CHAPTER 7
DEFINING THE WORLD
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In a country like ours, the commercial relations of which are so extensive, and whose ships, conveying the lives and property of our countrymen to distant climes, are daily trusting for safety and guidance across the pathless waters, to the researches of the astronomer, the maintenance of such an establishment is of the highest importance.
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‘The Royal Observatory, Greenwich’, 18331
By the end of the eighteenth century, the numbers of available timekeepers, sextants and astronomical tables, and of officers able to use them, were slowly increasing. However, this growth in the use of new instruments did not in itself revolutionize the safety of shipping. The records do not reveal a sudden drop in the number of wrecks, or even a reduction in maritime insurance premiums. Great dangers remained, with wrecks still caused by uncharted rocks – the fate that befell the Magnificent near the French port of Brest in 1804 (Fig. 1) – or bad weather. If there was a revolution, it was in the way that the longitude methods slowly affected the infrastructure and training associated with the Navy and merchant fleets.
The new instruments and techniques really came into their own on elite voyages of survey and exploration that followed in the wake of Cook, Vancouver and Flinders, and the lasting legacy of lunar distances, timekeepers and accurate instruments was in their application to the creation of reliable charts. It was this that ultimately improved safety and allowed increased world trade, and it was enabled by the Admiralty’s limited but increasing support of surveys, specialist officers and technical publishing. In an age of naval peace, after the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, scientific skill could, for a handful, be a route to recognition and perhaps promotion.
While Britain was by no means the only nation engaged in such activity, it was Britain’s dominance of maritime trade and empire in the nineteenth century that drove its effort to map the world’s coastlines. The century opened with the publication of the first Admiralty Chart by the Hydrographic Office, which had been founded in 1795 to review and improve chart provision. By the 1850s they offered nearly 2000, with some 64,000 copies issued to the Fleet and more on sale to the public in Britain and overseas. Some of these surveys have, even today, not been superseded. Use of the Nautical Almanac in surveying as well as navigation meant that charts were based on data produced at the Royal Observatory, making the Greenwich meridian an increasingly significant reference point for the world.
The very general diffusion of Chronometers of late years, and the great improvements that have recently been made in their construction, renders the management of them a subject of considerable moment.
Richard Owen, ‘Essay on Chronometers’, 18272
Fig. 1 – ‘Loss of the Magnificent, 25 March 1804’, by John Christian Schetky, 1839
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
Embedding the techniques
As well as remaining open to ideas for new navigational techniques, the Board of Longitude had a long-term role in supporting and improving existing methods. The Nautical Almanac continued to be produced, initially supervised by Nevil Maskelyne’s successor as Astronomer Royal, John Pond, and later by the Board’s Secretary, Thomas Young (1773–1829). From 1818, the Board became responsible for the Navy’s stock of chronometers. This task was delegated to Pond in 1821, making the testing and rating of chronometers a core activity of the Royal Observatory for the next century and a half. As well as helping to make the use of chronometers reliable and routine, the Greenwich chronometer work encouraged improvement and innovation. Annual competitive chronometer trials were begun in 1823, with rewards and honour on offer to successful makers.
The East India Company, too, was routinely using chronometers. In fact, they adopted them, and complementary astronomical methods, considerably ahead of the Navy, reflecting the more difficult navigational challenges their vessels faced compared with most naval voyages. Time was money, so use of chronometers became normal practice, and by 1810 nearly every ship owned or hired by the Company had at least one chronometer. However, precedence was officially given to the use of astronomical methods and, in practice, to dead reckoning.
By 1821, 130 chronometers were listed as Admiralty property, of which forty-three were on voyages of exploration or surveys and fifty-eight on the seventy-four vessels then employed abroad (the rest being in storage). Seven ships had two chronometers, meaning that twenty-three of these overseas vessels, which since 1800 had been officially obliged to carry one, went without. Dead reckoning and, to a lesser extent on non-specialist ships, astronomical methods remained essential for many decades to come. Only in 1859 was it decided that ships commanded by captains should carry three chronometers – a number that allowed proper checks on performance – although other vessels still might have only one or two.
Checking, testing, trialling and issuing chronometers were not the only ways in which the timekeeper method could be supported. As Captain Robert Wauchope (1788–1862) had first suggested in 1818, what was also needed was a way of checking their rate, other than by unreliable on-board astronomical observations. He proposed that ‘time balls’ be put up in prominent places that would, by being raised and dropped at the same time each day, provide an accurate time signal to docked shipping. It took more than ten years and further lobbying before the first experimental example was erected in Portsmouth harbour. It was controlled by a visual signal from the Royal Naval College there, which had its own small observatory for teaching purposes and chronometer rating.
