I find it striking how our understanding of the early Board of Longitude is defined as much by the absence of evidence as by its presence. For example, there is the perennial question: Was the gathering of 30 June 1737 truly the first official communal meeting of the Commissioners to have ever taken place? There are reasons to question whether or not this is true. Sources including the private papers of Nevil Maskelyne show that other formal (and informal) meetings of the Commissioners took place besides those entered into the ‘official’ minute books – although so far none are known to have occurred before 1737.
The existing records of the activities of the Board may have also been shaped and reshaped by the ways in which they were produced and compiled. For example, the minutes were often based upon the notes or later summaries of one meeting attendee – in many cases Maskelyne until his death in 1811. They were also later compiled and in some cases recopied at different times and for different reasons, in the process of which some errors were made. The selection and presentation of the extant Board minutes may have been further shaped by the later Astronomer Royal George Airy, who collected, reorganized and had them bound in 1858.
Eoin found a lovely quote from Airy regarding the end of this enterprise: ‘The Papers of the Board of Longitude are now finally stitched into books. They will probably form one of the most curious collections of the results of scientific enterprise, both normal and abnormal, which exists.’ You can see in the photo below a note written by Airy which is bound alongside the earliest surviving minutes in volume RGO 14/5 (now at Cambridge). How much did Airy’s rearranging and labeling of such documents (for example, as ‘impractical’ schemes) affect historians’ views of the Board? Could Airy or an earlier archivist also have disposed of some of the records which he deemed unimportant to the ‘official’ history of that body, for example from before the ascendance of John Harrison?
Some documents which are vital to understanding the history of the Act of 1714 and of the ‘Board’ have definitely fallen through the cracks. For example, there appears to be no extant copy of the famous petition to Parliament of 25 May 1714 from ‘several Captains of her Majesty’s Ships, Merchants of London, and Commanders of Merchant-men’ which is thought to have truly started the ball rolling towards the establishment of a longitude reward. Without knowing more details about its contents than have survived in the records of the House, there is so much which we can’t discern.
Was the petition truly an unprompted outpouring of concern from the nation’s maritime interests, or was it directly instigated or perhaps even scripted by William Whiston and Humphry Ditton? Whiston and Ditton had started lobbying for a longitude reward by 1713, and there are certainly similarities between the summarized contents of the petition and the contents of these two projectors’ publications. And could the contents of the petition have directly informed a draught Parliamentary bill now in the United States, which would have levied a duty on all shipping in order to provide British vessels with the means of finding the longitude?
If we go back further, even the original events of the early history of ‘the Board’ were marked by an absence of information. As I explain at greater length in an upcoming article, the Act of 1714 did not actually establish a standing body or ‘Board’ – but some percentage of contemporaries did not know this. We have not yet come across evidence that the detailed contents of the Act of 1714 were ever widely publicized, for example through the spread of handbills. Jane Squire, the only female longitude projector known to date, had to ask the Attorney General to read the text of the Act to her in 1731. As a result, it is not just longitude projectors but also the Commissioners themselves who expressed some confusion during the ensuing decades about their legislated nature and about the intended conduct of the longitude contest.
When eight Commissioners met together at the Admiralty on 30 June 1737, it seems to have received limited coverage, which did not necessarily mention the Act of 1714. For example, the London Evening Post simply reported that these ‘Persons of Distinction, view’d a curious Instrument for finding out the Longitude, made by Mr. Harrison’. When Squire wrote to Sir Charles Wager four years later to continue her decade-long campaign to have the Commissioners consider her proposal, she was not aware that the officials had ever met communally.
Photo credits: Cambridge University Library.
The project team have certainly been making the most of the conference scene recently. Last week saw some of us spending a thought-provoking two days at the National Maritime Museum, at their ‘Peopling the Past‘ conference scheduled to coincide with the opening of the new Sammy Ofer Wing.
