![]() ![]() ![]() She manages to bring the on board drama alive, particularly in the gripping account of a tragic multiple sinking in 1707, when more than 2000 British sailors died when four war ships went down near the Scilly Isles, only 50km from the south-western tip of England. Sobel writes that in literally hundreds of instances, ships sank in hellish circumstances due to a lack of knowledge of their longitude. For centuries, the inability of determining longitude proved disastrous for sailors, their ships either lost at sea unable to determine their bearings, or even more disastrously, dashed on rocks in uncharted waters. ![]() It’s a story of endurance, a passion that couldn’t be dinted by greed and blind ambition, and the tale of how one simple-but-determined man took on the establishment, and won… even though it took him a life-time.ĭescribed as an ‘elegant history’ by the New York Times, Longitude tells the story of John Harrison, an 18th Century carpenter-turned-clockmaker, who - over nearly five decades - developed a sea-worthy clock to measure longitude, the distance east or west on the earth. Longitude, by American writer Dava Sobel, is the true story of the quest to devise a reliable navigational instrument for sailors. ![]()
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