Book reviews: Nevil Maskelyne: the seaman's astronomer

Abstract

Derek Howse, Nevil Maskelyne: the seaman's astronomer . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 280, £40.00. ISBN 0-521-36261-X. In King Charles II the Royal Society and the Royal (Greenwich) Observatory share the same royal founder. For just short of three centuries they were intimately associated; between 1710 and 1965 the association was established by Royal Warrants that appointed the Society’s President and certain Fellows to serve as Visitors of the Observatory. This arrangement operated admirably, particularly during the time with which this book is concerned. The Observatory had been founded in 1675 to provide the astronomical information required ‘to find the so-much- desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation’. Then, presumably because practical results were still lacking, a Longitude Act of 1714 offered huge monetary rewards - for those times - for ‘a proper method of finding the said longitude’. The Act set up a Board of Longitude to administer its provisions. Subsequent Acts modified these, but the Board as such remained in being for 114 years. It was a high-powered body which included the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Speaker of the House of Commons as well as the President of the Royal Society and the Astronomer Royal: another important link between those two persons. Any significant award required the approval of the Commons; in some major cases they were swayed apparently by sentiment rather than science to act against the Board’s advice. It fell to the Astronomer Royal to organize the exacting tests prescribed by the Act. Thus the work of the Board was for long a large additional burden upon him.