In June 1833, Wauchope suggested that a time ball be erected at Greenwich, visible to shipping in the Thames. This time the Admiralty acted swiftly and one was installed at the Royal Observatory later that year (Fig. 2). John Barrow (1764–1848), Secondary Secretary to the Admiralty and Commissioner of Longitude, issued a notice in the Nautical Magazine, explaining that the ball would drop daily at one o’clock: ‘By observing the first instant of its downward movement, all vessels in the adjacent reaches of the river as well as in most of the docks, will thereby have an opportunity of regulating and rating their chronometers’3. The time ball still drops at 1 p.m. every day, though now more for the sake of tourists rather than for shipping.
Fig. 2 – The time ball at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Illustrated London News, 9 November 1844
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
Wauchope also persuaded the East India Company of the usefulness of this approach and, in the 1830s and 1840s, time balls came into operation at Mauritius, St Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai). Even if there was no time signal, observatories in docks and port cities provided a service to mariners. Their transit observations could define local time precisely, their longitude determinations allowed a conversion to Greenwich time, and many provided chronometer-rating services.
Elsewhere, efforts to improve the education of officers continued. Even in the early eighteenth century, developments in navigational techniques were making the process of learning seamanship significantly more complex. The arrival of precision observing instruments, chronometers and astronomical tables as part of normal equipment on board ship simply meant additional things to learn and, while observations were often a matter of learning by doing (Fig. 3), the theory and calculations had to be taught and practised.
Despite the existence of institutions like the Royal Naval Academy and the Royal Mathematical School, most midshipmen and officers learned navigational techniques at sea, perhaps supplemented by classes offered by the many teachers of navigation advertising in London and elsewhere. In theory, though not always in practice, there were also schoolmasters on board naval ships providing the education of future officers. From 1731, the ‘Duties of the Naval Schoolmaster’ were ‘to employ his Time on board in instructing the Voluntiers in Writing, Arithmetick, and the Study of Navigation, and in whatsoever may contribute to render them Artists in that Sci
ence’.4 In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a series of small improvements in the pay, conditions and status of naval schoolmasters, before they were replaced in 1837 with the higher-ranked naval instructors.
Whether or not there was an official teacher present, learning took place and the steps for finding position using the new techniques slowly became routine. Officers passed on their knowledge and there were many manuals of navigation. Increasingly, young midshipmen and others would practise their calculations and mathematical rules on board ship (Fig. 4), or when they had time ashore. One beautiful and painstaking example of a navigational workbook, from 1810, was produced while its author was held prisoner (Fig. 5). Despite his circumstances, he worked through the problems outlined in two standard navigation textbooks, by John Robertson and John Hamilton Moore, that formed the basis of many more regular courses of education.
Fig. 3 – Deck scene, with two men taking Sun observations from the quarterdeck, by Thomas Streatfeild, 1820
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
Fig. 4 – ‘Life on the ocean, representing the usual occupations of the young officers in the steerage of a British frigate at sea’, by Augustus Earle, c.1820–37. In the foreground one of the young men works on his mathematical calculations, with a sextant lying behind him. An octant and telescope hang on the beam above
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
There were some attempts to improve official training on land, although it was by no means obligatory, and was not even the usual way to gain entry into the Navy or to achieve promotion. The Royal Naval College in Portsmouth was reformed in 1808 from the existing Naval Academy there, although its main function was the training of cadets. The college tried to hire good teaching staff and the curriculum focused on mathematics and the classics. Responding to the perceived need of the times, mathematics came first, with almost thirty hours of instruction and additional evening work devoted to it each week. A mathematical prize was instituted in 1819, the first winner being Robert FitzRoy (1805–65), who was an exemplary student and went on to make his career in hydrographic surveying.
In general, though, the College was not well regarded. It was closed in 1837, and it was decided that all elementary teaching would take place at sea, emphasizing the importance of practical experience and the judgement and patronage of existing officers. The College reopened in 1839 to provide ‘additional means of scientific education to the young gentlemen of the fleet’ – that is, specialist training for a few officers.5 However, it quickly became a means of cramming for the lieutenant’s exam, rather than a place of higher education, and there was some suspicion from captains who had not themselves received a land-based scientific training. They, apparently, ‘looked upon scientific attainments not so much as a waste of time, but as injurious to the acquisition of seamanship and the details of routine’.6
It was not until the introduction of training ships in the 1850s and educational reforms in the 1870s that naval education became more universal and systematic. In the early part of the century, only a minority succeeded in gaining a higher mathematical and navigational education, whether through what was essentially an apprenticeship system, the College or other means, such as the limited navigational stream of the Greenwich Hospital. Some of them were able to profit from their education by doing specialist work on the increasing number of naval survey expeditions, perhaps giving them an edge in an era of massive underemployment of qualified officers. Nevertheless, promotion still most often relied on skill and bravery in action, which after 1815 might be seen in, for example, the capture of a vessel engaged in illegal trade. Only a very few had an opportunity to make their name on the high-status expeditions that took their inspiration from Cook’s eighteenth-century voyages.
