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.

It was difficult to know, when starting out on this blog, how much we should attempt to do some scene-setting and how much we should just attempt to reflect the research and activities coming out of the project. By and large, we plumped for the latter, although posts like Alexi’s on Maskelyne were a useful way of laying out some of the basics of our story. There does, however, seem to be a place for a post that lays out the reasons why we, as a group, will always refer to financial rewards from the Board of Longitude and not to the Longitude Prize.

I have felt the need for such a post as a result of recent discussions about challenge prizes in science and technology, which came up in my earlier post and in an interview I did for BBC Radio 4′s World Tonight (to be broadcast on 26 March). In addition, understanding this basic point is a very good way of seeing that the story of longitude in the 18th century is not only about John Harrison, and that timekeepers were not an instantaneously adopted and complete solution.

The immediate cause of this post is a discussion that developed on Twitter surrounding that old question: “Did Harrison win the longitude prize?”. The Museum has previously answered this, although this account, like the actual events, tends less to answer the question and more to raise debates about whether the Commissioners of Longitude were justified in withholding the largest payment until further conditions were fulfilled. This all boils down to interpretation of the original Act – in which the Commissioners were adjudicators of whether any trialled method was “practicable and useful at Sea” – and has been much discussed.

Although there are some fascinating issues to be explored, the question is a red herring: as my title suggests, there was no such thing as the Longitude Prize. From the beginning, as well as using the term “reward” not “prize”, the Longitude Act offered a range of sums depending on the accuracy achieved. Later on, with subsequent acts, the possible rewards proliferated, initially with the realisation that Harrison needed to be supported with ‘grants’ of money while developing his clocks and, by the 1770s, with knowledge that a handful of sea watches was not a complete solution and that benefit would be gained by offering further rewards for improvements to techniques and hardware.

Derek Howse’s article on the Finances of the Board of Longitude reveals what was spent by the Commissioners. Between 1714 and 1828, rewards accounted for only 33% of spending, while overheads (23%), expeditions (15%) and publications (29%) made up the rest. The total spent on rewards was £52,534, of which £22,000 went to Harrison. This sum was made up of a number of payments between 1737 and 1764 to improve and test his timekeepers, £7500 paid in 1765 (a further sum being on offer to take this up to a £20,000 reward if two more sea watches could be made, one by Harrison and one by another maker) and £8750 was awarded by an act of parliament in 1773.

It’s a matter of interpretation as to whether this process constitutes receiving the maximum reward. A number of the payments to Harrison had required additional acts (in 1762, 1754 and 1765) and, ultimately, all the money came from government as a result of the original Act of Parliament. However, the final payment did not appear in the Board’s accounts, which confirms the fact that this final move took place outside the Commissioners’ decision-making process.

More interesting to me is who received the other £30,534. Happily, Howse’s article lists all the reward recipients in an appendix. The bulk of the rewards post-date 1765, when the Board played its hand and divided out rewards between the two successful methods, timekeeping and lunar distances. While Harrison received his £7500 in October 1765, in May:

• Leonhard Euler was paid £300 “for Theorums furnished by him to assist Professor Mayer in the Construction of Lunar tables”
• Maria Mayer was paid £3000 as a posthumous reward to her husband Tobias “for his having constructed a Set of Lunar Tables” and to her for making them property of the Commissioners
• Catherine Price, Edmond Halley‘s daughter, was paid £100 for handing over several of Halley’s manuscripts, which the Commissioners believed “may lead to discoveries useful to navigation”.

While Harrison’s work was the cause of the Commissioners beginning to meet, keep minutes and spend money, there were other pre-1765 pay-outs. Christopher Irwin received £600 in 1762-3 for his marine chair (designed to allow observations of Jupiter’s satellites on board ship) and way back in 1741, William Whiston was paid £500 “For procuring a new Sett of Astronomical Instruments for finding out the Longitude on the Coasts of this Kingdom with the Variations of the Needle and for enabling him to make Observations with them”.

Harrison was certainly the biggest single beneficiary of the Longitude Acts, but balanced against that are the many involved in lunar distances. There are the rewards to Euler and Mayer, but 1765 also saw the beginning of investment in the computing work (£35,559 to 1828) and publication of the Nautical Almanac. There had already been expenditure on lunar-distance-related hardware, salaries for trials and expeditions and later sums were paid out for work on astronomical tables, for example £1537 between 1770-93 for Charles Mason‘s efforts and £1,200 to Josef de Mendoza y Rios for his longitude tables in 1814. 

