Many historiographies have struggled to shake a persistent, overarching characterization that seems to (mis)shape the study of the field of inquiry. The Black Legend of Spanish history is perhaps the most well-known example. For the history of navigation, the tenacious and reductive interpretation remains that of the lone genius. Popularized most famously by Dava Sobel, this interpretation holds that John Harrison’s ingenious chronometers, forged in the face of considerable adversity and animosity, single-handedly solved the longitude problem. As with most histories, this story is hardly the entire story. The authors and editors of Navigational Enterprises in Europe and Its Empires hope to overturn the prevalence of the lone genius interpretation. By expanding the geographic and thematic scope of their investigation, the essays examine how various individuals, institutions, and states took on what was one of the most significant challenges of their time: how to calculate one’s position on the globe accurately.
Higgitt and Dunn explain in their brief introduction that the history of navigation has long been overshadowed not just by Harrison, but by a more general British focus. To counter this, they want to “insist on plurality” to emphasize non-British elements to the longitude story while also zeroing in on how methods of calculating longitude were used in practice on land and at sea (1). These methods included mechanical solutions like timekeepers, but also astronomical approaches. Different methods got utilized—sometimes simultaneously—depending on the political, social, intellectual, and practical context of a situation. Whatever the specific context, cracking the longitude problem was a transnational effort, with people and ideas influencing one another across borders.
The volume grew out of the University of Cambridge and National Maritime Museum (Greenwich)-hosted and AHRC-funded Board of Longitude project, which digitized and analysed the Board’s papers and ran several events to discuss the broader history of longitude prizes and solutions. The essays in this volume were curated over three years from three different occasions to ensure diversity of subject, source, and geographic coverage.
Each of the four sections reinforces an element of the overall thesis. The first section, with four essays, focuses on national enterprises other than the British to show how other states and institutions approached the longitude problem. The reader learns of efforts by the Spanish, Dutch, and French to support research, invention, and instruction at the same time as the British Board of Longitude was assessing submissions for its prestigious prize. Juan Pimentel’s essay on Spanish attempts to embed a more systematic approach to navigation and cartography, which had largely failed by the 1820s, is richly detailed. Martina Schiavon overviews the French Bureau des Longitudes, one of the only institutions discussed in the volume that is still active. She explains what can be learned from the newly-digitized minutes of the Bureau, a source bank that other scholars will no doubt be interested in accessing.
The second section presents case studies to underline the transnational nature of navigational research and practice. The authors discuss a Swedish savant and sometime-spy in London, the reciprocal relationship between the Russian and Royal Navies, and the fascinating history of metrology within geodesy. All three emphasize that imperial or national competition did not supersede individual and institutional cooperation. Additionally, all three highlight the critical role of personal trust and admiration in the circulation of navigational knowledge.
If posited at the same time, how can both astronomical and mechanical solutions to the longitude problem be tested? Section three seeks to answer this question with a pair of essays focused on the specific voyages that tested chronometers and lunar distance tables. Both are French examples, to offer a counterbalance to the literature on British test voyages. John Gascoigne’s attention to the Pacific leads the reader to reflect on the geography of longitude as well as its history, as particular sites—Greenwich, Paris, but also the Madras Observatory and the entire Pacific Ocean—are important to the longitude story.
Finally, section four focuses on navigation. Although the history of navigation is mostly concerned with the finding of workable solutions, it is just as important to ask how, where and when these solutions were put into effect. Both essays challenge ideas of quick or uniform adoption of either chronometers or lunar distance tables. Jane Wess explains that the difficulties of the maths involved in lunar distance calculations were more considerable than usually assumed (and more complex than their proponents would have had their contemporaries believe). Evidence from ships logs suggests that the Royal Navy was not using lunar distance until the early nineteenth century, except on elite voyages of exploration. David Philip Miller agrees that adoption of new methods was not smooth, uniform, or immediate. He finds that, although chronometers were present, the East India Company did not regularly use them, and most navigators adopted a mixed-use strategy of dead reckoning, chronometers, and lunar distance to discern their longitude. Measuring longitude was a “contingent act” (224).
Miller explains in the final essay that neither technological determinism (of a single instrument like the chronometer) nor single method determinism (of a solution like lunar distance) is a satisfactory way to look at the history of longitude and navigation. This conclusion applies to the entire volume, which stresses transnational networks, trust, practicality, and exigence over intellectual purity and absolutes. While the book is not a primer on the history of navigation, it is a vital supplement for those interested in navigation specifically, but also to historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science and technology more broadly. It is an excellent example of the wide-ranging yet rigorous approach necessary to historicize an intellectual and practical challenge like the longitude problem, as such challenges seldom respect the confines of territorial borders.
