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The said master affirmed, that the vulgar reckoning proved as near as that of the watches, which [the clocks], added he, had varied from one another unequally, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, to 4, 6, 7, 3, 5 minutes; as also that they had been corrected by the usual account. And as to the island, at which they had watered, the said master declared, that it was not Fuego, but another thirty miles distant from the same west- ward.85

According to the Master of Holmes’s ship, then, there was not much to choose between the old way of calculating longitude, and that using the new clocks. Moray, who had spoken to Holmes himself, corrected ‘some mistakes in the number of the leagues formerly mentioned’. He confirmed that the ships had not watered on Fuego, ‘yet they had made that island at the time, which the Major had foretold, and were gone from thence to another, more convenient, for watering’.86

This was the meeting at which, immediately following Moray’s rather obviously fudged report, Hooke told the Royal Society ‘that he intended to put his [own] secret concerning the longitude into the hand of the president, to be disposed of as his lordship should think fit’. In his opinion, ‘no certainty could be had from [pendulum] watches for the longitude’.

At the very next meeting, 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.’87 Nothing further is heard, however, of discrepancies between the ships’ 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? Holmes’s account has been firmly lodged on the record ever since.

However, a presentation copy of Holmes’s Guinea voyage journals, which Pepys had indeed procured, as instructed by the Royal Society, survives in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. This is a fair copy of the journal, prepared for James, Duke of York. I believe that I am one of the first scholars to have consulted it in the context of the Holmes trials, on that voyage, of Huygens’s longitude clocks.88

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.89 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 (in connection with the incident we have already heard about), and it is hard to see how they could have been kept going steadily throughout, given naval battles with Dutch East India- men in which (for instance) Holmes’s topmast and mainsail were shot away.

In July Holmes was on San Thome off the west coast of Africa, reprovi- sioning and rewatering. He set out for home on 11 August. For more than a month strong currents, contrary winds and becalmings bedevilled him. By the third week of September his small fleet was well and truly lost on the open seas. There is a full sequence of entries relating to Holmes and his fellow captains getting lost and running short of water, which does, uniquely in the entire journal, mention ‘pendula’. It was with great reluctance that Holmes’s companions agreed to turn westwards. It was three days before they sighted land, during which time variable winds took them in several different directions. As Pepys had learned, they did not land on Fuego, but some time later on another of the Cape Verde Islands, Brava. Holmes had, at the very least, made greatly exaggerated claims for the part the clocks had played in the incident.

But once Holmes had lodged his misleading report, with its bravura account of the spectacular accuracy of the pendulum clocks, Huygens’s claim to priority in relation to longitude timekeepers was assured. The account