Post-1765 there were numerous rewards, mostly of tens or hundreds of pounds. The largest, after Harrison’s, was divvied up among the officers and crew of HMS Hecla and Griper in 1820, who received £5000 for reaching 110°W within the Article Circle, after discovery of the North West Passage became one of the Board’s interests in the 1818 Act. The Arctic voyages also led to Edward Sabine being given £1000 in 1826 for his pendulum experiments. Those who helped develop the chronometer as a commercial product, John Arnold, Thomas Earnshaw and Thomas Mudge, were each rewarded with £3000.

Although there was in the 18th-century a sense of competitiveness and occasional reference to a longitude prize (of which more in a later post), suggesting that there was a single pay-out that Harrison did or did not win misses both the richness of the history of the Board of Longitude and obscures the way that longitude solutions were developed and used.

We’ve recently been revisiting the 68 volumes in the RGO 14 collection of papers from the Board of Longitude which are now at the Cambridge University Library, as part of the new project to digitize these and other longitude-related documents. As has been a recurrent theme, these papers are far from complete or representative, being weighted towards the later decades and having been collected, reordered and bound by the Astronomer Royal George Airy thirty years after the abolition of the Board. However, they contain much valuable and interesting material, both from the lifetime of the Commissioners and — as Katy showed in a recent post — from Airy’s later sorting and binding of these records.

One of the interesting aspects of this collection to me is that it encompasses such a variety of types of materials including informal notes and calculations, letters and petitions, meeting minutes (draft as well as finalized) and other official documents, financial accounts, accounts of and records from astronomical events and sea voyages, and so on. I’ve recently been looking at some of the volumes of financial records (in total RGO 14/2 and 14/15-21), which also include some pocket expense books and ‘cheque books’ from key actors in the later history of the Board. These not only add to the information available to us today on the activities and financial dealings of the Board, but also reflect how much of both were tied up in interpersonal ties and communications, and in the actions and decision-making of key Commissioners and employees – especially the Astronomer Royal and the Secretary. Some of the small marbled books of accounts (like that shown above) are not signed but were presumably kept by the Secretary, who was a paid employee first requested by the Commissioners in 1762 and approved of by the King the following year.

Inscriptions in or on other pocket books and ‘cheque books’ specify that they belonged to key actors including the long-time Astronomer Royal and highly active Commissioner Nevil Maskelyne and the Secretary Thomas Young. Young served as the final Secretary of the Board but also as a Superintendent of the computing and publication of the annual Nautical Almanac, from the passage of the new longitude Act of 1818 until the abolition of the Board ten years later. As Sophie has mentioned, he was a successful ‘civil servant’ as well as being an enthusiast of Egyptology and optics and Foreign Secretary to the Royal Society – of which then-dominant Commissioner Joseph Banks was of course President.

In RGO 14/18 there are two of Maskelyne’s small marbled pocket books, one of which is pictured above. These are interesting because they record expenses which the Astronomer Royal incurred in posting and receiving correspondence relevant to the Board between 1783 and 1806, for which he was eventually reimbursed. (Until 1840, it was typically the recipient who had to pay to claim a letter!) These records reinforce the view provided by many other types of evidence of just how active in, and central to, the Board activities and financial transactions the Astronomer was during this period – and how much of this business was conducted betwixt individuals rather than at the periodic communal meetings.

There are various books related to Thomas Young as well including his small white leather pocket book for 1819 to 1828 in RGO 14/2, and his ‘cheque book’ (i.e. cheque stubs which Airy had mounted – as seen above) for 1819 to 1823 in RGO 14/8. The pocket book contains one other, somewhat poignant piece of evidence – handwritten minutes from the 1829 meeting of the ‘Members of the Committee of accounts of the late Board of Longitude’ to disperse the funds which still remained in the name of the Board after its official abolition.

Photo credits: Alexi Baker / Cambridge University Library.

Alexi mentioned in a previous post that one of the interesting questions for our project is the survival, or not, of the sources with which we deal. Alongside that comes the question of the history of our main archive at the Cambridge University Library. Alexi mentioned that we know the volumes were arranged and bound as we now have them by George Airy, then Astronomer Royal, in the 1850s, and how he commented on their potential as a resource.

