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.]
Hannah Salisbury undertook a research internship at the National Maritime Museum in 2011 and has sent us this post based on her work, which revealed the story behind an unusual-looking compass now in the NMM collections:
By the 1790s, after decades of development, finding longitude at sea by using timekeepers or the lunar distance method was finally beginning to seem a practical reality. Yet these methods still had their problems, and there was scope for alternative suggestions.
Ralph Walker, by Johann Eckstein and William Ridley, 1803 (NMM PAD3061)
In 1793 a man named Ralph Walker (1749-1824) appeared before the Board of Longitude with a compass of his own invention, which he promised would solve all of their longitude-based problems (and others besides). It was a grand claim for his instrument and method.
This was Walker’s first foray into designing navigational instruments. The son of a Scottish farmer, Walker went to sea in 1768 aged 19, and quickly became master of the merchant vessels on which he was sailing, trading to the West Indies, the Baltic and America. In 1783 he settled as a planter in Jamaica with his Irish wife Jane; making use of slave labour, they most probably grew sugar or coffee. It was also in Jamaica that Walker built a prototype of his compass, mostly out of wood.
The Governor of Jamaica was so impressed with the compass that he procured Walker a passage to London on the Providence under Captain William Bligh, to enable Walker to present his invention to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude. Leaving Jane and their seven children behind, Walker arrived in London in August 1793. It would be six or seven years before he saw them again.
Ralph Walker’s meridional compass, about 1793 (NMM NAV0263)
To carry out Walker’s method for finding longitude, a mariner would use the sundial attachment on the compass to align the instrument to the true north-south plane. Comparing this reading with the direction in which the compass needle was pointing gave the magnetic variation. This could, in theory, be used to discover the longitude, by finding where supposed ‘magnetic meridians’ intersected with the observed latitude. Walker believed that his method was simpler than lunar distances, cheaper than chronometers, and deserving of a substantial reward from the Longitude Commisioners.
Initial reactions may well have given Walker cause for hope. The results of trials were generally favourable; Admiral Macbride was so impressed with the compass that he ordered one to be made for his own use. However, the compass did not win glowing reviews all round. Nevil Maskelyne was particularly damning in his judgement, writing that the compass was neither particularly innovative nor useful.
Reporting to the Board on 6 December 1794, Maskelyne criticised both the compass and the theory behind it. The compass relied on the sun to work; on a dull day, it would be useless, and even on too bright a day its functioning would be compromised. Problems were also likely to be caused by the presence of iron on board ships, and Maskelyne thought that Walker’s innovation of placing the compass needle on its side was likely to cause it to warp. Lastly, in the ‘present improved state of navigation’, Maskelyne did not consider that the idea of finding longitude through magnetic variation had anything to offer.
Nevertheless, the Board did meet with Walker several times between 1793 and 1796, and sent his compass for repeated trials. Unfortunately for Walker, his longitude solution was indeed doomed to failure. He had oversimplified the laws of terrestrial magnetism, and in any case the presence of iron on ships would always be a problem for taking compass readings.
Although the compass was not considered a viable longitude solution, it was seen as an improvement on other compasses then available, and this seems to be the light in which the Board saw it. Eventually, in June 1795, after repeated pleas for justice from Walker, the Board awarded him £200. The compasses proved popular with naval men, and were still in use in the 1850s. Nevertheless, only four are traceable today, one of which is held by the NMM.
Although Walker would remain interested in the fate of his compasses, his main life’s work was actually as an engineer. He began this new career in 1795, his first work being the West India Docks – a quite remarkable achievement given that the docks were the largest construction of their kind in the world, and that Walker apparently had no engineering experience whatsoever. Over the remaining 27 years of his life, Walker worked on several other dock schemes, as well as harbour improvements, canals and the East London Water Works, and launched the career of his nephew James Walker (1781-1862), who went on to become one of the best-known civil engineers of his day.
