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The Mediterranean of Louis XV 237
the ability of the sedentary scholar to judge the veracity of data
gathered by travellers.
The heightened significance of travel as a form of scientific
research required that travellers be properly instructed in contemporary
techniques of information gathering. To this end, a
set of nine instructions drawn up by the astronomer and mathematician
Lawrence Rooke (1622–62) were published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1666. 5
Rooke was interested exclusively in phenomena with direct
applications to navigation and cartography, necessitating that
the scientific traveller-observer sound depths, describe coasts,
and record tides. Instruments were to be used (a clock, a magnetic
compass), the method was to be described and the latitude
and longitude of observations were to be recorded. Unlike the
Humanist traveller of the Renaissance, the scientific travellerobserver
of the Enlightenment was to be accountable and nothing
was to be taken on authority.
A distinct set of instructions by Robert Boyle (1627–1691)
appeared in the Philosophical Transactions a few months after
those by Rooke, in which the author established a much wider
field of enquiry, encompassing all manner of phenomena both
natural and human. 6 Boyle’s ‘General Heads of a Natural History
of a Country, Great or Small’ was but a précis of a more
extensive set of instructions that were a summa of the Royal
Society’s general objectives: ‘to study Nature rather than
Books, and from Observations, made of the Phænomena and
Effects she presents, to compose such a History of Her, as may
hereafter serve to build a Solid and Useful Philosophy upon’. 7
Like Rooke, Boyle insisted that the traveller-observer first determine
the longitude and latitude of the places visited, in order
that all other data could be plugged into a universal, mathematically
rigorous system.
The instructions of the Royal Society were a model that
remained useful well into the eighteenth century and were
reprinted in a number of important collections of travel literature.
Rooke’s nine ‘Directions’ were published in full as part of
5 Philosophical Transactions no. 8 (8 Jan. 1665/6), 141.
6 Ibid., no. 11 (2 April 1666), 186–9.
7 Ibid., no. 8 (8 Jan. 1665/6), 141.