The oldest public school in the United States, the Boston Public Latin School, was founded today in the Year of Our Lord 1635. It was a day still locked in the heart of dark winter in New England, the summer months away. The stern Fathers of the day must have figured it was a good time to get the little ones started on something productive before time for planting.

“Hic, Haic, Hoc” the little ones chanted. “Huius, Huius, Huius. Amo, Amas, Amat.” And so began declension in America, a process we have nearly perfected to such a degree that Latin has disappeared altogether.

The Great Migration from England was well underway in 1635, but it had not been long. In 1606 the King issued a warrant granting a company of Englishman the right to establish a settlement on one of the great rives that drained he Chesapeake Bay. Two hundred and fourteen souls were there by 1609, when the “starving time” left only sixty alive. They were prepared to throw in the towel by the next summer, and had buried their cannon and armor and abandoned the little Settlement of Jamestown. It was only the arrival of the new governor, Lord De La Ware, and his supply ships that brought the colonists back to the fort.

Privation of varying degrees went on for decades, almost up to the founding of the Latin School far to the north. But at least the Indian Threat was neutralized by the alliance with the Algonquins that followed the marriage of Pocahantas, favored daughter of Chief Powhatan, to tobacco entrepreneur John Rolfe.

So light up a Lucky with me, smoke ’em if you got ’em, and ponder the past. We hung onto this continent on a plant we can no longer burn in polite company, and the ones who planted it arrived at Jamestown in 1619, when a Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food.

By the time of the Latin School the Great Migration was well underway. Englishmen and women who came as free people to the new world followed a course not much different from that of the Vikings: South of Iceland, South of Greenland, then the long ruin down East on the Grand Banks to the northern Colonies.

Navigation was difficult. Clocks of the day relied on pendulums as escape mechanisms, and they did not work at sea. There was therefore no means for a navigator to discern how far the wind had blown them in the course of a day, and each night brought an increasing variance from the place they had started. It was possible to determine how far from the equator the ship might be by observation, but without an accurate means to keep time, there was never a way to determine where along the line of Latitude you might be.

Feeling their way, half-blind, made navigation a great adventure. In 1635 the 240-ton ship “Angel Gabriel,” sixteen guns strong, was headed for New England. On her decks were “a company of many Godly Christians.” She foundered in a great storm near off Pemaquid Point., Maine. They had only a general idea of where they were, and might have lived if they had stayed to sea. Instead, they were driven on the rocks and most of the company and crew drowned in the roaring waves.

One of the passengers was a man named John Bailey. As was the custom, he left his wife and at least two children behind, planning to send for them after he became established. Although he survived the wreck, his wife was afraid to follow him after what had happened to the Angel Gabriel. He was unable to face the journey back to England, so they never saw each other again.

That was the human face of navigation in those days. The Authorities were concerned, and established a Board of Longitude to attack the problem. They offered a prize of almost unimaginable size: 20,000 Pounds for the first person to produce a clock that worked at sea, accurate to enable geo-location to within thirty miles.

John Harrison was a carpenter who sometimes repaired clocks. He was not an educated man, and would probably have been bored by the curriculum at the Latin School, which was nearing its sixtieth year of declension but the time he was born. His first clock was built in 1713, and revolutionized timekeeping by completely eliminating the need for lubrication. Poor oil had been one of the largest causes of clock failure. He marched on through technical challenge. He invented the gridiron pendulum, made of alternate rods of steel and brass, so that the differing expansion rates of the materials made the pendulum sing at a constant rate when heated. This eliminated the summer-time problem of the slow clock.

On his fourth try, he created the one that was a spectacular success. It resembled what we know today as a large pocket-watch, and during a four month voyage to Jamaica in 1761, it lost only five seconds. That produced a navigational error of only 18 miles, well within the limit for the top Longitude prize. On a later journey, the inaccuracy was reduced further.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the scientific establishment of the time was outraged at the accomplishment of a simple craftsman, and managed to delay the award of the prize until two years before his death

We think that going to the Moon is just a matter of applying resources and a little ingenuity. Harrison’s clocks were the original Moon Shot. They opened the world to reliable navigation. For good or for ill, it was this invention that produced the world in which we live. With accurate time came safe navigation. With safe navigation came trade, and then Navy’s to protect it, and troops to enforce it, and governments to regulate it. Trade in tobacco and cotton and raw materials fueled an industrial age, and the jostling of nation-states and the rise of the bourgoesie.

I have taken a ride on an enormous jet plane across the Atlantic to visit Mr. Harrison’s clocks. The first three models look like something made of Tinker Toys, not at all like timepieces. Some of the tourists at the Greenwich Observatory walk by them, little noting the significance of the display. Those clocks were the foundation on which an Empire was built.

For good or for ill. I ran through the headlines today. Another soldier is dead in Baghdad. I am sure that there is an old sedan somewhere being loaded with something awful, and some young man is checking his watch for an appointment with eternity.

I don’t have a lot of superstition in my bones. I think every day brings its own novelty, a minor variation on an endless theme. But just to be on the safe side I am going to watch my navigation. My astrolabe is a little rusty so I can’t tell you if it was Friday the Thirteenth the day that the Latin School was founded. But it certainly is here.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra