Seventeenth Century Practical Mathematics

Navigation by Greenvill Collins

Paul Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

This exciting Greenvill Collins biography is about seventeenth century navigation, focusing for the first time on mathematics practised at sea. This monograph argues the Restoration kings', Charles II and James II, promotion of cartography for both strategy and trade. It is aimed at the academic, cartographic and larger market of marine enthusiasts. Through shipwreck and Arctic marooning, and Dutch and Spanish charts, Collins evolved a Prime Meridian running through Charles's capital. After John Ogilby's successful Britannia, Charles set Collins surveying his kingdom's coasts, and James set John Adair surveying in Scotland. They triangulated at sea. Subsequently, Collins persuaded James to sustain his dead brother's ambition. This, the British coast's first survey took six years. After James's flight, and William III's invasion, Collins lead the royal yacht squadron for six years more, garnering funds to publish Great Britain's Coasting Pilot. The Admiralty and civic institutions subsidised what became his own pilot. Collins aided Royal Society members in their investigations, and his new guide remained vital to navigators through the century following. Charles's cartographic promotion bloomed the most spectacularly in the atlases of Ogilby, Collins and John Flamsteed for roads, harbours, and stars.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003107668-1

Map Makers

The reign of Charles II is known for his support of science or natural philosophy. Half-way into that reign, Britannia came to dominate his thoughts so much, that he imposed her image onto the smaller coinage. From then on he promoted mapping works, which eventually resulted in three different atlases concerning measurement – perhaps to be considered a Britannic trilogy. Over the course of six years his parliament completed three treaties with the Dutch. Anthony Verrio (1636–1707) celebrated the first treaty in a painting, where he placed Charles above the goddesses of his three kingdoms, with Charles’s foot alighting on Britannia’s shoulder. First, Charles promoted John Ogilby’s (1600–1676) work, which rather quickly resulted in a highly successful road atlas. That was the only part of his tripartite promotion brought to fruition during Charles’s abruptly shortened lifetime. Almost immediately, Charles installed John Flamsteed (1646–1719) at Greenwich to chart stars, whose atlas Flamsteed’s widow published considerably later. Gradually, Charles focussed on Greenvill Collins’s navigation, who in 12 years between those road and star atlases, brought Charles’s vision of a harbour atlas to completion. ¹ In his atlas, Flamsteed featured a little of Collins’s magnetic work, and in his atlas Collins both thanked Flamsteed and featured Ogilby’s roads. Despite Charles being dead by publication of the harbour atlas, and long dead by the star atlas, all three atlas authors’ eulogised Charles’s promotion and celebrated his Britannia idiom.

Until the seventeenth century, British cartography had been piecemeal. A hundred years of former religious turmoil eventually turned political, leading the Parliamentarians’ cartographic patronage to take a wholesale approach. Their shift in mapping allowed the better organisation of the economy, an agrarian one much buttressed by trade. This study stands upon both Restoration kings’ support of practical science, but the study documents and accentuates theirs’ and their nephew William’s roles within cartography, a place which has not been told so far. Towards the sixteenth century’s end, Timothy Pont (fl. 1574–1611) mapped all Scotland over 13 years but did not publish his work. ² Fortunately his manuscripts survived, passing into the hands of Willem Blaeu (1571–1638) in the 1630s, who incorporated much of that work into his major maritime atlas. ³ The invasion of Ireland in the 1640s led eventually to William Petty (1623–1687) undertaking the Down Survey (set down on paper) of that island through the following decade. ⁴ The English coastlines of John Speed’s (1551–1629) The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine from some 70 years earlier, Collins found satisfactory for his survey work. The work of Pont and Petty more fully augmented Speed’s earlier mapping for all three Stuart kingdoms.

While adequate mapping of whole domains was then achieved, the British charting of particular coasts, rivers and harbours continued. Individual area maps often remained in manuscript, but John Seller (1632–1697) usefully collated many into maritime atlases. Two years into the Restoration, the mathematician, Sir Jonas Moore (1617–1679), charted the Thames for the Navy Board. Typically, Seller published that chart without attribution initially but became coerced into appropriate acknowledgement eventually. Compiled from 20 years of captivity there, Robert Knox (1641–1720) published An historical relation of the Island of Ceylon coincident with Collins’s start on the survey. That book and its new Ceylon chart drew widespread attention.

Before Captain James Cook (1728–1779) charted the Dominions, before Astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742) plotted the southern stars and earth’s magnetism, Greenvill Collins charted his kings’ shores. His ignored scientific voyages preceding William Dampier’s (1651–1715) were of practical work that pulled Britain into a hydrographic union. He put charts and sailing directions together by hand, as did Sir Martin Beckman (1635–1702) and Thomas Phillips (d. 1693) of the ordnance board. Collins and John Adair (1660–1718) compiled their separate surveys from the same season, with each giving considerable delay to their wholesale pilots’ publication. With Collins publishing his survey work ten years before Adair and Halley, he influenced both and those following Dutch and French cartographers.

Parts of Navigation

Finding latitude by measuring noon altitude had become an ordinary matter for seventeenth-century ocean navigators. Throughout that century, better instruments and headland positions improved their charts and sailing directions. What ocean voyagers lacked was their longitude out at sea, which was not to come until the century following. To cross an ocean or skirt a coast, the navigator considered two different elements: the maths involved, and the charts and guides to that part of the world. These separate parts of navigation existed long before the seventeenth century. Scholarly and respected histories of navigation show this well, but those histories tail off within this period. The earlier history actually runs on to Captain Cook, whereas the more considerable work terminates in mid-seventeenth century. ⁵ Each history sees navigation as a whole subject without considering these chicken and egg parts, daily calculation and pilot compendiums, as separate entities. Further, when considering the mathematical aspects of navigation, they take the Plutarchian view of Great Lives: who advanced navigation, and when. However, those advances were in cutting-edge maths, much too far ahead of the normal state of navigation practised aboard ship; even an outstanding astronomer only claimed to have calculated longitude at sea towards that century’s end. ⁶ For the first time, this monograph sets out what navigators of the time actually did. Throughout that century European navigators calculated along two different lines: one true for latitude, and a mysterious ‘meridian distance’ substitution for longitude. A growing number of navigators from the Americas were also joining their number. Within the materials from which earlier historians constructed their stories, they had to have witnessed this meridian distance paradigm. Curiously, none mention this peculiarity. That Devon seaman, Greenvill Collins, typified mathematical practitioners calculating navigation across the world. ⁷ Fortunately he fell under the influence of advanced cartography from the century’s early part, leading him into useful experimentation. Almost exclusively, it is successfully completed voyages which provide the available knowledge resource of navigational practice. In marked contrast, Collins provides a spectacular record of an unsuccessful voyage. From that voyage he evolved a new prime meridian, which he ran through the king’s capital city. Consequently, this man of modest rank, perhaps through charisma, came to interact with three crown incumbents and the whole Privy Council for over 12 years towards a mutual aim. The ultimate result was a large portfolio of another part of navigation – the pilot book bearing his name. This comprehensive way-guide, Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, was the first to come about from the first principles of a survey, and the first from native British resources alone. ⁸

Hailed for its accuracy, his pilot endured through a century of 24 re-printings. ⁹ That endurance combined with his now world-dominant prime meridian puts him at the head of British marine cartography. Therefore a biographical assessment of him is necessary. Greenvill had a bad memory. Consequently many notes in the pilot mislead so that it was Collins who beset investigation into his life with irreconciled dates from the start: the introductory matter contradicts, and the survey schedule mislabels. A calendar of his fourth journal appeared in 1896, and a gist of the second appeared in 1928. ¹⁰ Two full journals and two minor publications are further significant texts of his to have since come to light. ¹¹ This investigation grew from the simple strength of independent contemporary clerical records located across the country. ¹² Together, these shifted the viewing stance from that false trail laid down by Collins to one of a firmer foundation from which to investigate his life in archives and on the ground across Europe, Africa and North America. This assessment is the first substantial treatment of this hydrographer’s life and his contribution to navigation.