Through five panels, and a wide range of papers the conference considered how we can use museum collections to tell engaging stories about the past. Two over-arching questions emerged for me. The first considered which people we should put in the past that we display. Inevitably, we have more objects and archives related to celebrity figures, but we increasingly want to tell the story of the ‘ordinary’ man, the silent voices of the past’s real lived experience. This theme raised further considerations over how we harness and portray community and global narratives from a potentially small object-base; how we balance the authority we want to put behind our displays with the more engaging personality that can emerge from engaging wider communities in the curatorial process. Likewise, how do we portray controversial voices, discussing issues which are now politically incorrect, controversial, or upsetting.
The second, related question, dealt with how museums can use new media to tell such stories. This allows them to engage with wider and different audiences, and to tell stories in potentially more engaging and complex ways, but also runs the risk of detracting from the objects which are the museum’s raison d’être. With increasingly complex technology there is the danger of museums becoming a more elaborate television programme. Papers considered crowd sourcing of information to tell stories for the ‘silent voices’ and engaging community groups to tell stories from personal perspectives. For me, this also raised the interesting idea of sourcing objects and archival material through new media, allowing, in fact, more ‘silent stories’ to be told. Particularly interesting papers, on both themes, considered projects at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Imperial War Museum and Museum of London.
The questions raised also threw light on the NMM’s new ‘Voyagers‘ gallery in the Sammy Ofer wing which now acts as an introduction to the museum. It answers both questions raised by the conference particularly well I thought. Along the back wall of the gallery, a single long case uses key objects and characters to tell a story of maritime experience through seven emotions: joy, pride, sadness etc. It features both celebrities and lesser-known figures. In front of this, a huge wave construction weaves across the gallery, projected with key words in wave patterns, and with images from the archives. It is accompanied by sounds of the sea. I feel this gallery uses new media and ‘silent voices’ to particularly successful effect, and was the perfect complement to such a stimulating conference.
Today’s historians have an embarassment of riches when it comes to easy-access sources, thanks to digitization and the Internet. In earlier decades, if a scholar wanted to find the items relevant to their research in large, scattered and often poorly catalogued archives, then they frequently had to to trawl through them by hand and to travel great distances to access them all.
For example John R. Millburn, the respected biographer of scientific instrument makers such as Benjamin Martin and the George Adamses, dedicated much time and effort to paging through early newspapers in search of references to those individuals and even accumulated a small collection of newspapers himself (now at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford). This makes the scholarly achievements of earlier authors such as Millburn even more impressive but begs the question of how much more they could have discovered and accomplished today!
Some people bemoan the loss of the full experience when one is conducting research through computers rather than handling the original documents, but surely no one can deny that this allows scholars to delve through large and sometimes distant corpora of materials in far more manageable amounts of time than before. This is especially vital for a project such as ours, which in reality references many centuries and nations beyond just eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. For example, digitization and the Internet allow me to identify, view and analyze thousands of London newspapers that mentioned longitude from the mid-seventeenth century onwards through the British Museum’s Burney Collection online.
There are of course some dangers and drawbacks to using these resources. Their search engines tend not to work perfectly – often failing to recognize faded, blurred or poorly spaced words and in my experience occasionally turning up different numbers and combinations of results at different times for no obvious reason. Some students and scholars may also be tempted to use such search engines as a crutch – presenting scads of archival findings but without a properly rigorous application of analysis and contextual knowledge or consideration of the nature and limitations of the source type. However, there are similar limitations and the possibility of ‘weak’ scholarship with any body of sources.
Newspapers specifically represent a very rich, but in some ways problematic, resource for early modern scholars. The first English newspapers were single pages published during the 1600s, and by the next century some increased in length to four pages and contained perhaps one essay and one to two pages each of advertisements and news. From about the mid-1700s onward, some were printed in eight smaller pages and ran more varied articles. The lapse of the restrictive Printing Act in 1695 allowed for the appearance of many new titles and for their more frequent publication, including daily and in the evenings, with the Daily Courant becoming the first English daily newspaper in 1702. Judging by Stamp Act figures, their circulation numbers grew from at least 2.4 million copies in 1713, to at least 16 million copies by the end of the 1700s.