A recent new addition to our project is a digitisation side-project at the UL, funded by JISC. We will be making the entire 68 volumes of the Board of Longitude archives available online with summaries, commentaries and biographical information, in a similar format to the wonderful new Newton Papers resource. Those of us on the project who are charged with writing the summary for each volume therefore have the enjoyable task of going through each volume and making it clear how its contents fit into the history of the Board, and the stories told of it so far.

While writing my summary of Volume 1 last week, I came across this note, which was clearly accidentally bound in with the papers in the 1850s. It’s a letter from Airy to Edward Stone, who was Chief Assistant at the Royal Observatory in 1865. It’s interesting that Airy was asking Stone to go through the Board records in the 1860s, and trying to join up the correspondence with the minutes. Exactly what we are now trying to do!

This guest post is by Caitlin Homes, who did an internship on the NMM’s Maskelyne collections last summer. Her previous posts can be read here and here.

After spending five weeks last summer as an intern and immersing myself in the NMM’s collections relating to Nevil Maskelyne, I have found myself intrigued by the character of his relationship with Joseph Banks. A previous post on this blog highlighted two episodes in the forty or so years that they knew each other, one from 1775 revealing a confident friendship between them and a shared scientific curiosity, and the other painfully polite, written in highly stilted and formal language in the months following a major dispute in 1784. Further reading has shed more light on the latter incident, and I have found documents that reveal the depth of the schism between the two men at this time.

Maskelyne had been a high-ranking member of the ‘Mathematical Faction’ that took a stand against Banks’s leadership of the Royal Society between November 1783 and March 1784. Having opposed Banks’s motion in a Council meeting designed to remove Dr Charles Hutton, a fellow mathematician, from his role as Foreign Secretary, Maskelyne found himself removed from the Council the following week at the Society’s Anniversary meeting. The troubles escalated over the following months before support for Banks’s leadership was confirmed by a significant majority vote at two separate meetings in February. By the end of March all issues were decided in Banks’s favour, and the majority of the ‘Dissenters’ either resigned or quietly withdrew from the Royal Society.

Maskelyne, however, was not in a position to remove himself from close contact with Banks. As Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society respectively, their roles meant that Maskelyne was answerable to Banks as Chair of the Visitors to the Royal Observatory,  and as they were both key members of the Board of Longitude there was no way for Maskelyne to avoid Banks without reneging on his responsibilities.

It was in fact the Board of Longitude that brought them face to face in the immediate aftermath of the disputes for a meeting on March 6, 1784, with six other commissioners present. In a letter sent later that day to Charles Blagden, Banks’s close friend, ally and soon-to-be appointed Secretary to the Royal Society, Banks describes a moment in this meeting: ‘… when I was revenging myself on the R Astronomer at the board of Longitude who was reduced to a compleat state of humiliation…’[1] A clue to just how Banks was doing this lies in his draft minutes of the meeting, which begin:  ‘The Astronomer Royal, without the consent of the Committee certified Mr Bonds and Messrs Wright and Gill. The PRS signified his wish to be excused from acting any more on the Committee.’[2] It appears Maskelyne may have been severely reprimanded for taking action without the Committee’s permission, and that the President no longer wished to work with someone who would do such things.

Together these notes provide a rare glimpse into an unusually vindictive side of Banks’s character and show that he had been seriously provoked by the men who stood against his Presidency. But there is no sign of friction in a smaller Committee meeting just two weeks later, and as discussed in the previous post, within a few months Banks had arranged certain financial matters to Maskelyne’s benefit. Maskelyne was also reappointed to the Royal Society Council the following November and remained there until his death in 1811.

I am still fascinated at how they rebuilt their relationship, having to work closely together for another 25 years after this incident, and by the nature of that friendship. Was it warm and trusting, or respectful, but cautious? One view, taken by several historians, is that whatever their disagreements may have been, ‘in society they appear to have enjoyed each other’s company and to have met as friends and intimates.’[3] I am inclined to question the level of enjoyment and the degree of intimacy in their friendship. To avoid each other was impossible, and so peaceful, public compromises had to be made, but what they thought of each other in private may have been quite different.

H.B. Carter, author of the most comprehensive biography of Banks, describes Maskelyne as ‘a difficult and uncertain man, with whom [Banks] kept an enduring friendship in spite of their many disagreements.’[4] This may reflect a more accurate version of how Banks thought of Maskelyne, but I would also query the ‘enduring’ aspect of their relationship. A second serious dispute between them concerning the watchmaker Thomas Earnshaw peaked in 1806 and led to Banks’s non-attendance at Board of Longitude meetings until Maskelyne had passed away. I suspect holding their work relationship together was always a difficult task, but both men did so for as long as they did because of their commitment to science and willingness to accept the responsibilities of their respective positions.

I wonder if readers of this blog are aware of any documents that show evidence of ‘enjoyment’, ‘intimacy’ or otherwise between them after 1784 and then 1806? I would love to hear from you!

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[1] Joseph Banks to Charles Blagden, 6 March 1784, printed in Neil Chambers, Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, Volume 2, [476]

[2] MM/7/41 Royal Society Library. Draft minutes, in Banks’s handwriting, of Board of Longitude meeting. Messrs Wright and Gill were the partners of an eminent wholesale stationery company.

[3] Derek Howse, Nevil Maskelyne: the Seaman’s Astronomer, 1989, p160, following the comments of  H.C. Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks, KB, PRS: the Autocrat of the Philosophers, 1952, p.232.

[4] H.B. Carter, Sir Joseph Banks, 1988, p319.

It may sound like the beginning of a joke, but  it’s just me getting pedantic.

If you look at the title page of the first Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, you’ll see that it’s dated MDCCLXVI, i.e. 1766. Nothing unusual there and one would normally assume that this was indeed the year of publication of the astronomical tables for the following year (and published only just in time to be of any use, it seems).

Among our manuscripts at the NMM, however, we have a letter from Nevil Maskelyne to John Nourse, one of the London booksellers licensed to sell the new work. The letter is dated 3 January 1767 and this is what Maskelyne has to say:

I send you by the bearer your licence from the Board of Longitude to publish the Nautical Almanack & annexed tables. Mess. Richardson & Clarke in Salisbury Court Fleet Street will send you 100 copies in a day or two for present sale; be pleased to have them stitched up in blue paper; or if you think of any properer covering not expensive let me know, that I may acquaint Mess. Mount & Page to make theirs the same. Advertise the ephemeris for the day you shall be ready to publish, & let Mess. Mount & Page know the day that they may be ready at the same time.

Of course, this only matters because the process of getting the book printed and on public sale took things into the next year, but it does mean that we should really take the publication date of the first Nautical Almanac as 1767. Some people have noticed this in the past, I think, but more often than not 1766 is the given date (as most library catalogues will agree).

Now, of course, I’m wondering how many other books weren’t published when they say they were.

It’s always interesting to find longitude cropping up in spheres where you wouldn’t expect it, so I’ve been excited this week to find it mentioned in some unlikely correspondence. Horace Walpole, was one of the most prolific eighteenth-century correspondents. An antiquarian, art historian, man of letters, Whig politician and general bon viveur, he is probably best known for his extraordinary house, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham. The majority of his correspondence is now held in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, which has made the published Yale edition of these available and searchable online.

Looking for other material in the Lewis Walpole catalogue, I idly typed ‘longitude’ into the search field, thinking that it would be interesting to see how a man like Walpole, always discussed by historians of art and literature rather than of science, responded to the longitude problem. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann on 14^th February 1753, he discussed his new role as a trustee of Sir Hans Sloane’s collections which would eventually become the British Museum: ‘We are a charming wise set, all philosophers, botanists, antiquarians and mathematicians; and adjourned our first meeting, because Lord Macclesfield, our chairman, was engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.’[1] Macclesfield was, of course, President of the Royal Society, and therefore an ex officio Commissioner of Longitude. However, the Board minutes only show a meeting on 17^th July 1753. Perhaps it is significant that Walpole describes ‘a party for finding out the longitude’? He may be giving us a glimpse of the un-minuted, more social, discussions that went on outside of the official meetings.

