The Paradoxal Compass

by Horatio Morpurgo

  A month after Drake returned from the circumnavigation, Borough carefully measured the magnetic variation from Limehouse, in London. Less than a mile away, a special dry dock was being built around the Golden Hinde at Deptford, where the ship soon settled into its new career as a tourist attraction. Borough’s book on magnetic variation appeared a year to the day after Drake’s return. In it, Borough urges both ‘the vulgar and learned sort’ to ‘seek knowledge in Arithmatique & Geometry.’

  Borough had a near-identical background to Drake and clearly recognised his genius. In his account of the ideal seaman as explorer and map maker, he praised his fellow West Countryman, who ‘for valorous attempt, prudent proceeding & fortunate performing his voyage about the world, is not onely become equall to any [seamen] that liue, but in fame farre surmounteth them all.’ It is as a navigator that Drake is praised. But ‘prudent proceeding & fortunate performing’ surely carries sardonic undertones. There was indeed trouble ahead.

  Before we come to that, Borough’s references to the Scilly Isles are also revealing. For him they are above all a navigational aid, helpful in studying magnetic variation. Close to the 50th parallel north, they provided a convenient sightline for any English ship en route to the New World. He observed that on the charts used by trawler captains ‘the course is set downe from Sillie to Capo Raso’ (now Cape Race, Labrador). This interested him because he knew Cape Race is in fact more than three degrees to the south of Scilly. It suggested that English compasses, adjusted for magnetic variation as it was in England, became misleading as the ship travelled west.

  Borough will already in his teens have been aware that the variation, as measured from London and Northern Russia, was wildly inconsistent. Later expeditions to Labrador, to which he was an advisor, only confirmed what the Newfoundland fishermen had already told him. Borough observes this ‘strange variety’ and publishes it to the world, perhaps with a hint of mockery, ‘to the end that the learned sort might consider thereof, and sharpening their wits, see what probable causes & grounds they can assign for the same.’

  Here, then, is a contradictory figure: technically expert yet wary of ‘the learned sort’, well versed in the science but with a deep respect, also, for the knowledge of ‘ordinary’ seamen. You might think, along with the West Country background, that this would have made Drake and Borough the firmest of friends. Yet six years after the appearance of his Discours of the Variation, they dragged each other through a bruising court case.

  After the successful raid which Drake had led on Cadiz, Borough had declined to play any part in the assault on a smaller Portuguese settlement and stood accused of cowardice. Drake hoped to use the town as a base from which to take prizes. The same settlement, Sagres, on Cape St Vincent, had been a centre for the earliest developments anywhere in navigational science. Borough would certainly have been aware of these associations, whether or not he had accompanied his elder brother to Seville as a young man.

  I do not mean here to seek out hate-figures and pit them against heroes, or vice versa. Drake and both of the Boroughs, Dee and Davis too, were thoroughly men of their own times. They believed in divine missions, fell out among themselves, committed preposterous errors of judgement and sometimes paid for them. They were committed imperialists, fully intent upon civilising the savages. They did not, in other words, distinguish in the same way as we would between the better and worse applications of the new knowledge. But it is nevertheless clear from their writings, and from those of people closely associated with them, that they did make a distinction of some kind.

  PART TWO

  – Questions Emerge –

  PERVERSE AND QUIBBLING HERETICS

  They sail over the oceans. I’ve nothing against that – but they put their faith in a brass ball called a compass, not in God.

  – The Inquisitor in Brecht’s The Life of Galileo

  Already in 1581, doubts about the recently returned ‘golden knight’ were widespread. Drake offered treasure to Burghley and to others and was rebuffed. Given Drake’s immense wealth and popularity – and on occasion his temper – it is unsurprising that criticisms were muted. Nor perhaps that the most eloquent expression of concern has been overlooked. It is to be found in the preface to Robert Norman’s The Newe Attractive, the book which was bound together with William Borough’s Discours of the Variation. Norman, Borough’s compass-maker, warmly thanks his friend who ‘first gave occasion that I fell into consideration of this question’ and ‘through whose encouragement I entered further into examination of the matter.’