Walker was a clever and determined man, who took a great risk leaving his family in Jamaica while he took a chance on winning a longitude prize. Although he was not as successful in this as he had hoped, it led him to London and new work furthering Britain’s commercial and maritime interests through dock construction.
I too recently went to Edinburgh and was impressed by the reopened museum. As Katy says, the open vistas and object wall are a great introduction to the Museum’s space and collections. I also enjoyed the range of approaches in the galleries, where chronology was often treated fairly loosely. There were some fairly subtle themes, for example about particular collectors, which might be missed by a large portion of visitors but which gave those with more time another level of interpretation to engage with.
Like Katy, too, I was very happy to see astronomy, timekeeping and navigation represented, with a good dose of longitude. I was so excited, in fact, that I took this rather hazy photograph. It focuses on the labels rather than the objects, but it is always nice to see the Nautical Almanac taking its place in displays!
Richard and I will be back in Edinburgh next week, for a workshop on ‘Geography, Technology and Instruments of Exploration‘, so perhaps one of us could take a slightly more aesthetically pleasing picture then! In the mean time, here is the NMS’s page on this gallery, called ‘Earth in Space‘.
As you will see from their site, this gallery is part of the general ‘science bit’, set in a room beyond the stuff-animals-and-biology bit, and distinct from the industry-and-technology and the decorative-arts bits. The blurb goes:
What is out there? Where do we fit into the Universe? People have always been fascinated by what lies beyond our planet. Technology helps us investigate these big questions. Scientists use evidence from Earth and space to understand more about the Universe and the origins of life.
And, hence, the gallery includes not only medieval to 19th-century astronomical instruments, clocks and demonstration models, but also fossils, meteorites, films and interactive displays about modern astronomy and a model of DNA.
To me it seems a shame that these objects were thus removed from their historical context. During this project, and in thinking about future longitude-themed displays, we have been considering such instruments in connection with a whole range of themes: changing manufacturing processes, a developing consumer society, maritime trade and empire to name the most obvious. It seems a shame to hide these connections and to depersonalise the objects and the knowledge they helped produce or share. Finding longitude wasn’t (just) a scientific problem about knowing where we are, it was about practice, pragmatics, economics and politics.
Science and its material culture are, in fact, represented elsewhere in the museum. There are, for example, galleries on ‘Art and Industry‘ and ‘Inspired by Nature‘, and the Scottish galleries bring science and technology into a general account of Scotland’s history. Likewise, it is good to see some historical objects brought into the ‘Natural World‘ displays, of which the ‘Earth in Space’ gallery is part. However, a nagging feeling remains that there is an unnecessary divide created between (pure, objective, depersonalised) science and (human, contextualised) art, industry and culture. Or perhaps, for museums which aim to interest a whole range of groups and to create galleries that can link to aspects of the national curriculum, such divisions are unavoidable?
I have been in Edinburgh this weekend for an art history conference, presenting about madness in relationship to longitude in my usual plate from The Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth. The conference was rewarding and stimulating, involving a range of papers that considered madness on the intersection between science and art. I learnt a lot and met some fascinating people.
This also gave me the chance to soak up some culture and atmosphere in the ‘Athens of the North,’ and my first port of call was, of course, the newly re-vamped National Museum of Scotland. It is stunning. From the grand gallery that resembles a Victorian bird-cage, vistas open up into the surrounding galleries on ‘Natural World,’ ‘World Cultures,’ ‘Art and Design’ and ‘Science and Technology.’ One whole wall of the grand gallery is also taken up by a brilliant ‘Window on the World’ which pulls together 800 objects as a snapshot on the collection. I loved the juxtaposition of bicycles with Isnik tiles.
But what was most exciting was to see an entire case devoted to navigation at sea within the ‘Earth in Space’ gallery! It’s good to see the problem of longitude given such prominence in a consideration of the relationship between the earth and the heavens. The case focuses on local hero Alexander Dalrymple and his work on mapping and hydrography for the East India Company, but it also includes all our old favourites in the instrument story. Backstaffs, precision chronometers, and the Nautical Almanac, sit happily in this gallery alongside rocks, minerals and a giant trilobite. Lets hope that interest in longitude lasts as long as the trilobite apparently will!
