Now, for the first time, the full story of attempts to solve the longitude problem - unravelling the lone genius myth popularised in film and literature - is freely available to everyone via the Cambridge Digital Library at http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/
The new Board of Longitude Collection includes the complete archive of the Board, held by the Library, along with associated collections from the National Maritime Museum. Treasures of the Longitude archive include accounts of bitter rivalries, wild proposals and first encounters between Europeans and Pacific peoples. This includes logbooks of Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery, the naming of Australia and even a letter from Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty, who writes to apologise for the loss of a timekeeper after his ship was ‘pirated from my command’.
The University Library’s Digital Library project was launched in June 2010 following a £1.5m gift from the Polonsky Foundation. University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With the digitisation of this incredible collection, we have taken another important step towards realising our shared ambition of creating a digital library for the world.”
Max worked onsite at the National Maritime Museum digitising 32,000 pages.