  The Newe Attractive was one of the first purely scientific texts ever written – it is regarded by some as the very first. But it opens with a poem, ‘The Loadstone’s Challenge’, about the purpose of this new knowledge. A ‘lodestone’ was a piece of heavy black stone which was used to re-magnetise the needle in a ship’s compass. A form of iron oxide known today as ‘magnetite’, in this poem it challenges in turn the diamond, the ruby and the sapphire to justify their popularity. They would, the lodestone argues, all be lying at the bottom of ‘Indian seas’ were it not for his, the lodestone’s virtue. ‘I guide the Pilat’s course, / his helping hand am I, / The Mariner delights in me, / so doth the merchant man. / My vertu lies unknowen, / my secretes hidden are …’ He calls upon his flashy rivals to ‘blush then’ and acknowledge him ‘the prince of stones alone.’ Merchant and mariner each respond to this challenge, confessing themselves persuaded: ‘the loadstone is the stone / the onely stone alone …’

  The verse may be jaunty enough but there is a serious point to it, as to the text that follows. The safety of mariners and security of trade routes all depend, this poem argues, on the expert use of something not outwardly glamorous at all. It was only by means of this black pebble that a ship could constantly re-charge its sense of direction. Norman, like Borough, treated navigation as an engrossing science, both fascinating in itself and practically useful. Both he and Borough were artisans or technicians, new men. There are defensive disclaimers about a lack of formal education before he goes straight to the heart of the matter.

  The ancients before him, Pythagoras, Archimedes and others, were:

  carried and ouercome wyth the incredible delight conceiued of their own deuices and inuentions, though they followe partly the peculiar contentation of their priuat fancies, yet they seme chiefly to respect either the glorie of god or the furtheraunce of some public commoditie. Whose good example in this behalf I will indeuour to followe … seeing it hath pleased God to make me the instrument to open thys Noble secret, that his name might be glorified, and the commoditie of my Country procured thereby.

  The ‘incredible delight’ of exercising the power of invention had given us the art of navigation and this art had, in turn, made the English ‘Citizens of the worlde’. All the arguments in this book were grounded ‘onely upon experience, reason and demonstration.’ Norman’s work is informed throughout both by the new scientific rigour and by the excitement of a great collaborative venture.

  He is keenly aware, too, that these breakthroughs are without precedent. As the lodestone offered practical guidance so its properties hint also at ‘Noble secrets’ only now being investigated. The Newe Attractive will ‘set downe a late experimented truth found in this stone’, will reveal a state of understanding greater than that of any ancient authority. He will show that the world is on the brink of a new kind of understanding, about to take us beyond anything dreamed of by the ancients.

  Norman would later expand on his hopes for this emergent discipline. Through navigation ‘we learn the situations, natures, customes and dealings of other countries,’ he wrote. Through trade ‘the need that one man hath for another more cleerely appeareth.’ The new learning, then, is no license to plunder. In taking rubies and sapphires down a peg, his poem unmistakably suggests that alongside such advances in knowledge, the allure of precious stones is not just a little prosaic. It is downright shallow. Other stones are dismissed as ‘glittering s
parks’ that should give way to the outwardly humbler lodestone.

  This is why it should be regarded as the prince of stones. And this is published a year to the day after Drake’s acclaimed and treasure-laden return, by a figure well known to and highly respected by the community of navigators. One of Dee’s closest associates, Adrian Gilbert, owned lodestone mines and the metal is known to have been quarried in Devon, too: these might not have quite the same hold over the public imagination as the silver mines of Potosi or the city of El Dorado, or Philip’s galleons, for that matter, but perhaps, the poem suggests, they should.

