Characters Mentioned
* historically identified person
Captain Harris – 30, attendee of Harriot’s navigational instruments class
Captain Sturgess – 31, attendee of Harriot’s navigational instruments class
*Carleill, Christopher – 33, step-son of Francis Walsingham
*Cecil, William, Baron Burghley – 53, principal advisor of Queen Elizabeth
*Drake, Sir Francis – 43, sea captain, explorer, and privateer
*Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester – 51, former love interest of Queen Elizabeth
*Gilbert, Humphrey – colonizer who died at sea, 44 at time of death. Walter Raleigh’s half- brother
*Harriot, Thomas – 24, scientist
*Philip II, King of Spain – 56, Queen Elizabeth’s fiercest European enemy
*Raleigh, Walter – 32, courtier of Queen Elizabeth
*Stuart, Mary – 41, former queen of Scotland, cousin of Queen Elizabeth
*Walsingham, Francis – 52, Queen Elizabeth’s ambitious principal secretary
Commentary
Thomas Harriot is an important secondary character in the novel.
Navigational Instruments
Quadrant
Section 1
It was raining. Walter Raleigh listened to the course of water in the rain gutter above Hariott’s room on the second floor. His employee was teaching a class of sea captains how to use advanced navigational instruments and how to utilize his tables of corrections related to the instruments’ findings.
Dressed in black – Raleigh had never seen him wear clothing of another color – Harriot, but 23 years, was holding before his four students a quadrant. “Latitude, gentleman.” The young man held the quarter circle-shaped instrument tilted upward at eye-level. “Any sea venture you attempt requires that you know frequently your latitude. This instrument, as two of you well know, is one of the simplest ways of determining it.” He lowered the quadrant, smiled, extended his left hand to convey apology. “Captains Harris and Sturges, you could demonstrate the employment of this instrument as easily as I. To our distinguished gentlemen also attending, my demonstration, I conjecture, is essential to their basic understanding.”
Appreciating his employee’s mathematical aptitude, attention to detail, and insatiable curiosity, Raleigh had encouraged Harriot to attack the sea captain’s seemingly insurmountable difficulty of determining location where no land was visible to assist him. He had sent Harriot to the London and Plymouth docks to interview grizzled seamen -- preferably captains, over pints of ale in bawdy taverns -- to learn everything he could about ships, life at sea, and methods captains used to navigate. In addition to other titles of inquiry an astronomer, Harriot had researched what the ancients, and later the Arabs, had discovered about the constellations and the measurement of time. He had read as well two modern publications about this vital subject: John Dee’s translation into English in 1570 of Martin Cortes’s Arte de Navigation and William Bourne’s A Regiment for the Sea, printed in 1574, a corrected and expanded version of Cortes’s work. In short, Raleigh believed that Harriot knew more about the reading of the sun and stars, the instruments used, and the imperfections of those readings and how they could be partially corrected than any English seaman alive.
Harriot had assembled all that he had learned – from personal observations, interviews, and research -- in a book of writings that he called the Arcticon.
Enterprising merchants and veteran sea captains were attending Harriot’s classes to learn how to make their privateering enterprises in the West Indies and off the west coast of Africa less difficult. The two merchants in the room, not familiar with the quadrant, lacked a basic understanding of specific difficulties that their hired crews would surely encounter.
“Captains, your rutters are of unquestioned value. It is said that Sir Francis Drake seized the charts and descriptions of coastlines of every Spanish ship he boarded during his voyage around the world. The compass, I need not say, is also valuable. But it does not establish latitude. Or tell time.” He lowered the quadrant, held it beside his right hip. The weighted plumb string bounced gently against his legging. “It was the quadrant, the cross-staff, and the astrolabe, however, that Drake made most use of.”
In discovering Harriot and persuading him to join his small circle of associates fixated on the exploration and colonization of the North American continent Raleigh had been most fortunate. He had asked Principal Richard Pygott of St. Mary’s Hall, a former classmate of his at Oriel College at Oxford, who among recently graduated students might be capable of instructing seamen mathematical navigation. Pygott had suggested Harriot. Raleigh had then asked Richard Hakluyt, one of his close associates and one of Harriot’s teachers at Christ Church College, what he thought of the young man. Hakluyt had given Raleigh a good report. A commoner with exceptional skills of investigation, needing a patron to finance his varied inquiries, Harriot had immediately accepted Raleigh’s offer of employment.
“The quadrant, gentlemen, measures the altitude of the sun or Polaris, the so-called North Star. I will demonstrate.” Harriot raised the instrument to eye-level, the arc of the quarter circle pointed downward. “Pretend that I am sighting the sun. Along one of the radial arms are two sights, here and here.” He touched them with his left forefinger. “Looking through the sights, I locate the sun. Ah, there it is!” The string, anchored at its bottom by a lead weight, hung vertically straight from the point of the right-angle intersection of the quadrant’s two arms. “Now, having located the sun through my sights, I gently pin my plumb line against the side of the bottom of the quadrant’s arc and read the measure of degree indicated on the inscribed scale. That, gentlemen, is your latitude.” He grinned.
