David Igler

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David Igler | Longitudes and Latitudes | Environmental History, 10.1 | The History Cooperative

Anniversary Forum

Longitudes and Latitudes

BEFORE LEAVING England in 1772 on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean, Captain James Cook supplied himself with four recently invented "clock machines" that promised to record reliable time at sea. These chronometers—the name wouldn't stick until the 1780s—allowed Cook to establish longitude readings, and when combined with latitude readings, enabled precise surveying work of islands and continental shorelines. The "watches," as Cook frequently referred to them, cost the British Admiralty a small fortune; to Cook they were priceless. Cook kept the chronometers in locked wooden boxes and issued keys to the first lieutenant, the onboard astronomer, and himself. Cook gave orders that some combination of these individuals "were always to be present at the winding them up, and the comparing one with the other." Longitude and latitude served Cook and subsequent Pacific navigators exceedingly well, for among other reasons, returning to previously recorded coordinates (such as an island with wood and water) was a useful skill when exploring an ocean that covered one-third of the earth's surface.

This nautical anecdote reflects my current attraction to ocean basins as frameworks for historical analysis, and more specifically, the Pacific Basin as a site of ecological exchanges, exploitations, and migrations. Ocean basins provide (dare I say?) natural contexts in which to study human and non-human interactions, in part because they offer the possibility of moving us beyond the nation-state and terrestrial-based boundaries that often awkwardly fit our studies of nature as a historical force. However—and let me be clear about this—mine is not a call for environmental historians to scrap land-based parameters of the local, regional, or national variety, and suddenly embrace waterscapes as more useful frameworks. Instead, I want to encourage us to exploit more fully those necessary coordinates of eighteenth-century sea-faring exploration: longitude and latitude.

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