12 Jun 2012
A number of us have commented in posts on this blog about interesting things which we have found while summarising the Board of Longitude archives for our JISC digitisation project (see for example). One of the aspects that always interests me is the sheer range of people who wrote to the Board, and the variety of places and backgrounds from which they hailed. In just one volume, that I looked at today, correspondents ranged from a barely literate old sailor to the Marquis of Buckingham, and wrote from places as varied as Bath and a French prison in Mauritius. We are always interested in how far printed discussions of the longitude problem disseminated outside of London, so it was striking to find a comment by this Bath correspondent that he did not have access to public libraries, and therefore to the sorts of mathematical and astronomical texts, to which Thomas Young, the secretary of the Board, was clearly accustomed in London.
But, it was the barely literate old sailor, James Straycock, who really caught my eye. I have also written before about William Hogarth’s print from A Rake’s Progress, in which an inmate of Bedlam, the eighteenth-century madhouse, tries to work out a solution to the longitude problem on the wall. One of his drawings is a projection of the world, showing latitude and longitude lines. I was therefore very excited to find the following poem at the end of Straycock’s letter from 1824, in which he proposed a means to draw a plain chart by geometrical rules. He also included an example diagram which you can see here. 