‘Perfectly Correct’: Russian Navigators and the Royal Navy

Abstract

The era of the Board of Longitude’s existence, between 1714 and 1828, was also a remarkable period in the history of Russia’s navy. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Tsar Peter I set about reforming the Russian military following disastrous campaigns in the Great Northern War with Sweden, and created a substantial Baltic fleet centred on the new capital, St Petersburg.1 To provide expertise for training sailors on Russian ships, Peter turned west, and in particular to Britain. These efforts inaugurated a steady traffic of experts and students between Britain and Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that helped transform Russian navigation practices into a form resembling, and sometimes advancing on, those of Britain. This essay explores the British role in developing Russian navigation and makes three arguments. First, while the Russians evidently relied greatly on British expertise during this period, the traffic was not one way. Russian institutions provided theoretical expertise, practical experimental resources, and generous patronage that played a role in shaping British solutions to navigational problems including finding longitude at sea. Russians were not passive recipients of British expertise, and some techniques, at least, emerged from transnational co-operation and the circulation of knowledge.2