunch supporter of the British system of monarchical government, which he described as ‘the pride of England, and the admiration of all Europe for Ages’. He had no time for the politics of the French Revolution, referring to them at different times as ‘pernicious principles’ and ‘the French Disorder’.
During the French Revolutionary Wars, Walker was clearly concerned to protect British interests. Walker feared that the French:
will soon become our superior on the Seas, and shut up our fleets in our Ports and sweep the Seas of our Commerce, Deprive us of our Colonies, and put a total stagnation to our Trade, which in a short time would turn the current of commerce into their Ports, and our manufacturers would be obliged to emigrate to a Country, where taxes and the price of living and labour low. Then adieu to the Trade of Great Britain, and the payment of the interest of the National Debt.
For Walker, the only way of avoiding this dire fate was to enhance Britain’s naval strength. Britain, he suggested, should withdraw land forces from the continent, and instead ‘strain every nerve to enable us to keep our superiority at Sea’.
It is not just Walker’s political views, but also his philosophical standpoint which is relevant to his efforts to improve navigation. His (flawed) theory that magnetism followed regular patterns was part of the Enlightenment attempt to discover ordered, harmonious rules governing the natural world. As he explained in his Treatise on Magnetism, presented to the Board of Longitude along with his compass, he believed that these laws were provided by God in order for man to make sense of the world. Once they had been discovered, they could be used to ‘colonize and carry on commerce for our benefit and happiness’.
Walker was clearly aware of the links between navigation, commerce and conquest, and he seems to have felt no disquiet about the colonisation of foreign lands, or about the use of slave labour. As a Jamaica planter, he seems to have been more concerned about the disruption caused by rebellious slaves rather than their living conditions. In his 1796 letter to Dundas, Walker complained about the problems caused by disruptive slaves, which had cost the white settlers over £300,000.
Although care needs to be taken in extrapolating too much from the fragmentary evidence available, a good deal can be understood about Walker’s political worldview, and he can be placed firmly within literate eighteenth-century coffee-house political culture. For Walker, Britain’s security and prosperity depended upon its navy and upon its commerce, and its commerce depended upon successful maritime navigation, an endeavour which Walker’s compass aimed to improve. The variation compass which Walker submitted to the Board of Longitude is, therefore, symbolic not only of technical advances in navigation, but of the political, economic and cultural forces driving those advances.
I’ve mentioned before how everything I do now seems to link back to Longitude. Alongside the Board of Longitude project, Alexi and I are both also members of the Digital Humanities Network at CRASSH, here in Cambridge, where we share with other researchers our interests in making traditional humanities scholarship available with modern digital tools. Often our sessions come back to the problems of using digital tools within the established academic environment. This got me thinking about my longitude pamphleteers, and how our situations are not dissimilar. It also links nicely into our new project with the Cambridge Digital Library (funded by JISC) to digitise the Board of Longitude archives, which Alexi and I have both already discussed on this blog. I have therefore followed up my previous article for the Cambridge University research website (which was on the riots and consumerism) with one about pamphlets, digital humanities and the Board of Longitude. Please have a look and see what you think.
I was intrigued when I recently came across the mention of a letter of 5 June 1763 from the antiquarian and journal editor Richard Gough to one of his authors Edward Haistwell, describing ‘an outrage inflicted at his lodging in Suffolk Street on Sieur de la Condamine who had come for some weeks with colleagues to make researches into longitude’. The aging explorer, mathematician and geographer Charles Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774) was one of the French intellectuals who travelled to London that summer with the stated intention of attending the ‘discovery’ (essentially a verbal and hands-on explanation) which the Board of Longitude was requiring John Harrison to make of his longitude timekeeper H4 before a selection of experts. Other such visitors included the mathematician Charles Étienne Louis Camus, the Swiss-born chronometer maker Ferdinand Berthoud, and the astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande (who often collaborated with Nevil Maskelyne).
Although it was highly unlikely for many reasons, not least because Harrison was at one point said to be considering doing business with the French, I could not help imagining the ‘outrage’ inflicted upon La Condamine (shown below in his younger years) as having been a dramatic longitude-related scene like that which played out at a meeting of the Board almost precisely two years later – when Harrison responded to the Commissioners’ repeated request for ‘Experimental Exhibitions’ of his timekeeper technology by abruptly leaving the room and exclaiming ‘That he never would consent to it, so long as he had a drop of English Blood in his Body’!
However, our intrepid leader Simon Schaffer enlightened me that the La Condamine incident mentioned in the letter actually had nothing to do with the longitude but instead became somewhat of a (sex) scandal, as related in Lalande’s travel journal and in many publications. Upon arriving in London on 11 May 1763, La Condamine took a room in Suffolk Street adjoining Pall Mall, a popular neighbourhood on the western side of the metropolis (north of the Thames) which housed many well-heeled visitors and longer term inhabitants – although it was by this time also ‘greatly disfigured by several mean houses of the lowest mechanicks being interspersed in it in many places, and many of them joining to the most sumptuous edifices’ according to the Rev. George Reeves.
