In a previous post, we read Halley’s letter to the Lords of the Admiralty proposing a new voyage to make “an exact account of the Course of the Tides on and about the Coast of England”, which he claimed would be “a work of generall Use to all Shipping”. Their lordships quickly approved his proposal, and Halley set sail on his third voyage on 14 June 1701 – but what exactly was he doing? Here’re the Admiralty’s instructions:
Whereas his Maj[es]ties Pink the Paramour, is particularly fitted out and Putt under your Command that you may proceed with her, and observe the Course of the Tydes in the Channell of England, and other things remarkable, You are therefore hereby required and directed to proceed with the Said Vessell, and use your utmost care and Diligence in observing the Course of the Tydes accordingly, as well in the Midsea as on both shores; As alsoe the Precise times of High and Low Water of the Sett and Strength of the Flood and Ebb, and how many feet it flows, in as many, and at such certaine places, as may Suffice to describe the whole. And whereas in many places in the Channell there are Irregular and halfe Tydes you are in a particular Manner to be very carefull in observing them.
And you are alsoe to take the true bearings of the Princip[a]l head Lands on the English Coast one from another, and to continue the Meridian as often as conveniently you can from side to side of the Channell, in ord[e]r to lay downe both Coast truly against one another.
And in case dureing your being employed on this Service, any other Matters may Occur unto you, the observing and Publishing whereof may tend towards the Security of the Navigation of the Subjects of his Maj[es]tie or other Princes tradeing into the Channell you are to be very carefull in the takeing notice thereof: And when you Shall have p[er]formed what Service you can, with relation to the particulars before menc[i]o[n]ed, you are to returne with the Ship you Command into the River of Thames, giving Us from time to time an Account of your Proceedings Dated this 12° June 1701 [1]
These instructions can be summarised as:
to make observations of the behaviour of the tides in the Channel and along the English and French coasts
to take bearings that will allow the French and English coasts to be correctly situated north-south from one another
to take note of anything else that might lead to safer navigation in the Channel for traders
The first two points were copied almost verbatim from a letter of Halley’s dated the previous day (11 June), but the third point was added by the Admiralty, and it’s been suggested that it might represent an order for Halley to gather intelligence from French waters as the two countries slid towards war. [2] That idea has been given ballast by a 1693 diary entry made by Hooke, when Halley and business partner Thomas Jett were engaged in a salvage operation, that “Hally and Jed [were] Spys”. [3]
Now I have to admit that I’m far from indifferent to this notion of Halley as a secret agent but, like Alan Cook, I’m not wholly convinced by the idea in respect to his present voyage: the Admiralty instructions clearly refer to publishing Halley’s information and they express a concern with the safety of traders of all nations operating in the Channel.
That said, Halley’s earlier surveying activities do seem rather surprising, for example, he was apparently surveying the Thames approaches in early 1689, during the politically-sensitive aftermath of the so-called Glorious Revolution. I’ve started to trawl through the government archives to see if I can unearth anything that indicates whether he was ever employed on intelligence work, but I’ve encountered nothing as yet – though I’ll be sure to reveal such state secrets here if I do!
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[1] National Archives, ADM 2/27, pp 131-2.
[2] See Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (Oxford, 1998) pp 285-6, but note that Cook refers to a published mistranscription of Hooke’s remark.
[3] Hooke, Diary, 24 March 1693, British Library, Sloane MS 4024.
In my last post we looked at the maritime experience that Halley had accumulated as a passenger, surveyor, and diver before receiving his commission as Paramore’s master andcommander, and in this post we’ll examine his diving career more closely and take a look at my favourite thing about Halley – his diving suit!
Halley first wrote about a method for working underwater in 1689, proposing a mobile bell built upon four wheels. He discussed the effect that the weight and pressure of water had on a diver, and how water would compress air inside a bell, and rise higher as the bell descended. He suggested that if a way could be found to send air down to the bell, this would drive out the water and allow the diver – if wearing fishermen’s boots – to remain safe and dry inside. [1]
Robert Hooke was unimpressed, declaring Halley’s paper “the Same wth what I Shewed ye Society 25 years Since”, but diving and diving equipment have had a long and interesting history and probably neither Halley nor Hooke was quite as original as each believed himself to be, though Halley does deserve credit for being one of the few designers who went on to build a bell – and even to go down in it. [2]
His opportunity came during his involvement in the salvage operation on the “Guynie Friggott”, a Royal African Company ship which foundered on the south coast near Pagham around 1 April 1691, and from May of that year Halley was delivering regular reports of his activities to the Royal Society with escalating enthusiasm.