These popular publications have proved extremely helpful in constructing a timeline for, and understanding the nature of, longitude-related events and perceptions thereof in England and Europe from at least the 1660s onwards. Some mentions have led us to projectors, publications and even political developments at home and abroad of which we were not yet aware. As is always true in historical research, we must consider these findings alongside those made from other types of documents, however, in order to understand them in context but also to fact-check as much as is possible.
Early modern newspapers were quite different from those which we read today despite some striking superficial similarities, for example with the ideals of accuracy and objectivity not yet being associated with them. Tidbits of news were collected from sources including local hearsay, letters from the provinces and abroad, and other domestic and foreign publications. Sometimes newspapers repeated news items from their sister or competing publications verbatim or with some summarization or elaboration – some of which was clearly innacurate, as if the information had been distorted by playing a game of ‘telephone’.
For example, while the London Evening Post and the London Gazetteer reported in 1749 that a Jewish mathematician of Hanover named ‘Raphael Levi’ or ‘Levy’ was to present his longitude invention to the British Commissioners of Longitude, the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer gave his name as ‘Joseph Pollack’ - apparently in all earnestness rather than as an intended slur on a foreign projector of a different religion. This was presumably the mathematician and astronomer Raphael Levi Hannover, who had been a pupil of Leibniz.
If such news items or the contents of advertisements, letters-to-the-editor and other commentaries were debated or inaccurate, then usually the only recourse was for objectors to run their own responses in the same formats. This could lead to some back-and-forth between the different parties, as when key supporters and opponents of John Harrison‘s claim to the highest reward overseen by the Commissioners of Longitude tried to hash it out in print.
Many letters-to-the-editor and other commentaries such as reviews were published under pseudonyms, which can make it difficult to judge whether they originated from key players themselves (such as Harrison or a Commissioner), their supporters, or the unallied but informed members of the public who the authors often claimed to be (such as a former mariner or a merchant). The different categories of items which appeared in the newspaper also bled into each other during the early modern period, and it seems highly likely that some percentage of the glowing ‘news’ mentions of projectors were actually ‘puffs’ (i.e. advertisements), prompted and perhaps at times even paid for by those individuals.
As is true of slanted or commercially driven ‘news coverage’ today, this may have influenced the perceptions of the unwary general public or even of movers-and-shakers like some of the Commissioners. For example, it is possible that the Commissioners were encouraged to initially offer financial aid and sea trials to Christopher Irwin — the Irish projector whose ‘marine chair’ for astronomical viewing at sea was ultimately slated by Nevil Maskelyne — by the glowing accounts of his invention and prowess that appeared in the news. Essentially, a number of such early modern projectors and other actors used the newspapers and other publications including pamphlets and books to run what would today be called ‘PR campaigns’.
All of this material and similar surveys of large, sometimes digitized collections will help us to better understand what was going on in Britain and Europe with respect to longitude at sea and the Commissioners of Longitude – as well as one of the key ways in which related information (whether accurate, inaccurate or intentionally misleading) spread and interpersonal interactions were facilitated. Such publications provide a dynamic view of the extent to which longitude saturated the consciousness and culture of the British public in different ways at a time when the nation had one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Image credits: Photo of modern newspaper vendor © KF / http://wikimediafoundation.org/
To make sense of the novel eighteenth-century methods for longitude determination at sea, whether chronometric or through the use of lunar distances, we need also to recognize the unevenness of these new methods’ use on board ship. Historians often seem to spend much more time marking heroic innovations than in tracing mundane adoption and use. Recall how common and trusted was the method of dead reckoning among expert mariners. Two examples from the period when the marine chronometer and the Nautical Almanac were introduced remind us of how these puzzles worked. The examples are also interesting because they involved vessels of the East India Company, an early adopter of the newfangled techniques.
