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This article was downloaded by: [Newcastle University] On: 22 April 2014, At: 05:39 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Mariner's Mirror Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmir20 The Digitization of the Board of Longitude Archives Alexi Baker a a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE Published online: 05 Feb 2014. To cite this article: Alexi Baker (2014) The Digitization of the Board of Longitude Archives, The Mariner's Mirror, 100:1, 73-74, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2014.866376 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2014.866376 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

The Digitization of the Board of Longitude Archives

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This article was downloaded by: [Newcastle University]On: 22 April 2014, At: 05:39Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Mariner's MirrorPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmir20

The Digitization of the Board of LongitudeArchivesAlexi Bakera

a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGEPublished online: 05 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Alexi Baker (2014) The Digitization of the Board of Longitude Archives, The Mariner'sMirror, 100:1, 73-74, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.2014.866376

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2014.866376

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Notes 73

The Digitization of the Board of Longitude Archives

On 18 July 2013 Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees launched the digitized Board of Longitude archives, http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/longitude, at the Cambridge University Library (CUL). This was the result of a JISC-funded collaboration between the CUL, the National Maritime Museum [NMM] and scholars at Cambridge that produced high-resolution scans and searchable transcripts of 48,596 pages of archival material. These include the extant archives of the Board of Longitude, originally held at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and now at Cambridge, and relevant publications and archives from Greenwich including many of the papers of the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811). These provide a rich trove of evidence for historians of a variety of subjects in British and European history including navigation and exploration, science and technology, the rise of imperialism and of government bureaucracy, socio-economics and industrialization, and literary and visual culture.

The site is further enhanced by the addition of contextual essays on specific volumes and on key terminology, including specific individuals and ships as well as technologies and navigational methods, with links to relevant objects and artwork at the NMM. These were written by scholars from the closely associated AHRC-funded project ‘The Board of Longitude 1714–1828: Science, Innovation and Empire in the Georgian World’, http://blogs.rmg.co.uk/longitude/, a collaboration between the NMM and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge headed by Professor Simon Schaffer. Additional features on the site for the general public as well as for scholars include highlighted stories, school resources, and videos.

Until now the Board of Longitude has received limited scholarly attention, with only a small number of authors, including Derek Howse and Eric Forbes, having analysed different aspects of its history and made inroads into the surviving records. Often people’s knowledge of the board is confined to the story of its interactions with the innovative marine clockmaker John Harrison – and then often to

an inaccurate or incomplete version of that story. The Board of Longitude collaborated amicably with Harrison for more than two decades, and it was mainly during the decades after the culmination of his work that it developed into a high-profile standing institution. Its members included many influential individuals, it worked closely with important institutions at home and abroad, and it became a respected authority and funding body not just in Britain but also across Europe.

As I discovered during my post-doctoral research for the two projects at Cambridge, the famous Act of 1714 – which was the first British legislation to address a specific scientific problem – did not actually define a standing institution and certainly not one named ‘the Board’. It instead named influential individuals from relevant sectors as acceptable judges, or ‘Commissioners of Longitude’, to oversee new funding and rewards of up to £20,000 for improved methods of finding the coordinate at sea. The substantial amounts of money being offered quickly rejuvenated the so-called ‘search for the longitude’ that had already been ongoing in Britain and across Europe for centuries. (The decision to offer large new rewards in 1714 seems to have been prompted by a combination of factors including the determined lobbying of reward-seekers William Whiston and Humphry Ditton, the increased importance of international trade to Britain, and more complex influences such as political dynamics.)

In the years following the Act, the individual commissioners continued operating much as they had before with respect to the longitude proposals they received. The Astronomer Royal, for example, remained the single best-known and most oft-approached ‘longitude expert’, as had been the case since the Greenwich Observatory was founded in 1675 specifically to aid in the search. During these earlier decades, many proposals were submitted to individual commissioners and other potential patrons, to influential institutions including the Royal Society and the East India Company, and to publishers. Some were also trialled at sea, including by the Admiralty and with the approval of the Astronomer Royal. The commissioners’ behaviour only began to deviate

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when some began to meet very sporadically from 1737 on. This mainly occurred in response to the great public and institutional interest surrounding John Harrison’s work on marine timekeepers. However, soon the officials communally considered other proposals as well, including those related to the lunar-distance, magnetic variation, and Jovian moon methods of estimating longitude. They also supported other navigationally beneficial activities such as mapping the coasts.

It was mainly from the 1760s on that the individual commissioners increasingly redefined themselves as a standing institution and as one known as ‘the Board of Longitude’. They expanded their activities in response to changing trends in science, technology and navigation and to the interests and connections of key Commissioners including Maskelyne and later Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Their diverse activities, recorded at great length in the archives, included: the development of more affordable marine chronometers than Harrison’s one-offs; the invention and refine ment of the sextant and other scientific instruments; the search for the Northwest Passage; the trigonometric determination of longitude between different locations; out-fitting the new Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope; organizing and staffing diverse voyages of discovery and ‘science’; and searching for improved means of producing optical lenses via the Glass Committee.

As a result of this trajectory, the digitized archives essentially do not include records of the activities of the Commissioners of Longitude before 1737, and only encompass limited records from before the 1760s. It was not until 1762 that the Commissioners requested the money to hire a secretary to produce and to curate their institutional records. From that time on, the records expand to include a dizzying array of materials, from the drier minutiae of the Board’s operations and of longitude and meteorological record-keeping, to vivid textual

and visual records of scientific and exploratory voyages like those of Captain James Cook. The actors brought to life by the pages include all manner of British and foreign scientists and thinkers, artisans and inventors, navigators and explorers, politicians and bureaucrats, and even religious visionaries and sham artists – everyone from the poorest charity-seeker up to the king.

Many discoveries have already been made from these materials about the changing nature of the Commissioners of Longitude and their associates, and about the many activities in which they were involved. These are often mentioned in the volume descriptions and essays on the website. For example, the archives helped me to redefine the commissioners’ earlier history and their relationship with John Harrison, to trace the ways in which Georgian socio-economic networks defined and strengthened the Board, and to tease out fascinating personal stories such as those of the only two women so far known to have participated in the search for the longitude. Other team members have made discoveries of similar impact, with doctoral student Sophie Waring for example redefining the nature of the final years of the Board and of its transmutation in 1828 into a Committee of Longitude consisting of three scientific advisors. We have all seen how for much of the Board’s history, methods of finding longitude including the magnetic variation and especially the lunar-distance were of equal or sometimes greater interest than the chronometric method now automatically assumed to be superior. However, an untold number of discoveries large and small still remain to be made by scholars and by members of the public alike, now that interested individuals around the world can trawl the depths of these rich resources online.

alexi bakeruniversity of cambridge

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2014.866376© The Society for Nautical Research

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