Rehabilitating Nevil Maskelyne - Part One: Reassessing the accusations

09 Feb 2011

Today is the bicentennial of the death of Nevil Maskelyne (6 October 1732 - 9 February 1811), who was much admired in his own time but has been unfairly reduced in recent years to the arch villain in the tale of John Harrison's invention of the marine chronometer. As I'll be discussing in this four-part series of posts, the bulk and perhaps the whole of these accusations against Maskelyne and his fellow Commissioners of Longitude are almost certainly untrue. They also obscure the long and storied career of a champion of, and innovator in, subjects including navigation, astronomy, cartography, geodesy and institutional reform.

Part One: In praise of Nevil Maskelyne, and reassessing the Harrisons' accusations
Part Two: Why lunar-distance?
Part Three: 'Cultural' differences and the Commissioners' conflict with the Harrisons
Part Four: The Harrisons' issues with Maskelyne, and Conclusions

Early in his career, Maskelyne was central to the reorganization of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where previously Astronomers Royal had refused to make the results of their observations public and sometimes let the buildings and instruments fall into disrepair. During his own 46-year tenure as Astronomer Royal and thus as a Commissioner, Nevil was the driving force behind navigational and astronomical innovations including the foundation and advance publication of the Nautical Almanac. A number of his Astronomical Assistants at Greenwich went on to participate in geodetic and astronomical expeditions in their own right due to his teaching and influence, something which never happened under the previous Astronomers Royal. The astronomer and Joseph Banks were the longest serving and most influential of the later Commissioners as well, and the former was given the responsibility for an unbelievable amount of the officials' activities, judgements and practical arrangements.

Maskelyne was also deeply involved in the activities of the Royal Society, for example publishing an unusually high number of articles in its Philosophical Transactions (more than 50) and helping it and the Commissioners to organize famous voyages of exploration and early science including those made by James Cook (left). This is only a 'taster', really, of the many things which the astronomer accomplished during his jam-packed and relatively long life. He was involved with a wider variety of activities than I have time to mention here and participated in expansive global networks of colleagues and friends.

Today I will explain some of the fallacies behind the modern view of Nevil Maskelyne and of the Commissioners of Longitude in general as corrupt, prejudiced and/or unintelligent and uninsightful with regards to their treatment of the Harrisons. This view, which as been put forth by some modern authors including Dava Sobel, is not accurate but has unfortunately come to define the astronomer and his colleagues in the public consciousness. There is so far no evidence that it was true beyond the Harrisons' later accusations. There are a number of factors that are far more likely to have influenced the decisions and actions of  Maskelyne and the other Commissioners, and to have contributed to the discord that existed between they and the clockmakers by the 1760s and 1770s (as we've already discussed a bit in comments on other posts).

It's certainly possible that some well-born or well-educated Commissioners did privately hold snobbish feelings towards the 'rough and uneducated provincial genius' John Harrison, as has sometimes been suggested to great dramatic effect. However, there is so far no evidence that this greatly influenced the treatment of Harrison and his inventions, and especially in the case of Nevil Maskelyne. The perception that it did often stems from far more attention being paid to the Harrisons' emotional and verbose public statements and accusations than to the whole of the surviving records related to these events.

In fact, the majority of the scholars who have examined the eighteenth-century search for the longitude in-depth believe that the Harrisons' accusations of prejudice, plotting, sabotage and so on, on the part of Maskelyne and the other Commissioners were mostly or even wholly untrue. For example, Derek Howse and Humphrey Quill both concluded that the Astronomer Royal conducted the trials of Harrison's watch 'H4' at the Greenwich observatory fairly, rather than sabotaging them or misrepresenting results as has been suggested. Maskelyne could have given the clockmakers some more leeway in his interpretation of the results, but that he did not do so was probably not due to ill intent or severe prejudice. Howse, Quill and other authors do not believe that the astronomer had a deeply seated antagonism towards the Harrisons at all, never mind allowing such an emotion to impact the conduct of his positions at Greenwich and as a Commissioner - although he was no doubt offended by the increasingly serious accusations that they lobbed against him in later decades. Maskelyne (pictured below) was in fact one of the people who proposed John Harrison's son William for election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765, despite the working tensions that then existed between them.

It also seems unlikely that prejudice or ill will was what prevented the Commissioners of the Longitude from giving Harrison one of the official longitude rewards established by the Act of 1714 - although again, they no doubt grew increasingly irritated as the Harrisons cast verbal and printed aspersions upon their intellectual abilities and moral fibre during the 1760s and 1770s. The majority of them seemed to have truly believed that the clockmaker had not yet fulfilled the requirements of the original and later Acts because he had not proved that his inventions could be reproduced for widespread use rather than being brilliant one-offs, just as surely as the Harrisons believed that they did not have to prove this and that they should have already been given the largest longitude reward years before. When John first petitioned Parliament asking for satisfaction, he was not able to convince the majority of MPs that the Commissioners had not followed the 'letter of the law'. His second petition successfully sought recompense despite those laws, in light of his brilliant innovations, years of dedicated work, and advanced age.

Nevil Maskelyne insisted when writing much later in 1800 that, 'He always allowed Mr. Harrison's great merit, as a genius of the first rate, who had discovered, of himself, the causes of the irregularities of watches, and pointed out the means of correcting these errors in a great degree, in the execution of a portable time-keeper, of a moderate size, to be put on board of ship, not liable to disturbance from the motions of the ship, and exact enough to keep time within two minutes in six weeks. He made no opposit[ion] to Parliament granting him the remainder of the reward of £20,000; but only to the Board of Longitude doing it; as he had not submit[ted] to trials [i.e. as dictated by the related legislation], and those sufficient to enable the Board to give it to him according to the terms of the Act.'

To find out why Maskelyne and the Commissioners of Longitude had good reasons to encourage the improvement of the lunar-distance method as well as that of Harrison's chronometers, read Part Two of 'Rehabilitating Nevil Maskelyne' tomorrow.


Picture credits: Portrait of Capt James Cook by Nathaniel Dance © NMM BHC2628; engraving of Nevil Maskelyne, Wikimedia Commons.