At the end of 1770, the sixteen-year-old William Marsden, future eminent orientalist and Royal Society treasurer, shipped from England to the East India Company base at Bencoolen in Sumatra. He was carried on the Company’s ship Seahorse, captain Edward Dampier, then on its second voyage to south China. The ship soon lost its entire crew to a press gang at Spithead, and was only able to set out for the East Indies in mid-January 1771. In a voyage to Sumatra of 14000 miles without landfall, with the crew suffering from scurvy and short of water, position finding mattered. Here’s Marsden’s reminiscence about the longitude method used on board:
‘During the course of the voyage, I was led by the example of some of the officers to pay attention to the method, then recently coming into practice, of ascertaining the longitude of the ship’s place by observation of the apparent distance of the sun or moon and certain stars; which, under the particular circumstances of our case, proved to be of much importance; for in consequence of our not seeing any land since leaving England, by which the dead-reckoning as it is termed might be corrected, the progressive amount of error became very great’.
Marsden then recalls that thanks to a lunar eclipse he and his colleagues were able successfully to check their observations and sums. But, he continues, ‘the captain, indeed, was not a convert to this new process of determining what ought to be supposed the true place of the ship, and laying down on his chart the daily run by the log, his tract led him into the continent of New Holland [Australia], and the aggregate amount of our error amounted to no less than twenty-five degrees of longitude’. Their first landfall was at the Sumatra coast, ‘the first land that blessed the sight and revived the drooping spirits of the crew’.
Fig. 1: Portrait of an East India Company Captain, c.1800 (NMM: BHC3127)
The second case is from the voyage of the astronomer and mathematician Reuben Burrow from Southampton for Bengal in autumn 1782. Burrow was already an expert surveyor and hydrographer, a grumpy collaborator of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. His East India Company ship, the General Coote, captain Daniel Hoare, initially sailed in convoy with the main Royal Navy fleet through fear of French attack. Burrow’s notoriously irascible character had already made trouble for the ship’s ability to navigate. The great clockmaker John Arnold refused to provide Hoare with a marine chronometer just because of a remark by Burrow: in reply, the astronomer sent Arnold ‘a most bloody letter’. Once under sail, in the mid-Atlantic approaching Brazil, Burrow ‘attempted the method by the Moon, but not having a watch that could be depended upon, and having nobody on board capable of helping me, I never got a good observation. I took the distance of the Moon from the Sun without using the telescope, but the Moon’s altitude was very bad, owing to a ship being in the way of the horizon.’ Burrow’s sums gave a longitude of 17 degrees; dead reckoning gave 14 or 15 degrees.
Burrow is characteristically eloquent about the difficulties of the lunar distance method, and the corresponding incompetence of his shipmates. ‘I took the [lunar] distance and two of the Mates took the altitudes, but out of three sets of observations only one was anything like right, for some of the Altitudes were palpably erroneous, owing to the stupidity of the observers’.
Then Burrow explained the problem. Even though the East India Company had ordered the adoption of the new longitude methods at sea by their officers, ‘except the Captain I did not find any one that had the least knowledge of such matters…and they were likewise so conceited and ignorant as to be above being shown. I endeavoured to teach them better, but they only made ridicule of it and pretended they could carry a ship to India without it’. In Burrow’s view the second mate Stephen Newton ‘might be the means of destroying the lives of thousands if there was nobody on board better informed than himself’. Before the end of the voyage, at least on his own telling, Burrow was giving Captain Hoare highly accurate measures of longitude from lunar distances.
We see in these cases, and others, how the adoption of such complex and novel methods was neither self-evident nor easy. Discovery needed much more than great insight.
There are many obstacles to historians’ reconstructing and understanding the nature of past lives and events as accurately as is possible. While basic human nature has not changed much over the centuries, the socio-economic trappings that outfitted and influenced actors and institutions at any given time could of course be very different from those which exist today – even when they appear quite modern at first glance. This represents a dual threat to historians, of their 1) misinterpreting the past because of the deceptively modern feel of some of the terms and practices that existed then, or conversely 2) allowing the modern labels and definitions that they apply to the past to influence their analyses.