  Around the time that Norman’s book appeared, the Queen’s physician, William Gilbert, began to develop and test a theory of his own. It was Gilbert who gave us the word ‘electricity’, but his theory was about magnetism. What if it was not stars or mountains or islands that were responsible for the magnetic field, he asked. What if the earth itself were a magnetically charged sphere, its vast body animated by a magnetic soul? Like Borough and Norman, he was determined that his theory should be backed by solid evidence. Over almost twenty years he sought out anyone who could offer practical insight into how magnetism worked. And the best-informed group he could possibly ask about it were, of course, mariners.

  Gilbert followed up on William Borough’s earlier investigations. He boasts of information about compass behaviour in the southern hemisphere ‘pointed out to me and confirmed by our most illustrious Neptune, Francis Drake.’ But he was particularly curious about observations taken by navigators following the 50th parallel ‘from the Scilly Isles bound for Newfoundland.’ The book he finally published in 1600, De Magnete, or On the Magnet, was the only book he ever wrote. It made him famous all over Europe.

  Johannes Kepler, for one, rated Gilbert as one of the three chief architects of the astronomical revolution, along with Copernicus and Tycho. Kepler even wrote from Venice to tell him so and recommended De Magnete to the man who would be its most sophisticated reader, Galileo Galilei. The greatest astronomer of his age became convinced he had found in Gilbert’s work the physics to back up Copernican mathematics. Magnetism it must be that caused the planets to spin on their axes and magnetism, pervading the universe, shaped their orbits, too.

  Galileo could not praise Gilbert too highly. In the book for which he would be tried by the Inquisition, his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he has ‘the highest praise, admiration and envy’ for Gilbert. He does not doubt that ‘in the course of time this new science will be improved with still further observations’, but this ‘need not diminish the glory of the first observer’. He compares Gilbert’s power of insight with those of Pythagoras and approves of the divine status which the Greeks accorded to their greatest inventors.

  Recall Robert Norman’s determination to emulate the Greeks in the delight they had found in invention. Norman had, intriguingly, drawn just the same parallel between the ‘point’ of scientific breakthroughs now and what they had meant to the ancients. He, too, singled out Pythagoras’ joy at discovering his geometric laws.

  Galileo wrote that Gilbert’s book had led him to ‘a realisation that numberless things in nature remain unknown to the human intellect’, and yet what science was uncovering was ‘not a new thing, but as ancient as the earth itself.’ Compare the sentiments expressed in Norman’s poem about the lodestone and Galileo’s excitement: ‘It seems to me,’ says one of the characters in his Dialogue, ‘that this stone [the lodestone] opens to the human mind a large field for philosophising …’

  When Galileo referred to his own system as ‘the Pythagorean philosophy’ his readers knew that ‘Pythagorean’ was code for believing that the earth went round the sun. The Greeks had speculated about this possibility two thousand years earlier. When Galileo mocks the ‘slavery to one particular writer or another’ from which Gilbert’s approach has liberated him, it is a whole world view he is, implicitly, threatening. Of the Inquisition’s four proofs of Galileo’s guilt, one was that he ‘cites approvingly the opinions of William Gilbert, a perverse and quibbling heretic.’

  That 50th parallel passing just to the north of the Scillies might be extended, then, and re-figured as a liquid line connecting the Newfoundland boats and the Boroughs to William Gilbert and Galileo Galilei and everything that followed from him. Why do we not more often situate the explorers somewhere on that line? To do so is not to whitewash them. Nobody could argue with Drake’s skill, but, as we’ve seen, there were those who did find ways to question or oppose the way he used it.

  How well have we been served by the cult of the cut-throat sea dog? Has it provided us with a useable, grown-up account of these people and the astonishing time through which they lived? One of the first things Drake did upon entering the Pacific was to observe a lunar eclipse. He supplied readings of magnetic variation in the southern hemisphere to a researcher, who in turn became one of the major influences on Galileo Galilei. He discovered open sea to the south of Tierra del Fuego. He did not, of course, any more than Davis did, find open water to the north of North America, but he does seem to have looked for it. To sum up the purpose of this voyage as a ‘pirate expedition’ will not do.

