The era in which British, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and other sailors first circumnavigated the Earth, and then carved it into commercial and political domains, continues to fascinate. These two books articulate it in very different ways. One is a narrative focused upon a particular technical problem of the "era of expansion", while the other covers many centuries of attempts to map the oceans that were to be sailed by the explorers, soldiers, missionaries, slaves and cargoes of that age.
Dava Sobel's story is familiar to the cognoscenti. A skilled navigator can use star sightings to give a fairly accurate latitude for a ship at sea - its position north or south. But there is no such means to find longitude - how far east or west one is - without knowing the time. The issue came to a head in 1707 when four of Sir Clowdisley Shovell's five ships hit rocks off the Scillies and sank, with a loss of 2,000 lives. At a meeting of his navigators shortly before, there had been a consensus that the ships were near Brittany. Sir Clowdisley had a sailor hanged for insubordination when he suggested the fleet's correct position. Sir Clowdisley was washed ashore alive, but a local murdered him on the beach for his ring .
One lesson of Sobel's narrative is how slowly things moved 300 years ago. Instead of media outrage, instant inquiries and reforms, it took Parliament seven years to pass the Longitude Act, setting up the Board of Longitude and offering Pounds 20,000 to solve the longitude problem. The story ends in 1773, almost 70 years after the ships went down, and the board lasted until 1828.
Sobel tells the story of the intervening discoveries, debates and wrangles with rare style. Her book, beautifully printed in an intriguing page size, is the fruit of long enthusiasm and much scholarship. Like Chaos, it is written by a science journalist and grew out of a magazine article, in this case in the Harvard alumnus magazine.
Today, you can buy a watch adequate for navigation in Dixons and have change from Pounds 20, but in 1714 it was by no means evident that technology was the answer. No clock then in use was accurate enough even before it was placed on one of His Majesty's ships for a stormy trip to the Indies.
Instead, the Board was dominated by scientists, including the astronomer royal, John Flamsteed, a clutch of professors, and the president of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton. They were friends of scientific rather than engineering approaches. The clockwork of the heavens seemed a likelier route to success than the human sort. Flamsteed and his successor, Edmund Halley, spent decades observing the position of the moon in the night sky to produce tables that might allow sailors on distant seas to tell the time. Other methods included observing the satellites of Jupiter, a tactic that would be doomed for at least six months of the year.
The board considered some even less probable approaches. One, developed by Sir Kenelm Digby, involved his "powder of sympathy", which had the property of healing wounds at a distance. Thus, dipping a bandage from a wound in the powder would cause the wound to heal - but would also cause pain which would make the victim react. What could be more simple for time-telling? Take a wounded dog on your round-the-world trip, leave its bandage behind, and every day at noon have someone in London dip it in powder of sympathy. The dog leaps in pain, and your time-check is complete.
The real solution lay not with these worthies but with John Harrison, who had never been near a university and whose intellectual origins are arcane. By the age of 20, he had built a clock which is still on show at the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in London. Like two clocks he finished in 1715 and 1717, this was made almost entirely of wood, including its wheels and axles.
Harrison arrived in London in 1730 to find the Board of Longitude dormant, and Halley convinced that astronomy was the answer. The first clock Harrison designed for the Pounds 20,000 prize was taken up reluctantly. It worked well on a voyage to Lisbon - but the money was only payable for a trip to the West Indies. The second one, in 1741, also worked, but Harrison went away to improve on it. The collision of official indifference and time-wasting perfectionism is reminiscent of Charles Babbage a century later, almost but not quite producing a working computer before tiring of it and moving on to the next.
But it was astronomers' hostility, especially that of astronomer royal Nevil Maskelyne, that was the real barrier to acceptance of the increasing accuracy of the Harrison "chronometer". Every device from sloth to vandalism was employed to avoid the truth.
In the end, the problem was solved the way any good fairy tale should be, by the intervention of a benign king. George III may have gone mad, but he knew about science. When he heard of the indignities suffered by John Harrison and his son and collaborator William he said: "These people have been cruelly treated", adding: "By God, Harrison, I will see you righted."
Fresh trials began at the king's observatory - and the clock stopped working properly. Despite this, Harrison got his Pounds 20,000, the final instalment arriving in 1773, 66 years after Sir Clowdisley ran aground.
The story that Sobel tells with such skill takes up just two paragraphs of Peter Whitfield's book, which must be counted the least successful of the three he has written for the British Library on cartographic history. Whitfield tells his story as one in which Europeans discovered and mapped the world. The Chinese who arrived in East Africa long before the Europeans do not get a look in. Nor do the Inuit who made lengthy Arctic voyages of discovery this century.
Most extraordinary is the treatment of Polynesian migrations in the south Pacific, where people are said to have had an "instinctive" ocean chart in their minds - rather as black people were once said by whites to have "instinctive" skills at football or music. Yet the book reproduces a picture of a highly coherent native map of the Marshall Islands, obviously drawn with practised skill that Europeans have failed to understand.
Even so The Charting of the Oceans fills a serious gap in the literature, showing how useful sea charts became available for the whole world from their start in the Mediterranean, with new techniques and information flowing as commercial demands multiplied. As maps, they supplanted verbal documents describing sea routes in terms of colouring and other unreliable indicators.
The book is illustrated with well-chosen examples including charts showing the Galapagos at the time of Darwin's arrival, Sevastapol in the Crimean War, the Skagerrak at the battle of Jutland and the North Cape when the Scharnhorst was sunk.
In the modern era, Whitfield shows, technology allows us to see the distribution of ocean plankton or the height of the sea during a monsoon. Charts are usually highly accurate, and satellite navigation is so perfect that it gives different results depending on you put the antenna on the ship.
But such devices do not make the sea more trustworthy. In 1967, the radar-equipped Torrey Canyon, laden with over 100,000 tonnes of oil, hit almost the same rocks as those that sank Sir Clowdisley. In other cases, complacency induced by radar has been blamed for collisions. Technology increases our knowledge, and maybe our wonder, but the sea is a place where knowledge does not equal control.
Martin Ince is deputy editor, The THES.
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Author - Dava Sobel
ISBN - 1 85702 502 4
Publisher - Fourth Estate
Price - £12.00
Pages - 184
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