CHAPTER 28

Navigation

THE PROBLEM OF NAVIGATION

NAVIGATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY was an eclectic combination of science, astrology and pure guess-work. Crucially, there was no means of determining longitude; this culminated in the catastrophe of 1707, when one of the most successful officers of the age, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, and 2,000 of his men lost their lives when his fleet ploughed onto the Isles of Scilly. But aside from such high-profile catastrophes, command of navigation was often sketchy. Even long-serving masters and tarpaulin captains frequently and literally lost their bearings, mistaking prominent headlands in home waters or taking entirely wrong courses; the veteran Sir Thomas Allin and his master once mistook the Lizard for Land’s End.1 These blunders can be explained in part by the rigid geographical demarcations that were applied to the training of ships’ masters. They were certified by Trinity House as competent to take charge of ships in named areas of sea, and were reluctant to sail in waters with which they were unfamiliar; men often exchanged their posts with others who were better acquainted with the ship’s destination, but all too often the imperative to remain in employment meant that masters (and frequently captains too) were in charge of vessels in seas with which they were not familiar.²

Sir Cloudesley Shovell. The loss of Shovell and part of his fleet on the Scillies in 1707 was one of the worst disasters in naval history.

Even the waters which masters and captains should have known like the backs of their hands could pose problems. The vast sandbanks of the Thames estuary were treacherous and constantly shifting, while the tide flowed quickly and had a substantial range. Trinity House did not always survey the sands and reposition the buoys, as it was meant to do, and in any case the buoys (of which there were thirteen in 1653) were removed in wartime to confuse the enemy and enforce embargoes on merchant shipping.³ In such circumstances even the most experienced pilots and naval officers often mistook their bearings and took the wrong course: in 1672 the entire fleet overshot the King’s Channel because of an error by the pilot on the flagship.⁴ Masters were sometimes reluctant to retain control of navigation in what they regarded as ‘pilot water’, where an error might easily lose the ship and their careers with it, but pilots were sometimes of a poor standard, and several ships were lost within sight of the Kent or Essex coasts because of‘pilot error’.⁵ Conversely, pilots might be equally reluctant to take charge of warships, where captains might decide to treat them like pressed men and detain them indefinitely.⁶ In 1667 one captain tried to get round this by not hoisting his naval colours, but as soon as the pilot came alongside and discovered what ship it was, he tried to get away.⁷ Most pilots were certified by Trinity House, but the Cinque Ports maintained the right to appoint their own (the ‘fellowship of lodemanage’), and there were several clashes between the two jurisdictions.⁸

THE MATHEMATICAL SCHOOL

In 1673, at Pepys’s instigation, a Mathematical School was set up within Christ’s Hospital and funded by a grant of £1,000 a year from the king. This was intended directly to address the shortcomings of contemporary navigation by training forty boys specifically in that discipline, and a mathematician named Leake was appointed as master. By 1677, though, it was clear that Leake’s teaching was wholly inadequate, that the pupils were shockingly below the expected standard in numeracy and literacy and that they were effectively out of control. As a remedy, Pepys proposed a regime of inspections and testing; plus ça change. This failed to achieve the desired results, for by 1681 the boys were being taught by a loose-living drunk and spent most of their time playing football or simply dozing. When a new master was appointed in 1682 on the grounds that he was a good Latinist, even though he knew nothing of the sea, Pepys gave up the struggle.9 He was briefly involved in the school’s activities once more in the 1690s, when he and Sir Isaac Newton disagreed about the future direction of the school, but by then it was clear (to Pepys, at any rate) that the foundation had not really achieved the high hopes expected of it, and he remained deeply gloomy about the state of navigation in general.¹⁰ Even so, the Royal Mathematical School survived as a part of Christ’s Hospital, and forty places are still set aside to fulfil the original terms of the 1673 charter.¹¹