But Walpole doesn’t only give us institutional interest. The following year on 20^th November he wrote to Richard Bentley a ‘scolding letter’ about the fanciful schemes in which Bentley kept trying to get Walpole financially involved, commenting, ‘whenever you send me mighty cheap schemes for finding out longitudes and philosophers’ stones, you will excuse me if I only smile, and don’t order them to be examined by my council.’[2] What strikes me here is that Walpole is using a common throwaway reference to longitude as an impossible scheme, despite clearly being aware of the work of the Board of Longitude through his interactions with Macclesfield. By 1753 the Board had already met four times and had funded John Harrison to the tune of £1,500 to work on his time-keepers. So, we have the institutional considerations of the Board continuing to run alongside wider disparaging attitudes to the problem of longitude.

These are the kind of tantalising tit-bits of information that it’s such a joy to find in the most unlikely sources.

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[1] W.S. Lewis, The Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence Vol. 20, p.359

[2] Ibid. Vol.35, pp.190-1

Is it odd that we talk so much about longitude without much reference to latitude? Indeed, the word has only occurred four times, in a year’s worth of posts on this blog. When I was accepted onto this project last year, a friend asked how I could be studying longitude without latitude, many jokes have been made about how much ‘latitude’ we take, or are given, in our study of longitude, and any of our talks to a non-specialist audience usually start with an explanation of latitude and longitude and why one is easier to find than the other.

I’ve been noticing that this was also the case in the eighteenth century. One of my favourite pamphlet contributors to the longitude debate was Jacob Rowe. In 1725 he published Navigation improved: In two books. Book 1 introduced ‘an exact description of the fluid quadrant for the latitude,’ and Book 2 ‘an essay on the discovery of the longitude, by a new invention of an everlasting Horometer.’ He devoted equal text and image space to both, and argued that accurate measurement of longitude was pointless without first making latitude measurements as accurate as possible.

Likewise, wordplay on latitude was used in relationship to longitude in our period. To give another favourite example, an anonymous poem entitled The Star-gazer: or Latitude for Longitude was published in 1739. This deserves a later blog post in its own right as it raises interesting relationships between gender and the longitude problem, like those Becky touched on in her last post. In the poem, an old natural philosopher is cuckolded by his young wife, while he obsessively searches for a solution to the longitude problem. Various phallic wordplay is made over ‘longitude’ and the wife taking much too much ‘latitude.’ She claims to find a solution to distract him from her misdemeanours, but he ends with the lines ‘tho’ you talk of LONGITUDE, I nothing find but – LATITUDE.’ Years later, in 1836, the comic artist George Cruikshank made similar play with length and breadth, and gender, in his illustration series A Comic Alphabet, where L is for Latitude and Longitude. You can see it here.

In my work on the cultural importance of the longitude problem, it’s useful to remember how much this was connected to latitude in the eighteenth-century mind, just as it is today.

To put your minds at rest, I have been attempting to do a bit of research on this trip too. This has included going to archives in Göttingen and Hannover to look at letters relating to the years of lobbying and negotiation – between Göttingen and London - that had to happen before Tobias Mayer, or rather his widow, was finally awarded £3,000 for his contribution towards making the lunar distance method possible at sea.

Funnily enough, most of the stuff I looked at was in German and pretty indecipherable (to me) due to the handwriting and my own lack of German skills, although I did come across some letters in English, French and Latin as well. I’ve ordered lots of copies, so we’ll have plenty to work on, but a couple of things caught my attention immediately.

One thing I’m still trying to piece together a bit more, for instance, is Christopher Irwin’s marine chair, and I’m pretty sure I saw it described in one letter as ‘Erwin’s Easy Chair’, which makes it sound even more marvelous. I hope I’m not disappointed when I look at the copy again.

Another letter (in French) was from Mayer’s widow, Marie Victoire, to Lord Grenville. It’s an attempt to persuade Grenville to help her get the reward her late husband’s work merited. The bit that caught my attention was a passage that seems to claim that a repeating circle of Mayer’s design was used for longitude determinations by lunar distance on a voyage to ‘Arabia’ begun in 1761 by Carsten Niebuhr. It is well known that Niebuhr carried out lunar distances, but the other evidence suggests that this was with an octant. It may well be that she was wrong about the instrument used. It is more likely, for instance, that she was thinking of the ‘astrolabium’, a circular surveying instrument based on Mayer’s repeating principle, with which Niebuhr made a few measurements (which was something Ivan Tafteberg Jakobsen talked about at the conference in Kassel). In any case, it’s got me wanting to check things out a bit more.

