Accounts of the quest for accurate methods for determining longitude at sea have predominantly focused on the development of timekeeper and astronomical methods in the eighteenth century in the wake of the British Longitude Act of 1714. English craftsmen and men of science have taken a prominent place in these narratives, yet the problem of position-fixing while on a moving ship had long faced mariners worldwide.

This symposium adopts a wider international perspective and a longer time-frame, looking at practical seafaring tools and techniques already well-established in seafaring nations before 1714 and at the efforts of a range of professional communities to address navigational problems. It will also look at attempts throughout Europe to develop longitude-finding methods over the course of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, at times (but not only) in response to the British Act. These were efforts that threw together different communities – including astronomers, mathematicians, seafarers, instrument makers, mapmakers, politicians and others – in the search for solutions to a problem with pragmatic applications to the routine movement of people and property around the world’s oceans.

Speakers will examine not only the exchange of technical, navigational and cartographic knowledge within and between European countries but also the encounter between western modes of navigation, in which latitude and longitude were key parameters, and the practices deployed successfully by the communities into whose territories European seafarers encroached in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.