Centuries of science afloat

[...]the eighteenth-century lexicographer's admiration for explorers: "The adventurer upon unknown coasts, and the describer of distant regions" is to be welcomed, he declared, because they "enlarge our knowledge". By the eighteenth century, some ships had become mobile labs in which instruments from sextants to chronometers were tested and improved, and ever more accurate sea charts plotted. Beyond advances born of the need to stay on course, many seafarers kept journals, recording minute observations of sea life, coastlines and curious natural phenomena. The Endeavour expedition changed our understanding of the cosmos, as astronomers used its observations of the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun to measure Earths distance from our star.