Two recent posts on this blog have dealt with images of Nevil Maskelyne made during his lifetime or, possibly, made of other people who are now assumed to be Nevil Maskelyne (see Becky’s ‘Mystery Astronomer‘ and Richard’s ‘Ovidian Tribute to Nevil Maskelyne‘). This post relates the production of a bust of the Astronomer Royal some twenty years after his death, and the difficulties encountered when trying to match up the new object with previous pictures and memories. The reflections of one contemporary observer of this process have provided intriguing material for the historian about Maskelyne’s character and physical appearance, while raising even more possibly unresolvable queries. The letters and some of the images referred to are part of the recently acquired Maskelyne papers that I have been working with during my internship with the ROG this summer.

When Nevil Maskelyne passed away in February 1811, his family had a cast (or death mask) taken of him in order to have a bust made from it at an appropriate time.[1] Though his daughter Margaret described him as looking “most beautiful after death,” it did not turn out to be helpful for its appointed task. The bust was made in 1830 by Robert William Sievier who produced more than 50 portrait busts and statues for the Royal Academy during his outstanding career.  Sievier was given two images of Nevil Maskelyne and the cast to work from. But when the Rev John Prowett went to view the bust on behalf of Margaret, though praising Sievier’s skill, he declared the pictures and the cast unfit for purpose.[2] In putting his thoughts down in writing, he also provided a very warm description of Maskelyne’s character and physical features:

“Mr Sievier is in a difficult situation as to producing a Bust that shall exhibit a just resemblance of Dr Maskelyne. He has two pictures to model after: neither of them affording a good guide. That which represents your father’s kind & benevolent, as well as cheerful expression, degrades the resemblance by coarseness of feature and complexion; the other is perhaps more like him, but the expression of it is by no means his, either as to sense or good-nature. The cast is still worse for a model.

“I think Mr Sievier’s performance in its present state, gives the idea of a much larger and taller man, than the reality was: if I remember right, Dr Maskelyne’s face was round, which together with a certain playfulness of manner, preserved an air of youth to a late period. This is comparatively long: the eyes are too large and the attitude should more correspond with that of the smaller picture. … if the artist were to give a representation of your father after either of the pictures, refining upon the coarseness of feature & complexion in the first, or giving openness, & strength of expression to the last, he would produce a good resemblance. The cast has no likeness whatever to the living original.”[3]

It would have been unlikely for Prowett to emphasise any negative features (of character or physique) of Maskelyne’s  when writing to his daughter, but having read through many of Maskelyne’s letters I noted an occasional ‘certain playfulness of manner’ in his tone, and thus tend to support the warmth of Prowett’s assessment as more than mere flattery. The assertion of Maskelyne’s kind and benevolent nature is a helpful balance to the ‘villainous’ depiction of him in Dava Sobel’s ‘Longitude’.

With regard to what Maskelyne actually looked like, the letter raises more questions than it answers. Prowett did not identify for us which two pictures Sievier was using out of the six possible images that were made during Maskelyne’s lifetime (or five, if the disputed John Downman 1779 portrait of Maskelyne is indeed of someone different.) So we are left to judge for ourselves which one shows the most kind and cheerful expression, and which one looked more like him even though the expression was not at all his. Though we possess the modern wonders of photoshop, we cannot cut and paste as Prowett suggests to produce a fitting resemblance.

The bust was finished and kept in the family home at Basset Down until at least 1897.[4] It is credited in a short note, probably by Margaret Maskelyne, as “having hit off the eye and eye brow very well.” Its current whereabouts, if it still exists, are unknown to me, but I would love to know what it looked like and what happened to it. The cast, or ‘death mask’ would also be fascinating to see, and we have at least one clue as to what it looked like in this sketch:

RIP Nevil Maskelyne, 9 February 1811

[1] Margaret Maskelyne to her aunt, Lady Booth, 11 February 1811.
[2] Prowett is described as a ‘cousin’ of Maskelyne’s by Thereza Story-Maskelyne in 1897, though having examined the family tree it seems he must have been a very distant cousin, if one at all.
[3] J. Prowett to Mrs Storey (Margaret Maskelyne), 25 April 1830.
[4] Thereza Story-Maskelyne refers to it in her history of the life and work of her eminent grandfather-in-law for the Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine  (June 1897), 29, 126-37.