![]() ![]() As I discovered while doing research for my forthcoming book The Sea Journal, these documents show science conducted in situ - in cramped cabins, on open deck and on exploratory forays from ship to shore. By the eighteenth century, some ships had become mobile labs in which instruments from sextants to chronometers were tested and improved, and ever more accurate sea charts plotted.īeyond advances born of the need to stay on course, many seafarers kept journals, recording minute observations of sea life, coastlines and curious natural phenomena. The Atlantic voyages of European mariners to the Americas, India and the Spice Islands - now the Maluku Islands of Indonesia - demanded re-engineered ships and growing expertise in celestial navigation. Mapping had progressed steadily from the thirteenth century, when Italian merchant-venturers had developed the earliest portolan pilot charts of the Mediterranean, using compass directions and observations to locate harbours. Navigation was one of the greatest scientific challenges of Johnson’s time. Hence the eighteenth-century lexicographer’s admiration for explorers: “The adventurer upon unknown coasts, and the describer of distant regions” is to be welcomed, he declared, because they “enlarge our knowledge”.Īnd enlarge knowledge they did, from geography, oceanography and astronomy to meteorology, botany and zoology. ![]() Samuel Johnson once remarked that “being in a ship is being in a jail, with the added chance of being drowned”. ![]()
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