VOYAGES OF EXPLORATION

The great age of English exploration was long over, but two significant expeditions were mounted during the reign of Charles II. In 1669 Captain John Narbrough sailed for South America to investigate potential new trade routes, becoming in the process only the second English captain (after Drake) to pass through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific. He had two royal warships, the Fifth Rate Sweepstakes and the Bachelor Pink, although he lost contact with the latter while they were still in the Atlantic. At Valdivia, Narbrough had a dispute with the local Spanish garrison; four of his men had to be left behind, including his lieutenant, who married a local woman and was executed for treason some fourteen years later. This setback made Narbrough abandon his original intention of sailing on to California, and he turned for home, reaching England in June 1671. Although the voyage was an unprofitable failure, it produced an informative journal, published in 1695, which contained Narbrough’s descriptions of the lands that he visited and the native tribes that the expedition encountered.¹² In 1676 Charles II informed his Admiralty commission that he intended to send another Fifth Rate, the Speedwell, on a voyage to discover the North-East Passage. The Speedwell, commanded by John Wood, was to be accompanied by the Prosperous Pink, set out by a group of private adventurers keen on enriching themselves from the discovery of a new route to the wealth of the Indies; one of the adventurers was the secretary to the Admiralty, Samuel Pepys, who was largely responsible for setting up the whole project.¹³ The expedition got no further than Novaya Zemlya, where the Speedwell was lost. Her ship’s company was rescued with great difficulty by the captain and crew of the Prosperous, and the investors got little of their money back.¹⁴

CHARTS

For most of the seventeenth century, navigators depended overwhelmingly on Dutch charts, known as ‘waggoners’ after Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, whose sea manual was published in English in 1588 as The Mariner’s Mirror.¹⁵ Including sailing directions as well as charts, this became the basis for many later manuals. But the information that ‘waggoners’ included was often out of date or inaccurate: Pepys noted how the predominantly Dutch charts on which British navigators relied put Scilly ten minutes further north than it should have been, and disagreed about the longitude of the islands by ten leagues,‘by which our ships have been always to this day exposed to ruin, and infinitely more have miscarried than were ever heard of to have done so’.¹⁶ The journals of John Narbrough, a notably competent officer, contain many corrections to errors in the extant charts. In 1672 he found that the Dogger Bank was eight leagues more northerly than the charts suggested, and that all the soundings they gave for it were wrong. Similarly, all the headlands along the east coast of England were shown in the charts to be several minutes more southerly than Narbrough found them to be by observation.¹⁷ In 1671 a new set of charts by John Sellers effectively obtained a royal monopoly which prohibited their reproduction for thirty years, banning the import of Dutch waggoners in the process, but Sellers’s work still contained many errors.¹⁸ Consequently, in 1680 Greenville Collins was chosen to carry out a systematic survey of the coasts of the British Isles. Collins had been the sailing master on both Narbrough’s and Wood’s expeditions, and subsequently served in the Mediterranean, where he produced two superb journals that provide ample testimony to his skill as a navigator.¹⁹ He took command of the Merlin Yacht in 1681 and began seven years’ work, during which time he was appointed hydrographer to both the king and Trinity House, partly through the instigation of Charles II’s son the Duke of Grafton (vice-admiral of England from 1683), with whom Collins had served in the Mediterranean in 1680–1. The survey of England and Scotland was published in 1693 as Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, and was republished at intervals throughout the eighteenth century.²⁰

COMPASSES

Compasses were contained in a binnacle on the quarterdeck. The binnacle found on the wreck of the Swan, which sank at Duart Point in 1653, comprised three compartments, and was typical of the period; each of the two outer compartments contained a compass, so that the steersman could view it regardless of the position of the whipstaff, while the middle one contained a lantern to allow the compass faces to be seen at night.21 The brass bowl containing the compass needle was gimballed to keep the compass level, regardless of the ship’s movements. Ships carried several replacement compasses (a First Rate of 1688 carried twelve). Azimuth compasses, which had the rim of the compass box graduated in degrees, were available, but as yet seem to have been little used in warships; instead, bearings could be taken by fitting an azimuth ring to an ordinary compass and then looking through the sighting holes in two vertical pieces of brass that rose from the ring, the larger of which had a piece of cat-gut stretched down its centre.²² The first English tables of the Sun’s amplitude, which permitted compasses to be corrected at sunrise or sunset, was published in 1664.²³ The helmsman recorded the course steered on a traverse board; this showed all thirty-two points of the wind, and pins were stuck in it to show the number of glasses sailed on a particular point of the compass.²⁴

Part of the east coast, from Whitby to north of the Tyne; from Waghenaer’s Mariner’s Mirror of 1588.