It seems that questions current to our project are active in my head all the time these days. You wouldn’t think that the new show curated by Grayson Perry at the British Museum, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, would have much to do with the problem of longitude, but it raised some interesting questions for me when I visited this weekend.
The show itself is surprisingly effective, charming and thought provoking. It presents Perry’s highly personal response to the British Museum through a combination of his own work and his selection of objects from the collections, with a personalised label commentary. It works around concepts of craftsmanship, culturally constructed meaning, and the sanctity of objects. This not only links nicely to questions that we’re considering in the ‘Things’ seminar in Cambridge this term (which you can follow on a separate blog), but also reminded me of ideas raised by Eoin in his fascinating paper, at the Exploring Empire conference in July at the National Maritime Museum, on the meaning of chronometers during the mutiny on the Bounty.
More specifically, two objects got me thinking. The first, Head of a Fallen Giant (2008) (which you can see in the photostream here) is described by Perry as his attempt to create an ‘English ethnographic object.’ Resembling a cross between a barnacle-encrusted skull and a corroded mine this is ‘the skull of a decaying maritime power.’ I was struck at the high proportion of technological objects that were included in the encrusting layer, as well as many images of coinage. What would a similar object for our period’s growing maritime superpower look like?
The second object was in the section on mapping, in which Perry’s point is how maps are culturally constructed, not just simple diagrams of reality. Of course, our entire project on longitude tells us that. Perry has included a large tapestry with a personal map of the British Museum surrounded by relevant London locations. This more specifically made me think of one of my most exciting finds to date, A New and Exact Map of Toryland, with the dangerous Rocks and Shoals of all the Jacobite Islands lying in the same Parallel nth ye Red Sea whose Latitude is 1688, and Longitude 1714 (1729), in the Bodleian Library. In this latitude and longitude were used as metaphors to navigate the eighteenth-century political landscape; a personal, cultural construction like Perry’s.
Thanks to Grayson Perry and the British Museum, for a very enjoyable visit which also got me thinking.
As a result of a talk I gave to the Scientific Instrument Society not long ago, I’ve been looking a bit further into one of the National Maritime Museum’s compasses, which research by Mat Paskins during one the Museum’s research internships brought to light. The compass is a ‘Jennings Insulating Compass’, which was said to be immune to magnetic deviation.
Only a little is known about its inventor, Henry Constantine Jennings, a manufacturing and consulting chemist said to be the first man to liquefy prussic acid, the inventor of a new way of killing moths and instigator of a campaign against the waste of stationery in the House of Commons. By the 1810s, he was certainly offering his inventions to the Admiralty, including his insulating compass, which he also submitted to the Board of Longitude in 1817, saying that it could be used for finding a ship’s longitude through the determination of magnetic variation.
In Jennings’ 1818 patent for the compass, he claims that he can protect the needle ‘from all action arising from iron in its neighbourhood’ by adding curved pieces of specially prepared iron to the bottom of the card. These, he says, ‘act as guards against the passage of the magnetic fluid, by absorbing the first quantity of it’, with specially treated iron filings in the compass body providing a second layer of magnetic ‘insulation’. The Admiralty and the Board of Longitude were not, however, convinced by Jennings’ claims, although some trials were finally agreed to.
These proved inconclusive but an insulating compass was also used by Captain John Ross during his 1818 Arctic expedition. Ross wrote that, ‘This instrument certainly answered the purpose for which it was intended, and completely obviated the effect of local attraction’. Others also seem to have been impressed, with Jennings claiming the support of no less than ’2711 nautical men’, while Captain James Horsburgh, Hydrographer to the East India Company, recorded that Admiral Penrose had ‘tried it against a large magnet which would lift forty-two pounds of iron by its attractive power, but it did not influence the compass materially’.