At the meeting on 26 August, he read a paper describing the bell he had built:
The Diving tub [a truncate cone] was made 5 foot at Bottom where it was open, 3 foot at top and 5 foot deep… and under the bell by three ropes I fastned a stage about 2½ foot below to stand on… Within the bell I placed a bench about a foot from the bottom for the men below to sitt on when they should be cold and where a man might sett with all his clouths at any depth drie. I made likewise in the top of the bell a window to let in the light which was very thick and strong but as clear glass as could be gotten, and I placed a small Cock in the same crown of the bell to let out the hot & effete air unfitt for further respiration. [3]
Halley reported that the deeper the bell sank, the higher the water rose within it, which he countered by his “principall invention” of adapting cask to be sent down filled with air, having a bunghole underneath through which water would enter, and a cock at the top (later a flexible tube) to release the compressed air when the cask was drawn into the bell and raised above water, thereby replenishing the bell’s air and lowering the level of the water.
By this means I have kept 3 men 1¾ [hours] under water and in ten fathoms deep without any the least inconvenience and in as perfect freedom to act as if they had been above.
That’s certainly impressive, but four weeks later Halley read another paper to the Society and this time he was so excited by his creation that he “desire[d] to conserve to my self the right of priority of Invention”: this was Halley’s diving suit. [4] But before we read his description, let’s take a look at a nineteenth-century illustration of his apparatus, which appeared in Rees’s Cyclopædia and is shown with the permission of the Science Museum:
There are several depictions of Halley’s diving bell on the internet but this is the closest to Halley’s description. You can see it’s a truncate cone built of wood with a weighted stage beneath, attached by three strong ropes to the bell. Inside is a bench with a man sat “drie” in his “clouths”, and in the roof on the right is a cock to release the “effete air unfitt for further respiration”. To the right is a cask, delivering fresh air to the bell, and to the left is the diver, wearing a not entirely convincing version of Halley’s diving attire, topped off with… but let’s hear the description of that contrivance from Halley:
A Man having a suite of Leather fitted to his body, with a cap of Maintenance… cappable to hold 5 or 6 gallons [of air]… must have a pipe coming from the Diving bell to his Capp, to bring him Air, which will be returned by another pipe, which must go from the cap of Maintenance, to a small [receptacle] of Air ?placed above the Diver into which it is to return the air, that has been breathed; whilest the other brings it to the man… [5]
Well that’s splendid, but what precisely did this cap of maintenance look like? Halley describes it as a “small vessell on the head of the diver which from its shape and use I call a capp of maintenance”, which is a little puzzling as caps of maintenance sit on top of the head but this presumably fitted over the head and was akin to a small bell, as imagined in the illustration above. [6] In which case, the device seems unlikely to pass any health and safety assessment, as when the diver bent down to retrieve something or if he tripped, the cap would presumably have tilted and flooded with water!
But that’s a trifling objection and Halley was rightly undaunted, describing his own triumphant descent in the same paper:
Having fortified my self against cold by a double or triple flannel or knit woolen westcoat and excluded the water by a well liquored leather suit made fitt and close to the body, I make my self considerably heavier than water by adding a girdle of ledon shott… with this the diver can descend easily to the Diving tubb… [7]
I love that detail about the waistcoat, it’s a rare evocation of Edmond’s physical presence and it brings his wife Mary to mind. Did she knit the waistcoat? Did she help with the design and fit of his suit? Alas, we know nothing of Mary’s role or her view of his projects, but we do know more about the liquored suit as Halley later described the recipe for his waterproofing oil to the Royal Society. Here’s the relevant minute:
Halley’s Liquor for his Leather Suites was said by him to consist of equall parts Bees wax, Tallow, Turpentine, and as much Train oyle [whale oil] as all the rest, dipping therein, when all is scalding hott. [8]
Notice it’s now “Leather Suites”, plural, and I’m assuming that’s because he’s producing them for other divers engaged in the operation, rather than enlarging his personal collection of niche-interest leatherwear. The suits seem to have been effective at keeping the divers dry and toasty as Halley – at least – was happy “to continu[e] there as long as I pleased”, while the glass window at the top admitted so much light into the bell that “I could see perfectly well to Write or Read” and “by the return of the Air-Barrels, I often sent up Orders, written with an Iron Pen on small Plates of Lead, directing how to move us from Place to Place as occasion required.” [9]
That was typical of Halley: when a subject caught his attention he explored it obsessively, and at Royal Society meetings throughout this period we find him reporting not just on improvements to his bell and attendant devices, but on the appearance of light below water, the strength of currents in streams, his experience of aural barotrauma (alleviated by “Oyle of Sweet Almonds”), and his idea for an instrument to measure the depth to which a diver had descended.
