The Ancient Mariner and the transit of Venus.
The achievements of William Wales FRS - astronomer, classical scholar, demographer, editor, mathematician, meteorologist and humane teacher - have been overshadowed by the fame of Cook's extraordinary voyages, and overlooked as a significant influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's early development. The Royal Society sent Wales to Hudson Bay, Canada, and James Cook to Tahiti, both to observe the 1769 transit of Venus as part of an international project to calculate solar parallax, and hence the distance to the Sun. Wales later taught mathematics and navigation science at Christ's Hospital School to a precocious Coleridge, whose creative mind translated tales of polar adventures into memorable poetry.
Nevil Maskelyne, the seaman's astronomer
Part 1 Preparation: the Maskelynes of Purton the longitude problem the transit of Venus, 1761 Saint Helena, 1761 the Barbados trials, 1763-4 Astronomer Royal, 1765 the Royal Observatory and its instruments the Harrison affair, 1764-7 the Nautical Almanac. Part 2 Achievement: early years at Greenwich, 1765-9 the 1770s weighing the world - Schiehallion, 1774 the 1780s - and a new planet the 1790s the final years, 1800-11. summing up.
Arthur Dobbs and Joseph Robson: New Light on the Relationship between Two Early Critics of the Hudson’s Bay Company
TI-I-E MIDDLE YEARS Of the eighteenth century were anxious ones for the Hudson's Bay Company. After the period of comparative stability and affluence which had followed the return to the Company in 1718 of its possessions i Hudson Bay, it faced dangers from the French in America nd from its rivals in England. In the Bay the •Company's position was threatened both by the penetration of French traders to the heads of the rivers down which the Indians brought furs to the Company posts on the coast, and by the possibility of open French aggression during the War of the Austrian Succession: i England its charter and very existence were assailed by powerful mercantile lements whose attack was directed by Arthur Dobbs, the most persistent of the Company's critics at this time. 1