James Rennell

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Portrait of James Rennell (1799)

Major James Rennell , member of the Royal Society (FRS), (born December 3, 1742 near Chudleigh, County Devon , † March 29, 1830 in London ) was a British geographer, historian and pioneer of oceanography .

biography

James Rennell was the son of a British artillery officer who was killed in action shortly after his son was born. In 1756, at the beginning of the Seven Years' War, he joined the Royal British Navy as a midshipman and was involved in an attack on Cherbourg and the disastrous Battle of Saint-Cast in 1758 . After the end of the war in 1763 he saw no further opportunity to be promoted to the Navy and entered the service of the British East India Company . He was appointed surveyor of the company's properties in Bengal in 1764 and was given the rank of captain of the Bengali pioneers. He spent the next 13 years doing this. In 1766 he was so badly wounded by a sword blow in a battle with sannyasis (religious fanatics) that the resulting injury never completely healed. In 1772 he married his wife Jane Thackeray. Promoted to major, he was released into retirement in 1777. He received an annual pension of £ 600.

The fictional Kong Mountains (arrow) on a map from 1882

He spent most of the remaining 53 years of his life in London. They were shaped by his scientific work, which is his most important life achievement. The main source of his research were documents from the East India House, the headquarters of the British East India Company.

Services

Geography and history

His most famous works in terms of geography and history were:

  • the "Bengal Atlas" (Atlas of Bengal) of 1779
  • the first geographically exact map of India in 1783
  • the 1800 book "On the geografical system of Herodotus"
  • various studies on the geography of North Africa based on the discoveries of Mungo Parks and Friedrich Konrad Hornemann . In doing so, however, he falsified the geographical data provided by Park in that he added a mountain range called the Kong Mountains , which should be located in the western part of Africa near the 10th parallel. The reason for this invention was to support his own theory about the actual course of the Niger . Rennell's forgery persisted into the 20th century.
  • the "Comparative Geography of Wester Asia" (Comparative Geography of West Asia) published posthumously in 1831

He also made contributions to archeology in which he dealt, for example, with the exact location of the city of Babylon, or tried to determine the landing site of Julius Caesar in Britain.

Rennell's map of the ocean currents around Africa (1799). The currents and winds are shown very precisely, while the inner Africa is almost completely imaginative. The Kong mountains invented by Rennell can also be seen (unlabeled) in this map as part of the moon mountains that run in a west-east direction across the entire continent and were already conceived in ancient times.

Hydrography and Oceanography

Rennell's most important scientific contribution, however, are his hydrographic work, in which he examined the course of the ocean currents and winds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. He began to be interested in these subjects when he and his family were on the return trip to London, which was eleven months long.

While circumnavigating the Cape of Good Hope, which was particularly time- consuming , he mapped the ocean currents now known as the Agulhas Current and published his results in the 1778 Chart of the Banks and Currents at the Lagullas . This map is one of the first scientific works on topics of oceanography. During the next few decades, however, Rennel mainly occupied himself with other scientific subjects until, after the death of his wife in 1810, he began again to study ocean currents. Using a vast number of nautical records and logbooks, he was able to create a detailed map of all ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean. During the last years of his life he wrote his most scientifically significant work, "An investigation of the currents of the Atlantic Ocean" , which was finally published posthumously in 1832 by his daughter Jane. The conscientiousness with which his investigations had been carried out was so great that it was not until 1936 that his findings could be significantly improved. Because of these achievements, he is now considered a pioneer in oceanography.

Awards

As early as 1781 he was elected a member of the Royal Society, which is still one of the most important scientific institutions in Great Britain today. He was awarded the golden Copley Medal in 1791 and the Royal Society's Prize for Literature in 1825. In 1797 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1815 he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . After his death he was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey . Due to his sometimes unscientific working methods, his work was soon forgotten, so that James Rennell remained almost unknown outside of Great Britain.

Publications

literature

  • Thomas J. Bassett, Philip W. Porter: "From the Best Authorities": The Mountains of Cong in the Cartography of West Africa. In: Journal of African History 32, 1991, No. 3, pp. 367-413, ( JSTOR 182661 ).
  • Curt Arthur Frenzel: Major James Rennell, the creator of modern English geography ; Society for Geography in Leipzig 1904
  • Clements R Markham: Major James Rennell and Modern English Geography . Reprint of the edition from 1895. Hansebooks, Norderstedt 2017, ISBN 978-3-337-32109-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bassett, Porter: “From the Best Authorities” , cf. Researched and invented. Fictional mountains . In: Die Zeit No. 33 of August 7, 1992.
  2. ↑ James Rennell has given in his book "On the Geography of Herodotus" an average travel time of four months for the route from London to Bombay when modern ships of the late 18th century are used. However, the duration of his return trip was eleven months. Although he made a stopover with his family on St. Helena because his wife was pregnant, the trip to this island still took six months.
  3. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed April 2, 2020 .
  4. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. James Rennell. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 19, 2015 (Russian).

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Rennell, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British geographer, historian and oceanography pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH December 3, 1742
PLACE OF BIRTH near Chudleigh, Devon (England)
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1830
Place of death London