1) As an example of the first threat, key words such as ‘science’ and concepts associated with modern science such as accuracy and replicablility held far different meanings during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they do today. It was not until the second half of the 1800s that ‘science‘ began to specifically indicate branches of the study of the natural world such as biology, chemistry and physics. Before then, the term could refer to any type of knowledge, or to mastery of a certain branch of knowledge or skill set – such as music, politics or defence. The sorts of activities that would later be considered ‘scientific’ fell within the bounds of a number of subjects during the Georgian period including natural and experimental philosophy, astronomy and mathematics, and they were far different in nature than modern science.
Similarly, the modern concepts of scientific and technological accuracy or precision and margin of error simply did not exist during the eighteenth century. This was in part because the instruments of the time did not allow for measurements of enough accuracy for it to be of much relevance. For example, the highest praise that instrument makers tended to bestow upon their wares in advertising was that they had been ‘brought to perfection’ – a vague and unrealistic encomium. The ‘accuracy’ of timekeepers such as the marine chronometers invented by John Harrison lay not in their ticking away the seconds regularly like a modern clock, but in their ‘running down’ at a regular and predictable enough rate as the days and weeks passed that the variations in their running could be compensated for when making observations and calculations. Parliament chose to define the requirements for the granting of its longitude rewards in terms of determination of the longitude at sea to one or fewer degrees away from the true value, or within a certain number of geographical miles.
The recording and reporting of observations and of experiments, including the trials of new methods of discovering the longitude at sea, were handled quite differently during the Georgian period than they would be today as well. Historians must try to decipher how individual observers and experimenters defined their results and chose to present them to the wider world. It was not that unusual for mathematicians and astronomers to cherry-pick the results that they shared or published, for the best didactic effect! The global standardization of mathematical, astronomical and natural philosophical practices and terms began to take shape only gradually during the existence of the Commissioners of Longitude.
2) Historians can thus be misled in their analyses of the past if they do not take into account how the definitions of words and concepts having changed dramatically over the centuries. However, they also face the opposite problem – of misinterpreting the nature of past lives and events by applying modern terminology to them and unknowingly letting this shape their perceptions.
For example, during my recent research on ‘scientific’ instrument makers in eighteenth-century London, it became clear that many historians’ study of the instrument trade had been influenced by their continued use of the term ‘scientific’. That adjective would not actually become applicable to instruments until the later nineteenth century. Its usage is entirely understandable, since the term indicates that authors are not referring to musical instruments instead and is more concise than a litany of early modern descriptors including optical, mathematical and philosophical.
However, it is clear that conceiving of optical, mathematical and philosophical instruments as ‘scientific’ in any way has continued to limit historians’ understanding of the full range of ways in which the British viewed, used and traded in these wares. For one thing, the production and sale of instruments in London encompassed a number of interconnected and yet sometimes quite disparate crafts and retail specialties, rather than representing a single instrument trade as is typically discussed. These activities were also far more interrelated with other types of crafts, services and retail specialties that would not be considered ‘scientific’ today, than has usually been acknowledged.
These dynamics saw trade members forge many important socio-economic relationships outside of ‘the instrument trade’, and instrument production and sale intermingle with trades from ship chandlery to the sale of fashionable luxuries. This mixing of instruments with diverse other stock and trades can be seen in many advertisements including that above for George Willdey, an optician and toyman (a seller of small fashionable trinkets for adults). Willdey ran a successful retail and wholesale business near St. Paul’s Churchyard in London from 1706 until his death in 1737. One of his two known surviving telescopes is now at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and is a good example of the type of small, attractive and often technologically basic instruments that were produced in large numbers by instrument makers in Georgian London and exported across the nation and the world.
Similar problems of labelling and definition have hindered the study of the British state’s support for the ‘search for the longitude’. As I’ll be discussing in greater detail over the course of 2011, the term ‘the Board of Longitude’ and modern conceptions thereof have obscured the actual nature of the Commissioners of Longitude in the wake of the Act of 1714 and downplayed their activities during the earlier decades of their existence.
Image credits: Richard Rust trade card © Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library, all other images © National Maritime Museum.
