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Updated: June 7, 2025
The known world to him was from the Canary Islands eastward to China, and from the equator northward to Caledonia. His maps, however, are very erroneous; for, in the attempt to make them correspond to the spherical figure of the earth, the longitudes are too much to the east; the Mediterranean Sea is twenty degrees too long.
They included not merely predictions from the tables, but also astronomical observations made at the Paris Observatory or elsewhere. When the Bureau of Longitudes was created in 1795, the preparation of the work was intrusted to it, and has remained in its charge until the present time.
Cook found the longitudes in places were very different from those on the Russian maps, and was afraid the mistake might be carried through, but the latitudes were fairly correct. As far as he could ascertain, the instrument used for the survey had been the theodolite.
I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands.
All the lawyers, wits, and humanists of the De Villiers were baffled by any sort of problem. It was told of a member of the family a distant cousin as a remarkable thing that he had found a post in the Bureau des Longitudes. And it was further told how he had gone mad.
Under these circumstances it was necessary, and it was easy, to make great improvements in the construction of maps, in laying down the real form of the earth, and the relative situations of the countries of which it is formed, together with their latitudes and longitudes.
The depreciation of the rival fabrics is exquisite; and Dryden, the most English of our poets, would not be so thoroughly English if he had not in him some fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Speaking of "a more exact knowledge of the longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells us that,
We found a similar difference between our observation of St. Francisco and his; I therefore believe that his whole survey of the north-west coast of America represents it more easterly than it really is. Our longitudes have the greater claim to confidence, as they were the results of repeated observations on land, while his were merely taken on shipboard en passant.
Our first observation by chronometers, on our arrival at Matarai, gave the longitude of Venus Point as 149° 20' 30"; the true one, as given by Admiral Krusenstern on his map, is 149° 27' 20"; consequently, the error of our chronometers was 6' 50". This correction has been made in all the longitudes taken by us in the dangerous Archipelago.
The other work to which I refer was the application to astronomy and to the determination of longitudes of the chronographic method of registering transits of stars or other phenomena requiring an exact record of the instant of their occurrence. It is to be regretted that the history of this application has not been fully written.
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