Fig. 5 – Pages from a navigational workbook compiled by John Marshall, 1810 while he was being held as a prisoner
{National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London}
The Board, Science and the Arctic
Having demonstrated, to its own satisfaction at least, the advantages of a scientific committee advising the Admiralty, the Board of Longitude expanded its remit in other directions too. It had committees to explore technical issues, such as how to develop better optical glass for observing instruments – work which was passed on to the young Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution – and how to establish a ship’s tonnage correctly. An ambitious reworking of the Board and its role as an intermediary between the scientific world and government was masterminded by Joseph Banks and his close associates within the Admiralty, the Secretaries John Wilson Croker and John Barrow, who had, after Maskelyne’s death, increasingly come to dominate proceedings.
The reworked Board was created by an 1818 Act of Parliament. This spelled out the ongoing rewards for improvements in navigation and the Board’s role in overseeing chronometers and the Almanac. It also provided paid positions for Thomas Young and six scientific advisers, three of whom would be picked, essentially by Banks, from among the Fellows of the Royal Society. This Act also, somewhat surprisingly, revived a half-forgotten parliamentary reward designed to encourage exploration of the putative North-West Passage. This reward copied the 1714 Act by specifying different sums payable for varying degrees of success but otherwise attempted to tie the Board into a much broader maritime project.
The need for the continued existence of the Board was explained to Parliament by Croker. He declared that, although there were now two ways of finding longitude at sea ‘with partial success, the one mechanical and the other scientific, it was essential to the ultimate perfection of the discovery, that scientific principles should predominate’ and that much work was yet to be done.7 While perhaps attempting to blind his fellow MPs with science, Croker’s speech also reveals the extent to which, in its expansionary moment, the Board of Longitude almost became the Admiralty’s scientific wing.
Nominally, at least, the Royal Observatory and Hydrographic Office now came under the Board’s jurisdiction. It was also responsible for founding the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, intended to be the Greenwich of the southern hemisphere, in 1820. However, before the Cape Observatory was even complete, the Board was abolished in 1828. Explained as retrenchment, the real reason for its sudden disappearance was a storm being created in the astronomical community over errors appearing in the Nautical Almanac and anger over how the Board’s patronage was dispensed. It was initially replaced by a committee of three named scientific advisers to the Admiralty but much of the impetus for scientific work ultimately passed to the Hydrographic Office. By the 1830s, this, the observatories and the Royal Naval College were part of a defined Scientific Branch.
Both on land, therefore, and increasingly at sea, science came to play an important, though still minor, role for the Navy, through exploration and survey. Conversely, the Admiralty played a major role in the development of science in the nineteenth century. Mathematically and scientifically trained officers were prominent members of the newly founded scientific societies of the era: the Royal Astronomical Society, the Geological Society, the Zoological Society, the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Naval voyages and transport proved to be vital resources for the collection of data and the development of a whole range of disciplines, from geology to botany, geography to meteorology, tidology to geomagnetism. They had potential practical benefit to Navy and nation, and a transformative effect on the shape of British science.
The first ‘big science’ push of the century came with the polar expeditions that were sent out in 1818, 1819 and the 1820s. The possibility of finding a North-West Passage – and the hope that they would open up new trade routes and/or find new tradable resources – joined a whole suite of navigational and scientific objectives, including magnetic and gravimetric observations. Consciously picking up on the illustrious legacy of Cook’s voyages, the four ships on the 1818 expedition carried a large amount of technical
and trial equipment, as well as men with considerable naval and scientific expertise. The Isabella and the Alexander, commanded by Captain John Ross and Lieutenant Edward Parry, respectively, headed north-west towards Baffin Bay. The Dorothea and the Trent, under Captain David Buchan and Lieutenant John Franklin, went due north of Spitsbergen, aiming for the North Pole. Quite specifically, national pride was at stake too. As John Barrow wrote:
It would ... have been something worse than indifference, if, in a reign which stands proudly pre-eminent for the spirit in which voyages of discovery have been conducted, England had quietly looked on, and suffered another nation to accomplish almost the only interesting discovery that remains to be made in geography, and on to which her old navigators were the first to open the way.8
Barrow boasted that ‘A number of new and valuable instruments were prepared for making observations in all the departments of science, and for conducting philosophical experiments and investigations’. Each expedition, he said, was supplied with a clock and a transit instrument, plus:
a dipping needle on a new construction ... – an azimuth compass improved by Captain Kater – a repeating circle for taking terrestrial angles – an instrument for ascertaining the altitude of celestial bodies when the horizon is obscured by fogs ...– a dip-micrometer and dip-sector, invented by Doctor Wollaston ... – a macrometer ... for measuring directly the distance of inaccessible objects ... – three chronometers to each ship – a hydrometer ... – thermometers of various kinds – a barometer of Sir Henry Englefield’s construction ...9
Finding Longitude Page 16
