Our visit to the National Maritime Museum’s Caird Library was one that I greatly anticipated. Having just completed Dava Sobel’s Longitude, I was eager to find out whether they had some of the items that were mentioned in her book in their collection, and, after our excellent tour, I was pleasantly surprised.
Hannah Dunmow, archive and manuscripts manager for the library, gave us our introduction to the collection. The Caird Library was part of the original museum, from 1937, and was so named after Sir James Caird, who acquired the original collection. The rotunda, a central architectural focus of the library, was designed by Lutyens, and features a large golden marble bust of Sir Caird. The library also contains the oak bookcases and tables from the original library, which gives the space a warm, but airy and old feel. These essential pieces were designed by Calender and Mags and manufactured by Mssrs. Pyghlle. The library has an entry area that houses the catalog computers and a reception desk where visitors must be cleared before entering the actual collection space.
The Caird Library boasts that it is the largest research library on maritime history. Their collection focuses on information about and relating to human endeavors and the sea, including emigration, navigation, piracy, astronomy, prominent people in the maritime field, and the navies of the world. They have many different books that focus on these subjects, and many unique, specified, and rare items, including Lloyd’s captain’s registers and master’s lists, which aide people in finding information about relatives who once emigrated from the UK. The complete collection contains over 100,000 books published in 1850 onward; 20,000 pamphlets which are not fully cataloged; 20,000 bound periodicals, 200 of which are kept current; and 8,000 rare books and documents from 1474-1850 that make up the special collections of the library.
The staff at Caird includes six full time archivists, three subject and materials specialists, two reference librarians, one digital services librarian, and the head of the library, all of whom are professional librarians or archivists. The employees of the library handle between three and four thousand in-person visits to the library per year, but they get between fifteen and eighteen thousand enquiries at the outside desk from all kinds of visitors to the museum. The staff retrieves about five thousand manuscripts for research and about two thousand other archival items per year. This group is also engaged in constant scholarship for and about the collection with which they work. Every month, someone on the archive team chooses a book from the collection, researches it, and presents the information to the public via a blog on the library’s website.
As a group, we were privileged to see a few very interesting items that are part of the library’s collection, including the medical reference book that was used aboard the H.M.S. Bounty, as well as a book called Sea Grammar that was written by John Smith, governor of the Virginia settlement. The latter included chapters on varied subjects, such as those titled “How to Build a Ship” (Ch. 1) and “How to Start a Fight” (Ch. 17). From the manuscripts collection we were shown a real pirate’s journal and a letter to Sir Francis Drake.
I, however, having just finished reading Longitude, and knowing that the same museum that housed John Harrison’s clocks surely must have some of the most important documents that were part of the quest for accurate navigational abilities, was eager to get my own reader’s card for the Caird library and to request a very old book from their archives—if they had it. This library allows any visitor with proper identification to view its documents and use its reading rooms; since they do not lend, they incur no risk with this procedure of openness. I checked their online catalog and found exactly what I was looking for—the 1712 Atlas coelestis.
This was the pirated book of star charts, compiled by John Flamsteed and “borrowed” by Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley and published without permission. They managed to get 400 copies printed, but Flamsteed got his hands of 300 of those and burned them, as he had not had a chance to edit them himself. He later published his collected star charts on his own, but I wanted to see one of the hundred. I was hoping for an original copy, and I found not only an original, but the one that belonged to Newton himself, with his annotations in the margins! They hold it in the archives there at the Maritime Museum. Once again, I was able to touch a part of history.
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