Retiring from my travels as Caird North American Fellow I feel I must report that an anonymous boy has been scribbling over library books in the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. I am enormously grateful to him. Writing in the 1860s, he confided his doubts and his determination to go to sea to the margins of his copy of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s seminal 1841 guide for sailors, The Seaman’s Friend. His marginalia reveals both his youth and inexperience, as he has especially marked up the pages pertaining to ‘boys’ and ‘ordinary seamen’ and noted the wages for a green hand. He had literary interests too, pasting in lines from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure about doubt: ‘Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt.’ Under this he included, from the Boston Evening Transcript, an antidote to those doubts: ‘A man who has a fixed purpose to which he devotes his powers is invulnerable. Like the rock in the sea, it splits the troubles of life, and they eddy round him in idle foam.’ Inside the book’s covers he noted the latitude and longitude of Boston, of San Francisco, and information about Cape Horn, the three prime locations in which this boy was imaginatively invested. As in Dana’s Two Year’s Before the Mast, the voyage around Cape Horn often was seen as a rite of passage and especially for a young man. This boy’s marginalia expresses his sense that he is on the verge of his own rite of passage, redolent as its language is with doubt, determination, real and imagined location, and a literal and figurative positioning of himself.

Coloured lithograph of A Squall off Cape Horn (PAD6433)
I found this book in the wonderful collections of the John Carter Brown Library. The boy’s jottings have helped me to consider a crucial question which hangs over the book that I am working on: what did the study of celestial navigation mean for women who went to sea in the nineteenth century? This is because at the centre of my book are two young captains’ wives who, in one of the stormiest, most ferocious southern winters of the 19th century, had to navigate their husbands’ clipper ships westward around Cape Horn. They had to do so because their husbands were incapacitated by serious illness. These American women, aged nineteen and twenty-two, were then the only ones on board capable of navigating. As teenagers they had lived in adjoining streets in Boston’s North End, but although they must have passed each other in the crowded alleys many times, we have no evidence that they ever met. In the winter of 1856 their proximity was of a different and more deadly order as they battled with the seas around the Horn, fighting for their husbands’ and the ships’ survival. My book will tell of their lives within the context of the merchant marine and of navigational study by women and men at this time.
I have been reading David Rooney’s fascinating book about Ruth Belville, a woman very much in control of the time. The author’s profile claims that he is equally in control and ‘has never been late for work’. On my US travels I wished I had that same symbiotic relationship with my subject. Instead, navigation failed me, and I was too often utterly lost. North America saw me driving an hour north on Maine’s Route One, meaning to go south, and astray on the twisting overpasses outside Boston, in the dark, in a storm (don’t talk to me of the dangers of Cape Horn). However, I did find my way eventually, and this wonderful fellowship gave me the flexibility to explore the great centres for maritime history as well as the little local historical societies which can yield research prizes and surprises. I am enormously grateful to the National Maritime Museum for the opportunity to investigate these archives and the riches that I found there, and finally to let me come home to the NMM and the prime meridian, where I will at least know where I am.

If you worked in London from the 1890s to the 1930s, you might have encountered Ruth Belville working her trade along the streets of the London Docks, Clerkenwell, the City, the West End and as far afield as South Kensington and Baker Street. Once a week, every week, Ruth would journey to the Royal Observatory with an eighteenth-century pocket watch in her handbag. She would get the watch checked against the master clock at the Observatory before making her way around thirty or forty customers spread across the metropolis who paid an annual fee in return for a weekly visit from the ‘Greenwich Time Lady’ to inspect her watch. It sounds old-fashioned – a pocket watch in a handbag – but in fact Ruth’s time service was accurate to a tenth of a second (better than the Observatory’s own electrical time distribution system by a factor of ten).
Ruth was the third time-seller in her family. Her father, John, an assistant at the Observatory, had started the time service in 1836 and used to send the silver pocket watch (named ‘Arnold’ after the surname of its maker, and now on show at the excellent Clockmakers’ Museum in London’s Guildhall) to his customers in town each week. When he died in 1856, his widow, Maria, took over the weekly visits, and when she retired in 1892, in her eighties and nearly blind, their daughter Ruth took on the job. ‘It is a hard day’s work’, Ruth once said. She wasn’t wrong. I’ve recently written a book telling her story called Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady (it’s in shops now). I pieced together her walking route and I have to take my hat off to the woman described by one journalist as ‘hale and hearty’. I walked it; it’s a hard day’s work indeed.
It was a blast writing this book, because it got personal. It’s a story all about people struggling to get by in a big city and it shows, I hope, that the seemingly-simple question ‘what time is it?’ is not so easy to answer. There’s a colourful cast of characters in the book, from millionaires and murderers to the ‘Girl With The Golden Voice’. There are scientists, telephonists, terrorists and horologists, poets and paupers, bombers and bell-ringers. I’ve been recording some episodes for the National Maritime Museum’s podcast series where you can find out more about some of these folk (and there are more to come). Ruth Belville had a tough life, by all accounts, and her story deserved to be told. But when I pieced together the story I found that fact really is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make some of this stuff up!