Sadly, Jennings did little to ingratiate himself with Admiralty officials or the Board of Longitude, largely due to his aggressive style of letter-writing. Of the many wonderfully bad-tempered quotes, here’s just a couple. In 1818, he wrote, ‘it requires only Common Sense to judge of the case; & I am sorry the Board of Admiralty have proved themselves so deficient in that necessary quality’. And after the Board of Longitude rejected his application he expressed his sorrow that the Board ‘did not condescend to receive a Lesson on this Branch of Experimental Philosophy; which I should have been proud to have given them’. It is no surprise that internal correspondence referred to that ‘impudent Fellow Jennings’, a view that persisted when Jennings offered his compass again in the 1840s (when what is now the Museum’s example was tested and found to be easily deflected by iron) and then the 1860s, by which time his ideas were seen as nonsense. It would seem that Mr Jennings was perfectly insulated from the ability to influence others.
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.
H3 has returned to public display after a thorough cleaning and cataloguing. This video captures Jonathan’s feeling about the project as well as the timekeepers move back into its showcase.
Maskelyne’s trousers have again inspired a reconsideration of the man, this time in a nice story by Stephanie Pain for the New Scientist. While I am not sure that owning a funny suit necessarily works as proof that Maskelyne was a nice guy, it seems to be the case that the survival of this unique item reminds us that the historical character was once a living, breathing person. Clothing is particularly intimate and, of course, once encased a completely three-dimensional being. That in itself is enough to encourage readers, visitors and writers to look beyond black and white versions of the past and to understand that even the long-dead were once individuals with realistically complex personalities and motivations, which is, surely, a Good Thing.
Pain did not, of course, leave the work to the trousers alone, and I was particularly glad that she found room to mention the ’mathematicians’ mutiny’, as an occasion that complicates the idea of Maskelyne as a represenative of a unified ”scientific elite”, against which Harrison had to do battle. The mathematicians in question attempted, in 1784, to oust the Royal Society’s president Joseph Banks. They painted themselves as “the scientific part of the society”, countering a snobbish generalist with no understanding of mathematics and the need for practical mathematicians to have representation on the Society’s Council. Maskelyne was identified with those who needed to earn a living through their skills in practical mathematics, and against the coterie surrounding Banks.
(Perhaps it was leaked knowledge of Maskelyne’s funny trousers that lost them the vote….)
I hope that there will be further opportunities to create a good, rounded sense of Maskelyne and his times at the Museum’s symposium on 15 October, marking this year’s Maskelyne bicentenar. The programme and booking details are now available online. Speakers include NMM curators, who will reflect on the surviving manuscripts and objects relating to Maskelyne and his family, as well as members of the Board of Longitude project team and external speakers. Attendees will also have the opportunity to see some of the collections in store and in the Museum’s new library and archive the previous afternoon (Friday 14 October).
I will be starting the day with a brief look at how Maskelyne’s reputation has fared in biographies and histories since his death. While he was certainly painted badly (or moaned about) in his lifetime by some who felt hard done by, such as William Harrison, Thomas Earnshaw and Reuben Burrow, he was generally respected and obituaries naturally sang his praises. I am hoping to pinpoint the moment when it all turned sour, probably as a result of the renewal of interest in Harrison in the early 20th century. I am beginning to see, though, that my talk will also have give some time to reflections on the 2011 Maskelynian rehabilitation!
In Jennings’ 1818 patent for the compass, he claims that he can protect the needle ‘from all action arising from iron in its neighbourhood’ by adding curved pieces of specially prepared iron to the bottom of the card. These, he says, ‘act as guards against the passage of the magnetic fluid, by absorbing the first quantity of it’, with specially treated iron filings in the compass body providing a second layer of magnetic ‘insulation’. The Admiralty and the Board of Longitude were not, however, convinced by Jennings’ claims, although some trials were finally agreed to.