The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (96 page)

The art of navigation improved even faster than ship design in the centuries of European expansion thanks to scientific advances, the construction of more sophisticated and finely tuned instruments, and the spread of literacy and book learning. In many respects, seamen were already well equipped with instruments to determine vessel speed, latitude, depth of water, and direction. The most significant breakthrough with respect to the last was Edmond Halley’s solution to the problem of correcting for magnetic variation in
compasses, which he solved in the course of two voyages to the South Atlantic in the 1690s. (A third cruise, in the English Channel, resulted in publication of the first chart of tidal currents.) Establishing latitude remained a function of measuring the altitude of various celestial bodies against the horizon, although the instruments became simpler, lighter, and more accurate as manufacturing techniques improved.

Determining longitude was considerably more problematic. Using dead reckoning over weeks or months at sea could give only a rough approximation of longitude—one’s position east or west of a prime meridian running between the poles—and miscalculations led to the loss of countless ships. An early method of fixing longitude based on celestial observation required precise timekeeping and could not be adopted until the development of an accurate timepiece. The quest for a more reliable technique began in earnest following the loss of three ships of the line and their 1,400 crew on the
Scilly Islands in October 1707. Seven years later, Parliament enacted a £20,000 reward “
for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea.” This was hardly the first offer of
financial incentive, which had been proposed by Spanish, Venetian, and Dutch authorities as early as the sixteenth century. Moreover, the French Academy also provided an award for scientific advances beneficial to navigation and commerce, and there was considerable collaboration among French and English theoreticians and instrument makers. Initially the focus was on calculating time by
lunar distances—determining the time at a prime meridian by measuring the angular distance between the moon and a
star or planet and checking the result against tables in a nautical almanac. The real breakthrough, however, was the work of a clockmaker named
John Harrison whose first marine chronometer (or clock), known as H1, was tested at sea in 1736. This and two successors were too big to be practical—H1 weighed about thirty-two kilos—and in 1761
he completed work on H4, which measured twelve centimeters in diameter and weighed just over a kilogram. Another clockmaker named
Larcum Kendall was commissioned to make a facsimile of the H4, which
James Cook took with him on his second circumnavigation. Cook was unstinting in his praise and assured the
Admiralty that “
Mr Kendal’s Watch has exceeded the expectations of its most Zealous advocate and by being now and then corrected by Lunar observations has been our faithfull guide through all the vicissitudes of climates.” Lunar distances were widely used to determine longitude until the price of chronometers came within reach of the average navigator in the 1800s.

A separate problem from determining one’s place on the globe was how to represent it on a chart. The second-century Ptolemaic concepts of latitude and longitude were understood by a few European mathematicians, but they were not reintroduced to European cartographers until 1450, when Ptolemy’s work was translated into
Latin. A little more than a century later,
Gerard Mercator published a world map entitled a “New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation.” Mercator’s breakthrough was to devise a projection in which meridians and parallels intersect at right angles, and a straight line drawn between two points represents a line of constant bearing, called a rhumb line or loxodrome, and intersects all meridians at the same angle. Although the shortest route between two points on the globe is a great circle, this requires constant course corrections, which was virtually impossible prior to the
development of electronic aids to navigation in the twentieth century. While somewhat longer than a great circle, the virtue of the rhumb line was the ease with which it could be followed by a navigator. On long courses where the difference between a great circle and a rhumb line was significant, the course could be divided into a series of shorter rhumb lines entailing occasional changes in compass heading. How Mercator came up with his projection is not entirely understood, and although
Edward Wright devised a mathematical explanation that could be easily followed by other cartographers and navigators in 1599, the Mercator projection was not widely used until the 1700s, when it was embraced especially by marine surveyors.

Even without maps based on scientific projections, great progress was made in charting coastal waters by cartographers centered in Antwerp and
Amsterdam. In 1584,
Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer published his
Spieghel der Zeevaerdt
(Mirror of navigation, or Mariner’s mirror), a collection of forty-four charts of northern
European waters that focused on the contours of the coast (often out of scale to provide details of harbors), landmarks, profiles of the coast as seen from seaward, and depth of water. Waghenaer’s compilations were so popular that the English adopted the term “waggoner” to describe any collection of charts with accompanying descriptions of the coasts. Waghenaer’s methods were refined by
Willem Blaeu, whose
Het Licht der Zeevaerdt
(The light of navigation, 1608) rendered coasts and harbors more accurately, among other improvements. In acknowledgment of his accomplishments, the VOC named Blaeu their chief examiner of pilots and chartmaker. Cartographers in other nations expanded the scope of waggoners and other pilot books to incorporate as much information as they could about all the major sea routes of the world, but institutionalization of the discipline proceeded fitfully. France established its
Dépôt des Cartes et Plans in 1720; the English East India Company appointed
Alexander Dalrymple their hydrographer in 1769, and he held the same position concurrently with the
Royal Navy from 1795. Charting by navies, merchants, and explorers progressed in spite of this haphazard approach. Among the more notable accomplishments beyond European waters was the British charting of the
St. Lawrence River during the
Seven Years’ War by a team of surveyors including James Cook and
Joseph F. W. Des Barres. Between 1774 and 1780, Des Barres published the
Atlantic Neptune
, the first comprehensive compilation of charts of the east coast of North America. In the next century, improvements in navigational instruments would be dwarfed by the invention of wholly new technologies for propulsion but there would be no comparable advances in navigation until the invention of
sonar and
radar, the gyroscopic compass, and
global positioning systems in the 1900s.

