Short Books for You and Your Middle and Secondary Students
Short Books for You and Your Middle and Secondary Students
Dr. Bryce Decker
I. LONGITUDE: the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.
by Dava Sobel. New York, Walker & Co, 1995. 184 pages; index
This little gem of a book tells the story of John Harrison, an
unpolished country carpenter who taught himself the art of clock-making so superbly well that for the first time in history ordinary seamen could reliably find their positions at sea, and who made
timepieces that run flawlessly today after more than 200 years. Further, because he was barely literate, with no social standing, it is a story of the way gentlemen in the English bureaucracy were to able deny Harrison an official prize for his acheivement that he had
clearly won. Were it not for the intercession of King George III, John
Harrison might have died without official recognition.
As the pace of ocean voyaging quickened in the 18th Century, hundreds of ships were wrecked because a sailor could never know for sure how far east or west his vessel was from an intended
destination. Latitude -- distance north or south of the equator -- had
always been easy to find. With a quadrant, a navigator measured how high the sun or north Star lay above the horizon. But longitude was simply impossible to measure. Unless he could sail due east or west along a parallel of latitude toward a continental port, a
navigator had only a very rough notion how far east or west he was from anywhere.
Ms. Sobel likens the urgency of the problem to the search in our own time for a cure for cancer. To measure longitude seemed as unattainable in the 1700's as a cure for cancer does today. The British Admiralty established a Board of Longitude that offered a prize of twenty thousand pounds sterling (millions of dollars in today's money) to anyone who could come up with a practical way to measure longitude at sea within half a degree of arc-- roughly 30 miles. Longitude and time are absolutely synonymous. The earth rotates at the rate of 15 degrees of longitude every hour: four minutes equals one degree of earth's rotation. If you know what time it is back in London, and you have an accurate watch aboard your ship, you can tell how many degrees/minutes you are away from the home port by timing the overhead passage of the sun at noon. But good clocks in 1750 had pendulums on them -- you can imagine what heavy seas do to a pendulum clock.
When the Board of Longitude's prize was first offered in 1714, the most likely approach seemed to lie in astronomy. If one could accurately time the movements of the heavenly bodies, then the timing of astronomical events might, with some arduous calculation, yield one's longitude. But that approach was troublesome, too. At
the time, positions of most stars in the sky had not been observed precisely enough to make such calculations practical. In order to fix their locations, astronomers of the time undertook lifetimes of labor in observation and calculation of hundreds of stars. As a
scientific pursuit of educated classes, astronomy's promise appealed to the Board of Longitude, who saw an astronomical solution to longitude as a worthy contender for their prize.
Trouble was, the astronomical solution called for a stable, land-based observation platform to measure angular distances between the moon and certain stars, and took at least four hours of skilled and laborious calculations. Skilled seamen like Captain James Cook
used the method superbly well, but only on land; it was impossible to use at sea.
In contrast, the calculation of longitude using an accurate watch might be easily done by a seaman of common education. John Harrison finally made that possible.
Harrison's chronometers are still marvels -- the first timepieces balanced so that they would run accurately no matter how wildly a ship pitched and rolled, employing different metals bonded together in critical parts that neutralize the effects of temperature changes.
And thanks to King George III, in 1773, the old man got his reward before he died. Sobel's account will thrill those new to this story, and a renewed pleasure for those who know it. It is reliable, helpfully documented and, and told this time by a woman with a
gentle literary touch.
II. KANAKA: the Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest
By Tom Koppel. Vancouver/Toronto: Whitecap Books, 1995. 152 pages, paperback.
This is the most wide-ranging account of Hawaiians on the Mainland in
the Nineteenth Century that I have encountered. It is impressive for the variety of scattered details Koppel has brought coherently to light about very obscure, mostly illiterate persons, from old archives. Only one Sandwich Islander, for example, William Naukana, appears in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. With photos and portraits where he has found them, Koppel pieces together several family histories, and does what he
can to bring back for us these people and their eventful lives, in a naturally bountiful, but very hard and perilous land.
The wide-ranging travels of Hawaiians in those early days, and their
participation in the enterprises of the Mainland coast of the time is an eye-opener. There is a portrait, on page 16 of John Coxe (Naukane), an ali'i appointed by Kamehameha I to look after the interests of Hawaiians who sailed off to work on contract in 1811 at Astoria, the first Yankee fur-trading establishment at the mouth of the Columbia River. Koppel dubs
Naukane the first Hawaiian "soldier of fortune". Coxe/Naukane traveled overland across the American continent in the employ of Hudson's Bay Company -- all the way to London. Later, after returning to Hawaii, Naukane was to travel to London a second time in the royal retinue of Liholiho (Kamehameha II).
Thousands of young Hawaiian men, -- far fewer women -- left the Kingdom between 1800-1850, and seldom came back home for good. By 1827, even Coxe/Naukane was back on the banks of the Columbia raising pigs for Hudson's Bay Company. Koppel documents similar life histories for others. Hudson's Bay Company had an agent in Honolulu who hired Hawaiians on contract, but thousands shipped out anonymously, and by 1850, there were Sandwich island sailors in every great seaport of
the world.
In the Northwest, the skills and labor of Hawaiians were in demand. In an era when long distances were traversed by river and sea, they were at home on the water, and in it, too! Hawaiians could swim, an exceptional skill at the time, even among sailors. Their strength and size served them well the backbreaking work of portage, clearing land, farming, and logging.
Like the British, American and French-Canadians in the fur trade, they
married Indian women, and raised large families. They also fought fiercely, too, when the little trading settlements came under Indian attack, an attribute much appreciated in the journals of Company agents. The Indian-Hawaiian association was natural enough, given the social conditions of the time, and the orientation of both cultures to the sea and the plentiful
subsistence it provided. Many of the daughters married Anglos, so that there is, in the words of one woman descendent, "a lot of cream in the coffee today".
The geography of the Hawaiian settlements that appeared after 1850 calls for as detailed a map as you can find of the Northwest Coast, and particularly of the San Juan and Channel Islands between Victoria and Vancouver, B.C. Place and family names of Hawaiian origin are numerous there, although sometimes obscure to the stranger. Friday Harbor, for example is named for a Hawaiian, Joe Friday (Joe Poalie), the smoke from whose chimney was a landmark for sailors in the vicinity of "Friday's Harbor", in the 1840's and 50's.
If you would discover vestiges of this early Hawaiian movement to British North America, plan to explore Salt Spring Island, just northeast of Victoria. Tom Koppel's rich annotation will help you plan your trip.