  The object of veneration, a cracked, dull disk, seems a little lost amidst all the celebrations in its honour. It peers dimly from a riot of foliage and ribbons and scientific instruments, all carved in ivory. The inscription reads: ‘The sky opened by the lynx-like thought of Galileo, with this first glass lens he showed stars never seen before…’ The relic, in other words, is the lens through which Jupiter’s moons were first observed. They were moving and they were definitely not orbiting the earth. They were therefore breaking an elementary rule of an astronomical system which had seemed to work for two thousand years.

  Galileo named these planets after Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, and gave him the lens he had seen them through. It is still kept in Florence and I went to see it there on my way down to Rome. Through the account it gives of Galileo, each generation writes anew what the Renaissance and what meaningful dissent have come to mean. His story is an inexhaustible resource. His clarity and courage, but his recantation, too, still hold a terrible fascination.

  He was no plaster saint – that pseudo-reliquary in Florence really gets him completely wrong – but I was looking in the right place at least. Bertolt Brecht wrote The Life of Galileo in 1940 as an exile from Nazi Germany. His Galileo was a ‘believer in the gentle power of reason over men’ and a believer too in the liberating power of the new knowledge. ‘If you want to find the true greatness of ancient Greece, that mighty spirit of enquiry, alive today, go to the shipyards,’ his Galileo enthuses. ‘In the rope and sail shops five hundred hands move in the harmony of a new scheme of things.’ And it’s clear from his Dialogue that the real Galileo did follow Gilbert’s and Borough’s example in questioning mariners about their experiences of navigation.

  For Brecht that ‘power of reason’, that ‘new scheme of things’, which his homeland had so fatefully betrayed, was socialism. A decade later, with the nuclear stand-off between the Cold War superpowers underway, Albert Einstein saw it rather as a question of authority and how it is generated. ‘The leitmotiv which I recognise in Galileo’s work is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority… Actually we are not so far removed from such a situation as we might like to flatter ourselves,’ he wrote in 1952, as hysteria in his adopted homeland over ‘Communist subversives’ was wound up to a new pitch.

  The version of Brecht’s play which I read as a student was still addressing an irrationalism as political as it was scientific. ‘The Cold War … grips minds and distorts reality more fiercely than ever,’ wrote the playwright Howard Brenton in 1980, in his translator’s note. ‘That betrayal three hundred and fifty years ago is still with us … this is a desperately timely play.’ He likened the smuggling of Galileo’s last work out of Italy, with which the play ends, to the smuggling of dissident literature out of communist Eastern Europe.r />
  And the play’s timeliness did not cease with the passing of the Cold War order. When Galileo inveighs against the authorities who ‘hide their machinations from the people by keeping them in a narcotic haze of superstition and old words’, when his lens-grinder inveighs against the great families ‘who order the earth to be still so their castles don’t come tumbling down,’ this story seems as ‘desperately timely’ as ever it was.

  His iron founder, in Brecht’s version, praises him as ‘a man fighting for the freedom to teach new things.’ And so he was. But he was fighting to teach old things a new way, also. Of this Brecht and Brenton between them offer only sly hints. For them his allusions to religion must be ironic. But the Galileo who gave us his interpretation of Psalm 19 was not laughing up his sleeve.

  ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork,’ it begins. Verse 5, in the version Galileo would have known, reads: in sole posuit tabernaculum suum, in the sun He (God) has placed his tabernacle. Such ‘imaginative’ elements may look uninteresting to us, but no account of how modern science came about is complete without them.

  If, Galileo argued, the sun is a tabernacle for the power of God, then the heat and light which radiate from the sun and circulate through the universe, are manifestations of His divine power. When, therefore, in the next verse, the sun is described as being like a ‘bridegroom coming out of his chamber’, rejoicing ‘as a strong man to run a race’, it is the heat and light of solar energy – and the life they bring – which are being described as God-like, not the sun itself.