Sly looks and slow take-up

26 Jun 2011

For the past couple of days the project team has been at a conference on Joseph Banks, which was held at the National Maritime Museum.

For various reasons, I ended up giving a paper there on the later life of the Board of Longitude, in which I tried to emphasise the dominance of Banks and Nevil Maskelyne in the affairs of the Board. If you want to hear some more incisive work on the Board's later history, however, you should go to the BSHS Annual Conference in a few weeks time.

Fortunately, I found one great quote to begin my talk with. It was particularly interesting because it tied in nicely with an earlier blog about the nature and location of Board meetings in which I used an account by William Harrison (John Harrisons' son) of a meeting in the 1760s.

Inspired by reading Greg Dening's wonderful The Death of William Gooch, I had a look at Gooch's original letters to his parents, which have lots about his appointment as astronomer to George Vancouver's voyage to the north-coast of America and his voyage to meet that expedition. Sadly, he was killed on Hawaii before meeting up with Vancouver's ships.

The piece I found was written to his parents on 11 June 1791 as he sat in the Admiralty Office waiting to be called in to a Board meeting to have his appointment confirmed:
 

The Board of Longitude are now met an[d] I'm now in an antechamber expecting to be call'd in, in a few minutes... Dr. Maskelyne will receive my salary for me (by power of attorney) during my absence, & he tells me he will order & make the best use of it for me; which I thought was a very kind offer. - Just before I began I saw & spoke to Dr. Smith. - Sr. Jos. Banks pass'd me just before that, & gave me a sly look as if he had been inform'd that I was the Person to be appointed. - however they will all be inform'd presently.

Dr Smith, incidentally, was the Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford.

There were also lots of interesting papers at the conference, two of which I got particularly excited about.

The first was by Jane Wess of the Science Museum, who showed through very careful research that the lunar distance method seems to have been very little used in the late-18th century. The main reason, she argued, is that it was just so complicated to do - a fair point. The evidence she produced was absolutely convincing, and it's certainly a really important point to bear in mind. We hope she publishes her work soon.

A second fascinating paper was by Jacob Orrje from Uppsala University and the University of Cambridge. He was talking about a Swedish astronomer, Bengt Ferrner, who came to London in 1759-60 and wrote a diary of the trip. This included meeting many of the leading astronomers, mathematicians and instrument-makers of the day. As well as going to see John Harrison  (although he didn't say much about that), he paid a visit to the workshop of Jeremiah Sisson, where he saw Christopher Irwin's marine chair, designed for viewing the satellites of Jupiter on board a ship. Ferrner, however, seems to have been worried about the stability of Irwin's device - rightly, as it turned out. I hope we'll have more to say about that in a future blog. More importantly, it would be great to see Jacob do something with this wonderful primary material.