It's so in-tents

03 Oct 2012

This post is about sort-of an object, but not one that really survives. In planning for a small exhibition on the art and science of exploration (which will probably happen in 2014), we've been looking at some of the drawings and prints produced by the official artists on British voyages of exploration from the 1770s onwards. Once you start looking at these, you begin to see little tents cropping up in corners and backgrounds, as in this detail of a coloured print of Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, by John Webber from Cook's third voyage:

and this image of Observatory Inlet from the published account of George Vancouver's voyage of 1791-95.

These are all portable tent observatories and were crucial to the work of the expeditions' astronomers, who needed to set up their larger instruments on land to make accurate observations. Here's another couple of examples from Cook's third voyage, one by Webber, this time a drawing of Nootka Sound in what is now British Columbia:

the other a drawing of Tahiti by William Webb Ellis, a surgeon's mate on the same voyage:

A slightly different style of tent had been designed by John Smeaton for Cook's first voyage, but it was for the second voyage that William Bayly, one of the astronomers , came up with what became the standard design for future expeditions. It cost £25 and was praised by his fellow astronomer on the voyage, William Wales, as 'one of the most convenient portable observatories that has yet been made'. Big enough to hold the larger clocks and instruments when erected, it could apparently be packed away and put in a box 'six feet and nine inches long, and about twenty inches square'. This is the image of the observatory from Wales and Bayly's published observations of 1777:

They mostly seem to have been very successful and well travelled, although Eóin has come across a complaint. In 1802, Matthew Flinders wrote to Nevil Maskelyne that ‘a great obstruction to our operation’ was that the small size of the portable observatory meant that the theodolite and clock had to stand in different tents, while the tent’s canvas ‘was rotten and full of holes’, as a result of ‘the little room in the ship, which obliged us to take the parts out of the cases and stow them separately in different places’. This in part explains why the tents don't survive, although in 1968 the National Maritime Museum did build a replica:

This is still in store somewhere, so don't be surprised if you see it again in a couple of years time.