Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [142]
The events described in this and the preceding chapter have made it clear, I hope, that Christiaan Huygens’s claims to priority in the matter of the spring-regulated pocket watch, and pre-eminence in the field of lens- grinding, microscopy and telescopy, are inseparable from his sometimes uncannily close connections with his British and French counterparts. So let it be another of Christiaan Huygens’s involuntary international collaborations at a distance that takes us forward to the final chapter of this story – Anglo–Dutch relations in the New World.
In a letter written on 25 October 1660 from Hartford, Connecticut, where he was governor of the English colony, John Winthrop junior, son of the founder of the English colony at Jamestown, and a considerable scientist in his own right, told the English scientist and educator Samuel Hartlib that he was disappointed that his ‘Telescope of [focal length] about 10 foot doth shew little of Saturne’.82 He asked Hartlib, who acted as an intellectual go-between for scientists and practitioners across Europe, to tell him if he knew ‘the manner of the fabrique of that new Telescopium in holland’, expressing the hope that Christiaan Huygens might have described such an instrument accurately in his Systema Saturnium (System of Saturn), which Winthrop had not yet read. Huygens’s book, announcing his remarkable discovery of Saturn’s rings, had been published the previous year. Winthrop’s anticipation of a copy arriving in Connecticut is further evidence of the ease with which new publications circulated across the known world. It was another year, however, before Hartlib wrote telling Winthrop that ‘some weeks agoe’ he had sent him ‘the Systeme of Saturne with all the Cuts [illustrations]’. Winthrop was gripped by the contents of Huygens’s book, and was keen to observe the phases in Saturn’s appearance himself.
His astronomical observations were interrupted by more pressing local political concerns. Connecticut had been founded during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Now, in 1661, Winthrop was obliged to return to England to negotiate a new charter for the colony with the returning King, Charles II. He was away for almost two years, during which time he was successful in gaining for the inhabitants of Connecticut a charter from the King, assigning them lands from the Pawcatuck River all the way westwards to the Pacific Ocean. While in England he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He returned to Connecticut in 1663, and in 1664 assisted in Charles II’s seizure of the thriving Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island for the English.83
In January 1665, in the midst of unfolding events following the seizure of Manhattan, Winthrop wrote to Sir Robert Moray at the Royal Society, sending him observations of the moons of Jupiter which he had made with a refracting telescope of ’3 foote and [a] halfe with a concave ey-glasse’. Inspired by Christiaan Huygens’s book, he had, it seems, brought the English-made telescope back with him from London:
Having looked upon Jupiter with a Telescope upon 6th of August last I saw 5 Satellites very distinctly about that planet; I observed it with the best curiosity I could, taking very distinct notice of the number of them, by severall aspects with some convenient time of intermission; and though I was not without some consideration whether that fifthe might not be some fixed star with which Jupiter might at that time be in near conjunction, yet that consideration made me the more carefully to take notice whether I could discern any such difference of one of them from the other four that might by the more twinkling light of it or any other appearance give ground to believe that it might be a fixt star, but I could discern nothing of that nature.84
Winthrop turned out to be mistaken – although a fifth moon of Jupiter was indeed discovered in the nineteenth