But it’s his diving suit that captured my own imagination: is it too fanciful to picture him donning his three waistcoats, his oiled leather suit, his fishermen’s boots, and his cap of maintenance, then lumbering downstairs to display himself to Mary, his servants and two young daughters? He must have been an impressive sight. Well, a sight, anyway.
UPDATE JUNE 2018
Wonder no more what Halley’s diving suit looked like, because since writing this post I’ve seen Halley’s own drawing of it, sketched on the back of the Royal Society minutes he was taking. You can see the suit for yourselves in this short ‘Objectivity’ video (which, alas, refers to him as ‘Sir Edmond’ – sigh).
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[1] Royal Society, Halley Papers, Cl.P/21/28.
[2] Hooke, Diary, 6 March 1689, British Library, Sloane MS 4024. You can read a short history of diving here – or if you simply want to see a picture of Alexander the Great in a diving tub, enlarge the second image shown here.
We looked at how Halley came to be given command of a Royal Navy ship during his first voyage and I said we’d examine what experience he had to justify that commission during his second: this we’ll do now in a two-part special.
In fact Halley had minimal maritime experience – although perhaps rather more than your average seventeenth-century natural philosopher – but the experience he did have was of three types: as a passenger, as a surveyor, and as a diver.
Halley was a passenger on three voyages as a young man, the first when he abandoned his degree in 1676 to sail to St Helena to map the southern stars. The two-way voyage on an East Indiaman would have taken about 5 months, and as Halley seems to have had a life-long interest in maritime matters, it seems reasonable to assume he took the opportunity to observe how the ship was sailed, how the crew operated, and to pick up a smattering of nautical terminology.
One year after his return from St Helena, he was at sea again en route to visit the great astronomer, Johannes Hevelius, at Dantzick (Gdańsk) on the Baltic coast, and at the end of the following year, 1680, he crossed from Dover to Calais (and was apparently seasick) to begin his Grand Tour, returning to England from Holland in January 1682. [1] Again, it seems fair to expect that he paid at least some attention to the handling of the ships.
At the end of the decade, Halley progressed from maritime passenger to coastal surveyor, although his work as a surveyor is rather obscure, being largely inferred from his presentation of two charts to the Royal Society, the first of which appeared in the minutes for 3 July 1689:
Halley produced his Sea-draught of the Mouth of the River of Thames, wherein he saith, that He hath corrected severall very great, and considerable faults in all our Sea-Carts [sic] hitherto published. [2]
It isn’t known for sure when he undertook his survey of the Thames approaches but Robert Hooke recorded two entries in his diary – “Hally a Sayling” on 22 March 1689, and “Hally Returnd” on 3 April – which may relate to his surveying, although the previous summer Halley had made several references to towns near the Thames estuary which may indicate that he had been surveying in the area at that time. [3]
His second survey, “of the West coast of Sussex between Selsey and Arundell”, was presented to the Society on 15 November 1693, [4] and this time we have rather more idea about the circumstances behind its production because this chart was a by-product of his diving activities.
Halley first wrote about diving in a paper of 6 March 1689, and his interest was probably prompted by the recent success of Captain William Phips’s diving operation in the West Indies, where Phips recovered a spectacular haul of treasure from a Spanish wreck and sparked a tsunami of projects connected with diving and salvage. [5] Halley proposed a mobile diving bell built on four wheels, and while he didn’t build that particular bell, he did build another as part of his salvage work on the wreck of the Guynie frigate.