If navigation were only so simple, Raleigh thought. If convincing the Queen to authorize my enterprise were only five times more difficult!
“But our sea captains present know well that this instrument is useful only on land and aboard a becalmed ship. Put some waves under the ship and try to locate and hold your sight of the sun for even a fraction of a second! And your plumb line dances like the farmer’s comely daughter at the country fair!”
The seamen laughed. Raleigh was amused. Harriot possessed both brains and a commoner’s touch.
“So that leads us to the cross-staff.” Harriot placed the quadrant on the black rectangular table at his immediate left. He picked up a long contraption that consisted of a square-shaped, three foot long wooden staff and a sliding rectangular cross piece. The four sides of the staff had different degree markings, each side applicable to a different-sized cross piece.
“The cross-staff,” Harriot began, “measures the altitude of a given celestial object, like the sun, from the horizon. Which cross piece you choose to slide along the staff depends on the predicted angle of the object relative to the horizon. Let me demonstrate.”
Raleigh watched him elevate one end of the staff to his right cheekbone, directly below his right eye. His left hand held the cross piece just below the staff. “The lower edge of the cross piece must be aligned with the horizon. The upper edge must sight, if it is your choice, the sun. You slide the cross piece along the staff until you accomplish both at the same place on the staff. Hold the cross piece in place and read the measurement on the staff where the cross piece is located. This measurement must only be taken at noon, at no other time. Done so successfully, you have determined your latitude.”
Raleigh had not told Harriot of his intention to send him on an exploratory voyage to locate a suitable port along the North American coastline where privateers could re-provision and repair their ships. He had advocated this idea persuasively to the Queen. She had seemed amenable. She had not, however, agreed to extend to him his half-brother’s patent!
“Who can tell us what advantages the cross-staff has over the quadrant?”
One of the sea captains raised a hand.
Harriot gestured. “Please.”
“The cross-staff tisn’t bothered by gravity. You can use the bugger on a rollin’ ship, if’n the waves tisn’t too choppy so as to find the ‘orizon. Tis a ‘ound t’find the sun at the same time, but can be done, with a bit o’ swearin’!”
Harriot nodded. He placed the instrument on the table. “Now what might be its disadvantages?”
Raleigh observed a movement of heads and shoulders. The sea captain that had already spoken said, “The buckin’ of the sea. Like I said.”
“Noted. And?”
“The bleedin’ sun!” Using his left index fingernail, the seaman scratched his scalp. “You d’ave t’look straight into the bleedin’ sun!”
“Yes! Better to have the first mate do the measurement!” Harriot grinned. The captain nodded, appeared to Raleigh to be pleased.
“There is another disadvantage I should mention,” Harriot said. He waited, causing the four men – Raleigh noticed -- to straighten. “Who do you know who is able to look at two separate things well apart from each other at the same time? Nobody, I suspect. It cannot be done.”
“You have to shift your eyes,” the captain who had not yet spoken said.
“Therefore, the place where you stop moving the cross piece might not be entirely accurate. Close to accurate but not entirely. Part of my lesson today involves certain ways you can make a more accurate reading, despite this difficulty. But enough with words. I will have each of you now practice taking a reading with the quadrant and the cross-staff. Please come up here in turn. Captain Harris, if you would be first, to set the best example.”
They rose from their chairs, the leg bottoms scraping the bare floor. Watching them, Raleigh exhaled. He had heard rumors that Secretary Walsingham was soliciting the Queen hard for Humphrey’s patent. He had thought rigorously about Walsingham’s motives. He was uneasy about his chances.
Walsingham was the most powerful of Elizabeth’s advisors. Walsingham’s spies operated everywhere. (He, Raleigh, had provided Walsingham reports about targeted Catholics while he had been at Oxford!) For years, Walsingham had fought Leicester and Burghley about how Philip of Spain and the House of Guise in France should be stymied. Walsingham was relentless in ferreting out plots against the Queen, especially those that implicated Mary Stuart, the former Queen of Scotland. Here now intruded the knave upstart Walter Raleigh, born and raised in Devon, one or two cuts above common stock, the Queen’s newest love interest, advising her how to emasculate the King of Spain!
Walsingham had tried to stop Humphrey from exercising his patent. Now he wanted to send his step-son, Christopher Carleill, to North America to discover a permanent port and establish a colony for the identical reasons that he, Raleigh, had advocated.
Walsingham was about Power. Control.
And, Raleigh believed, income. It was rumored that Walsingham was in debt. Humphrey’s patent had given him the authority to sell large sections of land within the boundaries of his patent to wealthy investors.
“Tomorrow I will acquaint you with the astrolabe and of the ways of determining time,” Raleigh heard Harriot say. And perhaps tomorrow the rain might stop. Harriot had forgotten to mention how foul weather negated the benefits of navigational instruments. That was common knowledge. As was the assumption at Court that Walsingham would receive Humphrey Gilbert’s patent.
He would make plans as though that would not happen.
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