The Honourable East India Company, or HEIC, was staffed
by devoted officers who travelled the world on the company's ships
on a mission of crucial importance: to chart, in all the seas known
to man, the reefs, currents, position of ports, rivers and natural
bays, etc. By doing so, they created precise maps to ensure that
future expeditions would avoid catastrophe and return to Europe
with their precious cargo intact.
Thanks to the works he published, we know a little of the
eventful life of one of these men: Commanding Officer George
Robertson.
Robertson embarked on a naval career with the East India Company
at the beginning of the 1780s. He compiled observations, comparing
these systematically with information in earlier English, French
and Dutch publications. When he started publishing himself in 1801,
after almost 20 years at sea, he was quick to pay tribute to the
instrument that had helped him the most:
"The present work, or compilation, is published since the
introduction of that great improvement made in the art and practice
of navigation, the marine chronometer, the only sure means of
ascertaining meridian distance with facility, and that to a degree
of precision (when common care has been taken in the observation)
to answer every purpose required in the formation of a general
chart."
Robertson found Arnold's chronometers to be the most reliable.
He was aware that many explorers whose observations he compiled
used them: Captain Lestock Wilson and Captain Cook when he mapped
Macao and Cochinchina, or Captain Fraser, when he was interested in
New Holland, present-day Australia.
In October 1788, he himself was on board the General Coote in
the China Sea, off the coast of the island of Borneo, in a channel
riddled with treacherous reefs:
"The Praters Shoal is a very dangerous reef, near the coast of
China, and lies much in the way of ships coming from the eastward
late in the season. On the 12 October, in the ship General Coote,
Capt. Baldwin, we made this Shoal; and had a very favourable
opportunity of determining its exact position, by a well-regulated
box-chronometer, made by Arnold, whose uniformity of rate during
our four months' stay at China, I could never discover to
alter."
Robertson also provided valuable information regarding the
circumnavigation of Formosa and New Holland. It is not known what
became of him after the publication of his works. However, he was
known and respected by numerous seafarers who crossed his path,
including the famous Captain Joseph Huddart, who improved the
design and manufacture of marine rope, and who remembered his skill
as a cartographer in mapping the Keeling Islands, a small
archipelago in the Indian Ocean:
"The ingenious Mr. George Robertson has determined their
situation by an Arnold's box chronometer in a short run from Java
Head, and corroborated by three sets of Lunar observation, objects
East and West."
Bibliography:
Huddart, Joseph, Captain,The Oriental Navigator(London,
1801).
Robertson, George,A Short Account of a Passage from
China(London, 1802).