The Guynie was owned by the Royal African Company (RAC) and in early 1691 she returned from Africa to English waters, having collected “Bees Wax & Elephants Teeth” from Gambia and “Elephants Teeth & Redwood” from “Sereleon” (Sierra Leone). [6] On 23 February her commander, William Chantrell, wrote to the RAC from Falmouth requesting a convoy to accompany him back to London. The RAC instructed three of their most senior officers to “waite on the Lords of the Admiralty to gett a Man of Warr to Convoy the Guynie Friggott up from Falmouth”, which might seem a little excessive for beeswax and ivory, but the Guynie was carrying something much more valuable on board. [7]
Captain Chantrell had undertaken to deliver a large quantity of gold on behalf of the Portuguese in Africa, and it was on this account that a convoy ship had been requested. [8] The Guynie sailed from Falmouth on 26 March, but on 4 April Captain Chantrell wrote from Chichester to advise the RAC that the ship had foundered. [9] It isn’t clear what happened to the ship, but there’s no mention of any lost men and the gold seems to have been saved, as on 8 April the RAC ordered that “a Guard of Tenn Soldjers & an Officer be sent from hence to fetch the Gold (saved out of that Shipp) from Chichester”. [10]
The ivory, however, went down with the ship, and it’s in this regard that Halley now appears in the affair. The Deputy Governor of the RAC was Royal Society fellow, Abraham Hill, and it may have been he who brought Halley in to try to salvage the elephants’ tusks. Halley’s initial plan was certainly ambitious as on 13 May 1691 the Royal Society minutes record that “Halley shewed the Method he intended to use in raising the Ship”, but this plan was evidently modified as on 12 August he was relating “the Success of his Experiments of going under water in his diving bell”.
Halley believed his diving bell had limitless possibilities, and on 15 September a government warrant was issued to prepare a bill granting Halley and three partners “sole use of their invention of a new engine never yet known”, and Letters Patent were issued on 15 October. On 17 November, the four patent-holders formed a joint-stock company with two other men, John Carter and Thomas Jett, who was a friend of Halley’s. [11]
Thomas Jett, incidentally, is interesting because he is the “Jed” in Hooke’s Diary entry for 24 March 1693, “Hally & Jed Spys”, which offers a hint (there are one or two others) that Halley may have undertaken coastal surveys on behalf of the government. [12]
Halley and Jett appear periodically in the RAC minutes until about spring 1694, though their level of success in salvaging the tusks is unclear – and by that time Halley had become involved in the scheme with Benjamin Middleton to obtain a ship to sail around the world, which, when the scaled-down version of the project finally got underway in late 1698, would see Halley drawing on all his modest maritime experience to serve as the Paramore‘s commander. [13]
In part 2 of this post about Halley’s nautical experience, we’ll take a much closer look at his diving bell – and at my favourite thing about him!
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[1] Hooke to Halley, 1 March 1681, Royal Society, EL/H3/62; Hooke, Diary, 24 Jan 1682, London Metropolitan Archives.
[2] Royal Society, Journal Book Original, JBO/8 p 268.
[3] Hooke, Diary, 22 March 1689 and 3 April 1689, British Library, Sloane MS 4024; references to towns in RS, JBO/8.
[4] RS, JBO/9 p 141.
[5] For a fair copy of Halley’s paper, see RS, RBO/7/24.
[6] RAC Instructions to Captains, The National Archives, T 70/61 ff87r-88v.
[7] RAC Minutes, TNA, T 70/83.
[8] RAC Black Book, TNA, T 70/1433 p 104.
[9] TNA, T 70/83 f8r.
[10] Ibid.
[11] CSP, D, 1690-91; TNA C111/192.
[12] BL, Sloane MS 4024. Many thanks to Hooke’s editor Dr Felicity Henderson for confirming this entry as it has hitherto appeared mistranscribed.
[13] I’ve read suggestions that Halley and Jett only recovered one tusk, but that is based on a mistranscription of the phrase “the elephants teeth”, where the e’s in teeth are akin to the Greek letter theta (ϑ) and have been misread as ‘oo’. This style of ‘e’ was common in the 17th century and Halley himself used it. He later told Hans Sloane that his attempt to recover the ivory had been frustrated by the wreck quickly becoming covered with “Sand and Oase”.
Halley's Log 