The lighthouse at Tynemouth, as it was in the latter part of the seventeenth century (with the remains of the priory and castle to the right).
(© TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

SEAMARKS, BUOYS AND LIGHTS

There were a number of dedicated seamarks around the coasts of the British Isles. One of the best known was Gilkicker, a white tower south of Gosport, erected in the middle of the century. This had a ‘backmark’ called Kickergill; if kept in line, the two markers provided a safe transit through the Solent. Like all the others, though, it was not always kept in good repair.²⁵ Ships’ journals of the period show that church towers provided some of the best seamarks on the coast, particularly along the long, featureless east coast of England. Reculver’s twin towers acted as a guide to ships passing up or down the north Kent coast, and the tall towers of Southwold, Covehithe and Walberswick churches aided ships in Solebay. Bearings were also taken on prominent coastal castles and forts, such as Orford, Southsea and Walmer, where a useful windmill just to the south of the castle could be used as an alternative.26 Groups of trees, or even prominent single trees, were sometimes used as seamarks, and Pepys criticised their uncontrolled felling.²⁷ Similar techniques could be employed on the equally featureless shore across the North Sea. During the Anglo-Dutch wars, journals show that captains and masters relied heavily on the most prominent church towers on the Dutch shore, such as Westkapelle, Egmond and ’s-Gravezande.²⁸ Matters were easier in the Channel. where ships usually navigated from headland to headland, getting their bearings from the likes of Dungeness, Beachy Head, Start Point, Rame Head and the Lizard.

The representation in Greenvile Collins’ Coasting Pilot of part of the same coastline shown in Waghenaer; the greater detail and accuracy of Collins’ version is immediately apparent.

Covehithe Church. Like several other large churches along the Suffolk and Essex coasts, its prominent tower served as an important seamark.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)

Although Trinity House had the power to erect lighthouses, it was unable to finance them, so in practice they were built by private speculators; in 1669, for instance, Sir John Clayton was given a licence to build lighthouses on the north-east coast, and in 1674 Justinia Angell set up lights on Spurn Point at the mouth of the Humber.²⁹ In 1664 Pepys’s colleague Sir William Batten obtained a patent for two lighthouses at Harwich, and these proved very lucrative for him.³⁰ Lighthouses were politically controversial, partly because the grants to private speculators were seen as a royal prerogative power similar to monopolies, and partly because lights (and all navigational aids) were regarded as potentially useful to an enemy in wartime.³¹ The division of authority between owners and Trinity House led to constant disputes, with Spurn Head, Harwich, Tynemouth and above all Scilly (on which the Dutch also depended) causing the most difficulty.³² Lighthouses were not always kept lit: in 1682 Pepys noted that those at Cromer, Flamborough and Farne Island were all out.³³ Even when they were functional, the effectiveness of some lights must have been very limited. In the first half of the seventeenth century Caister and Lowestoft had only large candles instead of the coal fires used at other lights.³⁴

NAVIGATING A SHIP

Although considerable progress towards a more mathematical approach to navigation had been made at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, many navigators still relied on empirical knowledge and often erroneous assumptions.³⁵ Mercator charts, in which the meridians converged towards the pole, had been widely available since the late sixteenth century, but most navigators preferred the old method of plane (or plain) sailing, relying on a projection which placed the meridians parallel to each other. Some depended on astrology, and cast horoscopes for each voyage.³⁶ Dead reckoning courses were laid down with as much precision as the knowledge of the time permitted, but there were several major obstacles in the way of accuracy. Above all, longitude remained elusive, despite many attempts to resolve the problem. Henry Bond, who taught navigation at Chatham, made it his life’s work; his table of magnetic elements to be used with a dip needle was approved by Charles II, but it proved to be worthless.³⁷ Charles also appointed John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1675 in the hope that he would be able to establish longitude by astronomical means, and the erection of the observatory at Greenwich (suitably overlooking the royal dockyard at Deptford) was a means to that end.³⁸ Accurate timekeeping was already seen as a likely solution to the longitude problem, as indeed it eventually became, thanks to John Harrison’s series of chronometers in the middle of the eighteenth century. Robert Holmes took a pair of pendulum clocks to sea with him in 1664, but they proved wildly inaccurate, and other experiments with shipboard clocks had equally disappointing results.³⁹

