Archives

At the very next meeting of the Royal Society, on 22 March, ‘Mr
Pepys was desired to procure the journals of those masters of ships,
who had been with Major Holmes in Guinea, and differed from him in
the relation concerning the pendulum watches.’ 17 Nothing further was
heard, however, of discrepancies between the ship’s journals and his
‘relation concerning the pendulum clocks’. Had that convivial dinner a
week earlier perhaps predisposed Pepys to draw a veil over the matter?
In any case, by this time England was at war with Holland, and Holmes
himself was in charge of English naval hostilities.
Holmes’s account of his trials of Huygens’s longitude clocks has
been firmly lodged on the record ever since, as an exact account of the
astonishing success of these critical sea-trials of Huygens’s pendulum
clocks.
However, a presentation copy of Holmes’s journal of his two
Guinea voyages survives in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College,
Cambridge. It is presumably the copy Pepys procured, as instructed by
the Royal Society, to validate Holmes’s narrative. It has gone unnoticed
by scholars, in the context of the Holmes trials of Huygens’s longitude
clocks on that very voyage. 18
Holmes’s journal is extremely full and specific. It is also rather
well written – Holmes has a nice line in racy narratives, particularly
where bombarding and plundering Dutch merchant ships is concerned.
Day by day he chronicles the progress of his band of ships – the Jersey,
the Brill, the Golden Lyon and the Expedition. Only once in the course
of the entire journal does he mention the pendulum clocks, and it is
hard to see how they could have been kept going steadily, given a
series of buccaneering adventures and naval battles with Dutch East
Indiamen in which (for instance) Holmes’s topmast and mainsail were
shot away.
Here is a taste of Holmes’s swashbuckling style, and a reminder of
the combative nature of his maritime ventures, as preserved in a letter
he included in his Guinea voyages journals written from Lisbon on his
return journey:
17 Birch, The history of the Royal Society 2, 26.
18 I owe this discovery to some chance remarks in C. H. Wilson, ‘Who captured New
Amsterdam?’, The English Historical Review, 72 (1957), 469–74: ‘Fortunately our answer [to
the question of whether Holmes was involved in the capture of New Amsterdam in 1664]
need not rest on surmise, for we have Holmes’s own account of his movements during
the months when he is supposed by some historians to have been on his way to America,
and capturing New Amsterdam [Captain Robert Holmes his Journalls of Two Voyages into
Guynea in his Mts Ships The Henrietta and the Jersey, Pepys Library Sea MSS. No. 2698]’
(pp. 472–3).
Never Trust a Pirate: Christiaan Huygens’s Longitude Clocks 39