The scope of maritime trade and naval operations expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century. Voyages considered exotic or possibly fatal at the beginning of the century became commonplace and explorers opened previously remote lands and people to interaction with the rest of the world. New combinations of commercial and state power were in evidence, while countries with previously untapped or underdeveloped maritime resources like
Russia and the United States were launching themselves on the world stage. Among the most far-reaching developments occurred in Asia, where Europeans had at long last succeeded in reshaping the ancient patterns and composition of trade. This was most evident in the English East India Company’s takeover of Bengal, which prefigured the British Raj
in India, but also in the
United States’ engagement in the fur trade between the Pacific Northwest and
Canton, and the rapid growth of the
China tea trade. In some respects, these were merely variations on trends one can trace from the end of the fifteenth century, and few if any people foresaw the enormous changes in the balance, reach, and pace of global power that would result from the technological and economic revolutions already under way on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Annihilation of Space and Time.” So trumpeted a newspaper headline announcing the arrival of the first commercially viable transatlantic steamship in New York on April 22, 1838, barely three decades after the inauguration of regular steamship service on the
Huds
on River. In an age of the jumbo jet and Internet, it is difficult to appreciate the staggering advance represented by the arrival of the
Sirius
and, the following day, the
Great Western,
after transatlantic crossings of eighteen and fifteen days, respectively. The best times under sail were three weeks eastbound and twice that westbound. Soon, steamships would routinely make the crossing in less than two weeks, and by the turn of the century the fastest ships easily crossed in fewer than six days. Yet the invention of the marine engine had global implications far beyond what its sea-minded developers could have imagined. Initially, the greatest impact was on coastal and short sea trades, but steam technology did as much to open continents as to connect them: steam shipping gave rise to an era of
canal digging and other
improvements to inland navigation that transformed landscapes, created opportunities for industrial and economic development in continental interiors, facilitated the movement of goods and people across the land, and thereby changed the tempo of life for people worldwide.

The
development of steam navigation cannot be separated from the rise of industrialization generally. This led to realignments in trade that favored states with flexible financial markets upon which to draw for investment in capital-intensive machinery. It also produced tensions between industrialists, merchants, and shippers, at one end of a widening economic spectrum, and laborers and seamen at the other. The financial division between rich and poor was not absolute and industrialism fostered the growth of a professional
middle class whose bourgeois values gave rise to a humanitarian impulse characterized by a belief in fairness and social welfare. In Great Britain, the superpower of the nineteenth century, the same
merchant marine that facilitated the growth of British economic and industrial power was at once an emblem of much that was wrong with unfettered
capitalism and a vector for the reforms that mitigated its worst excesses.

Inventors in England and France began experimenting with the application of steam power to mechanical ends in the seventeenth century. The most significant practical developments occurred at the end of the 1700s in England, at the hands of engine designer
James Watt and his partner,
Matthew Boulton. Steam held obvious attractions for shippers, who had always depended entirely on expensive human energy or the fickle wind and tide. Mechanical power would liberate them from these physical constraints, open up new vistas, and create a wealth of new opportunities. But the obstacles to the adoption of steam were not only technological but also financial and political, and the first person to build a practical steamboat was a resounding commercial failure. In 1785, the hapless American inventor
John Fitch petitioned the fledgling United States Congress for support of his “
attempt to facilitate the internal navigation of the United States.” Propelled by a device that mimicked the action of canoe paddles, Fitch’s
Steamboat
logged two thousand miles in and around
Philadelphia with paying passengers.
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Although the
New Jersey and
Virginia legislatures gave him exclusive rights to all “
water craft, which might be urged or impelled by the force of fire or steam” in their states, he was unable to fund his work and he died penniless and forlorn in 1798.

It was not until the merging of
Robert Fulton’s technological and entrepreneurial genius with the wealth and political connections of
Robert Livingston that steam propulsion succeeded. The inaugural run of Fulton’s forty-five-meter-long side-wheel steamer, the
North River Steam Boat
, took place on the Hudson River between New York and
Albany in 1807; after that there was no looking back. In less than a century, steam power would dominate global maritime commerce and naval warfare, although sail remained competitive in at least some markets into the 1900s. In the three decades between the
North River Steam Boat
’s debut and the arrival of the
Sirius
at New York, steam
navigation had a tremendous impact on continental developments, especially in the United States. In 1809, Livingston and Fulton secured a monopoly over
steam navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and engaged fellow inventor
Nicholas Roosevelt to determine the feasibility of running steamboats the nineteen hundred miles between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Two years later, Roosevelt’s side-wheeler
New Orleans
began service. As Fulton confided to a friend, “
The Mississippi, as I before wrote you, is conquered; the steam boat which I have sent to trade between New Orleans and
Natchez [Mississippi], carried 1500 barrels = 150 tons, from New Orleans to Natchez, against the current 313 miles, in 7 days, working in that time 84 hours.” By 1814, when the
New Orleans
sank, there were three more steamboats operating on the river—two in defiance of the Livingston-Fulton monopoly—and twenty-one arrivals were recorded at New Orleans. An early challenger was
Henry Shreve, whose two-decked, shallow-draft stern-wheeler
Washington
proved the forerunner of the classic Mississippi River steamboat, although
stern wheels were not widely adopted until the 1860s. Twenty years later there were more than twelve hundred arrivals, and
in 1840 New Orleans was the fourth busiest port in the world, thanks to its enormous cotton exports. By the end of the century more than four thousand steamboats would be built to ply the “Father of Waters.”