This chapter surveys one of the most significant enterprises of the Committee of Instruments and Proposals, established by the Board of Longitude following the Longitude Act of 1818. This was the management of a new observatory proposed for the Cape of Good Hope. Several Commissioners of Longitude had direct interests: John Barrow had been administrator and surveyor at the Cape; Joseph Banks advised on maritime surveys there; Davies Gilbert lobbied actively for a southern equivalent of the Royal Observatory. Commissioners successfully negotiated the scheme with the Admiralty and the Colonial Office. Though funds were forthcoming from the Navy, long-distance management proved difficult. The resulting issues reached the Committee and the Board, as did increasing costs of equipment from London’s finest instrument makers. These challenges had not been resolved at the Board’s dissolution in 1828; indeed, that moment coincided with discussions as to the possibility of closing the observatory. The affairs of the Cape Observatory thus reveal both opportunities and challenges in issues of scientific and geographical management in the epoch of empire and reform.

In the first book-length history of the Board of Longitude, a distinguished team of historians of science brings to life one of Georgian Britain’s most important scientific institutions. Having developed in the eighteenth century following legislation that offered rewards for methods to determine longitude at sea, the Board came to support the work of navigators, instrument makers, clockmakers and surveyors, and assembled the Nautical Almanac. The authors use the archives and records of the Board, which they have recently digitised, to shed new light on the Board’s involvement in colonial projects and in Pacific and Arctic exploration, as well as on innovative practitioners whose work would otherwise be lost to history. This is an invaluable guide to science, state and society in Georgian Britain, a period of dramatic industrial, imperial and technological expansion.

This chapter details the creation and management of the Nautical Almanac, one of the Board of Longitude’s most important concerns. Appointed Astronomer Royal and thus a Commissioner of Longitude in 1765, Nevil Maskelyne oversaw its publication and that of associated texts, directing the work of a group of mathematical computers overseen by comparers. Hierarchical organisation and increasing costs preoccupied much of the Board of Longitude’s subsequent affairs. Calculated up to a decade in advance, the Nautical Almanac became a symbol of the Board’s repute among foreign academies and observatories, although its accuracy was later subject to satire and criticism. After Maskelyne’s death, work seems to have suffered and its management was overhauled by the Longitude Act of 1818 that brought it under Thomas Young’s management. Controversy wracked the Board’s direction of the Nautical Almanac for the next decade. Its assignment from 1831 to the astronomer William Stratford as superintendent was a major element of the aftermath of the Board’s abolition.

This brief epilogue considers the decades after the dissolution of the British Board of Longitude in 1828 and the ways in which its functions were subsumed by and distributed between other bodies, within the Admiralty and beyond.