In separate voyages beyond the Sunda and Magellan Straits, Collins formed part of important attempts to discover trading possibilities, and of the then still extraordinary world of commerce within the furthest of foreign lands. This assessment completes an outline of the earliest period of his career, but still leaves obscure the precise roles that he undertook in those trading voyages beyond distant straits. He entered the navy at the Restoration, becoming a warrant officer in his late 20s – a master’s mate, warring in the third Anglo-Dutch encounter. The subsequent peace released him to the Royal African Company. There in 1676 he eschewed command, in order to sate his lust for adventure and discovery. From then on, hundreds of individual records begin to flesh out Collins’s career and family life and to explain both the survey undertaken and its published results, the pilot for which he is known. While the facts within those records are too terse from which to build a coherent story alone, it is their authority which throws an understanding light onto his sea journals. The first was for another voyage to discover a new route to China and Japan, in a radically different direction, through the North-East Passage of the Russian Arctic. Two Mediterranean voyage journals followed, where the convoying strength of naval artillery protected merchants’ trade from succumbing to Barbary corsairs. He published three short texts during the survey work. From the Glorious Revolution’s quick months came his fourth journal; and the pilot forms his eighth text, published under the Grand Alliance of Great Britain and the States General. Unlike the monotonous, routine daily entries that most of his contemporaries inserted into their journals, Collins took pride in his accounts. His navigation notes are easy for readers to follow. He effused about what he saw and did, compiling sailing directions as he went. Beautiful sea-scapes, harbour plans and unique charts fill his journals completely. That resultant high quality allows a look at the two discovery voyages together, an exposition of his circle’s mathematical ability and his own navigation method. A warrant officer’s place within convoy work was normally rather hum-drum; but his journals rise above that of a tarpaulin to that of a gentleman’s wonder at climbing Vesuvius, contemplating Troy or Troas-Alexandria and witnessing earthquake damage travails in Malaga. His account of these subjects is early and of good quality. Those three journals for foreign parts are full of what he considered exotic. The fourth, written during William’s invasion, is a straightforward account by a naval master, invaluable because of its non-political record of events, set out in the sequence that they unfurled. In his known 34-year career, he adventured the world’s extent and became the hydrographer royal. From first gaining King Charles’s promotion, he retained crown support into James’s reign, which came to a useful head in William and Mary’s reign. He brought Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the navy and civic institutions around the country to bestow their patronage on him. Together, they sustained two equally large works: his hydrographic survey and subsequent feat of complex atlas publication. Attention to the science of hydrography came from the first English waggoner, whereas his combined portfolio of sailing directions and sea charts spring-boarded the rise of British hydrography: the science of mapping the seas and codifying their navigation. ¹³

Needful Assessment

Another navigational writer from the West Country, Samuel Sturmy (1633–1669), preceded Collins in two more ways: he engaged William Fisher (fl. 1669–1693) as bookseller and descended a particular Gloucestershire pot-hole. For Sturmy, that pot-hole descent became fatal. Despite the obvious danger, Collins followed on from Sturmy and investigated. Therefore it seems likely that Collins wittingly chose that same bookselling company for his main work, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Dates and Conventions
• List of abbreviations
• Navigation Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Navigation and Seamanship
• 3 Sailing-Master Making
• 4 Sights Ashore
• 5 Curriculum to Survey
• 6 Surveying
• 7 Dedicatees and Subscribers
• 8 Atlas Manufacture
• 9 Matter Bound and Unbound
• 10 Pilot Influence
• 11 Yacht Squadron Leader
• 12 Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index