Knowledge of currents and their impact on dead reckoning was still patchy, but detailed work by Edmund Halley in the 1680s and 1690s greatly improved matters.⁴⁰ Even so, accurately calculating a ship’s leeway was another apparently insurmountable problem. Some trailed a weighted cord from the lee side of the poop, others relied on a rule of thumb system of making allowances for different wind states.⁴¹ Distance and speed were measured by a log line, knotted at regular intervals, which was traditionally forty-two feet (seven fathoms) long. This was already known to be inaccurate, and a fifty-foot line (which gave a knot as a sea mile of 6,000 feet an hour) had been available as an alternative since the 1630s, but mariners continued to favour the old line.⁴² A second line was employed to take soundings, which had to be taken regularly in the shallow waters around the British Isles (partly because of the inadequacies of the charts in the years before Collins’s work was published). Ordinary lead lines for coastal work were twenty fathoms long and had a weight of about seven pounds; deep sea lines could be up to 200 fathoms long, with a weight of up to thirty pounds. Both kinds were marked to indicate particular depths.

Soundings were essential for determining a ship’s location as it returned to Britain from the south, particularly as the charts showing the location of the Scillies and other landmarks were so inaccurate. Navigators knew the nature of the seabed in the English Channel and the sea area that became known eponymously as the Soundings; a belt of fine sand and a depth of about sixty-four fathoms marked ‘The Sleeve’, at approximately the latitude of 49° 40′ north, where a ship needed to turn east for a safe passage into the Channel.43 Returning to England in May 1673, John Narbrough sounded first when he reckoned himself at 49° 24′ north, and found ninety-five fathoms. He then sounded at intervals of six hours, found fine sand at eighty-five and then eighty fathoms, and repeated the exercise on the following day, when he had successive soundings of seventy-five, seventy-one and sixty-two fathoms, with a bottom of grey sand. But even Narbrough, one of the best navigators of the day, could be fooled: his ships then almost ploughed onto the Scillies, primarily because he had been caught out by ‘a great indraught of a current [which] sets into Severn and St George’s Channel always, and … a tide of flood [which] set us strongly to the northward, which put most commanders and masters in this fleet out of their reckonings’.⁴⁴

This view of Greenwich Observatory was produced soon after it was completed in 1676. Beyond the observatory to the north stands the palace of Greenwich, while a royal warship lies in the Thames off Deptford dockyard.
(©TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM)

Seamen used traditional tools to take observations, especially crossstaffs, astrolabes and quadrants. The back staff, first introduced in the 1590s, was improved in the 1660s and remained in general use until the end of the eighteenth century, even though telescopes began to come into general use during the course of the seventeenth century.⁴⁵ Manuals contained tables of logarithms, rules for working out courses made good, catalogues of the stars, dates of new moons and so on. One of the most widely used was John Tapp’s Seaman’s Kalendar, first published in 1601 and republished regularly throughout the century.⁴⁶ Officers recorded their observations, wind directions, the distance run and other data in journals. Captains, masters and lieutenants were meant to submit these to the Admiralty, and from 1671 captains did not receive their pay until they had done so.⁴⁷ Despite attempts to standardise the format, both the level of detail in, and the presentation of, the journals, often varied wildly. Pepys and his clerk, Richard Gibson (neither of whom were navigators), spent much time analysing officers’ journals and pointing out their shortcomings.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, many officers possessed a high degree of navigational skill, given the body of knowledge available to them. John Narbrough, generally regarded as one of the best officers of the time, knew that the journal of his voyage south of the equator in 1669–71 would be of great value to other seamen, and provided an exemplary level of detail:

This afternoon [30 December 1669] I took an Azimuth and found six degrees ten minutes variation easterly … Nebiles Major was very visible in the Heaven, and seems to be a piece of the Milky Way broke from it; the southern constellations appear which are near the Pole Antarctic, the Chameleon, the Bird of Paradise, the Tail of Little Hydra, and the Water Snake, which are all small stars of the 5th and 6th magnitude; no Pole Star, nor any star fit for observation to be seen within 15 degrees of the Pole, the Crosers Stars of the first and second magnitude are good for observation …⁴⁹

Even Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, who had apparently been a complete landlubber before his appointment as general-at-sea, was soon taking his own observations, and recorded in particular detail the path of a comet that passed through the skies above Portsmouth at the end of December 1664 and beginning of January 1665:

[4 January] I saw the Blazing Star again about 6 o’clock in the evening, being a little below the ecliptic to the southwards almost touching it in the 29th degree of Aries. Then distant from Os Baleni 15° 26′, star in Ligatura Piscium 9° 58′. His body weak of light and confused, and his stream not much to be discerned, little better than a star of the 2nd magnitude.⁵¹