Horace Walpole — who did not much care for La Condamine, although he appreciated the man’s support for innoculation — wrote snidely to a friend that: ‘La Condamine, qui se donne pour philosophe. He walks about the streets, with his [hearing] trumpet and a map, his spectacles on, and hat under his arm. But, to give you some idea of his philosophy, he was on the scaffold to see Damien executed. His deafness was very inconvenient to his curiosity ; he pestered the confessor with questions to know what Damien said’. This was Robert-François Damiens, who had been drawn and quartered in Paris in 1757 after stabbing and attempting to kill King Louis XV and with whom Walpole rather sympathized.
La Condamine’s London scandal began on the evening of 27 May 1763. As Lalande (pictured below) succinctly recorded the next day in his journal, ‘constables were sent to Mr Condamine to compel him to leave the same evening. He gave them 2/- and they went away.’ (Two shillings was the same as the cost of a coach trip to Richmond Palace three days later.) La Condamine was able to quickly secure other lodgings in the same street, since by the 29th Lalande was visiting him in ‘Suffolk Street opposite the envoys of Algiers. Those of the Canadian natives lodge very close by in the same street.’
However, the entire episode publicly blew up when the Frenchman published a rather lengthy ‘Address to the English Nation’ in French and English which began appearing in the newspapers and periodicals by at least 30 May, relating that when he returned to his lodgings at 9 o’clock at night, two ‘shabbily drest’ men (one wielding a stick) had entered and threatened to imprison him unless he moved out. La Condamine initially refused and wrote to the French representative, but was encouraged by men of law to move rather than to take legal action. He accused his landlady, Mrs Strafford, of having orchestrated this so that she could let his room to someone else and wondered that he ‘should be exposed in the capital itself to an insult, which he never suffered amongst Barbarians’ during his travels.
The landlady was soon reported to have responded, as the newspapers gleefully recounted alongside the Frenchman’s letter, that in fact two constables had tried to serve a warrant to him because he had threatened a servant maid with his penknife the day before – and ‘he was found amusing himself with the philosophical society of two fair nymphs, who with more propriety might be styled two Graces rather than two Virtues‘, i.e. prostitutes. These conflicting public accounts produced periodic responses in print (often in both French and English) throughout June and until perhaps late July 1763, including both defenses and criticisms of La Condamine, for his perceived slight against the English as well as for the original episode. This was probably not the sort of publicity which the mathematician wanted to accompany the recent publication of his translated Journal of a Tour to Italy!
For example, the pseudonymous commentator Hospitais L’Anglois wrote a week later that surely the ‘Address to the English Nation’ had not actually been written by La Condamine, insulting the people as it did by ranking them lower than Barbarians. The author pointed out that such an episode, if it had in fact occurred, would turn out the same way in Paris as it did in London, since the mathematician could not name or produce the two men who had confronted him. He added that the much disliked French representative or negotiator ‘Monsieur Buffy’ had stayed in the same street and perhaps the very same house without experiencing any trouble.
Others came to the aging explorer’s defense, as when an anonymous commentator produced a note which was purportedly from the French representative to whom La Condamine had unsuccessfully tried to send a letter on the night in question. (The representative was the infamous Chevalier d’Eon, a sometimes cross-dressing diplomat, soldier and spy who convinced many that he was biologically female.) Whether or not he was influenced by this episode and the publicity, an anonymous poet also began publishing a poem in July which ‘imitated’ one that La Condamine had purportedly written to his wife, whom he married in 1756. The explorer had gotten a papal dispensation in order to marry his young niece, Charlotte Bouzia of Estouilly, and this ‘imitiation’ (which was published in books alongside the original for decades) emphasized the great age difference between them – whether more innocently or satirically, it is not entirely clear.
Despite all of this, La Condamine and his French compatriots continued their social rounds in London, often meeting and dining with intellectuals such as Fellows of the Royal Society and central longitude actors including the Astronomer Royal, John Harrison and key scientific instrument makers. (The Frenchmen were never actually able to view Harrison’s H4 or to receive its ‘secrets’, although the clockmaker showed them H1, H2 and H3 without taking them apart.) However, this episode near ritzy Pall Mall was at least an embarrassment to some of his associates and potential associates, if not to La Condamine himself. Walpole resorted to pretending that he was in the country in order to avoid meeting with him, as he wrote on 30 June:
‘MONSIEUR DE LA CONDAMINE will certainly have his letter ; but, my dear Sir, it is equally sure that I shall not deliver it myself. I have given it to my Lord Hertford for him, while I act being in the country. To tell you the truth, La Condamine is absurdity itself. He has had a quarrel with his landlady, whose lodgers being disturbed by La Condamine’s servant being obliged to bawl to him, as he is deaf, wanted to get rid of him. He would not budge : she dressed two chairmen for bailiffs to force him out. The next day he published an address to the people of England, in the newspaper, informing them that they are the most savage nation in or out of Europe. This is pretty near truth ; and yet I would never have abused the Iroquois to their faces in one of their own gazettes. [...] I wish humane men, or men of reflection, [...] would consider that the most desirable kind of understanding is the only kind that never aims at any particularity ; I mean common sense. This is not Monsieur de la Condamine’s kind ; and Count Lorenzi must excuse me if I avoid the acquaintance.’
Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons.
