Air Navigation and the New Institute

Extract

The foundation of the Institute of Navigation has given satisfaction to many, but perhaps to none more than the shade of the great man who in 1673 inaugurated on the basis of the old charitable institution of Christ's Hospital ‘a nursery of children to be educated in Mathematics for the particular use and service of navigation’. That science has made some strides since Samuel Pepys's day. But no one who has read Arthur Bryant's fascinating study of the Great Secretary of the Admiralty under the Restoration can doubt that old Samuel would have been well abreast, if not ahead, of all developments, especially as they affected the King's Fighting Services. His comments on the subject after his experience of the Great Storm of 1684 have a very realistic and modern ring about them: ‘We are very solicitous in our disputes and opinions touching our draughts and log lines and things’ he wrote ‘when we are at a loss for our ways … but as soon as ever we see land all difference is forgot, or any desire of recording the truth, but on the contrary, everybody endeavours to make himself be thought to have been in the right, and not thinking also that they should ever come to the same loss in the same place again. Hence it comes that the science of navigation lies so long without more improvement’. How true, and how curious that it should have been more than 260 years before the foundation of this Institute, under a president one of whose predecessors was called in by Pepys in 1686 to defend against unjust criticism a treatise on the science of navigation.