Perhaps it’s because I recently read and reviewed Robyn Arianrhod’s Thomas Harriot; A Life in Science, which details how the remarkable achievements of this Elizabethan polymath began with his employment by Sir Walter Ralegh as a mathematician specifically tasked with improving Ralegh’s crew’s navigational techniques.
Perhaps it’s because I recently completed (another) reading of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, and often found myself marveling at the nautical and navigational feats accomplished by the captain and crew of that little barque on its five year surveying voyage.
Perhaps it’s because I then subsequently picked up and began reading FitzRoy; the Remarkable Story of Darwin’s Captain and the Invention of the Weather Forecast by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, in which I have already discovered that Darwin didn’t even tell half the whole story of just what a remarkable and highly skilled sailor (to say nothing of his other accomplishments) the captain of his famously recounted voyage truly was.
Or perhaps it’s simply because Prof. Margaret E. Schotte‘s recently published Sailing School; Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 sounds like such a fascinating book all in it’s own right that I so very much would like to read it at the first opportunity. In any case, I look forward to doing so very soon.
