James Rennell
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Major James Rennell F.R.S. (December 3, 1742 - March 29, 1830) was an English geographer, historian and a pioneer of oceanography.
[edit] Biography
Rennell was born near Chudleigh in Devon. His father, an officer in the Artillery, was killed in action shortly after the birth of his son. He entered the navy as a midshipman in 1756, and was present at the attack on Cherbourg (1758), and the disastrous action of St Cast in the same year. At the end of the Seven Years' War, seeing no chance of promotion, he entered the service of the East India Company, and was appointed surveyor of the Company's dominions in Bengal (1764), with the rank of captain in the Bengal Engineers. To this work he devoted the next thirteen years. In 1766 he received a severe wound in an encounter with some Sannyasis, or religious fanatics, from which he never thoroughly recovered; and in 1777 he retired as major on a pension of £600 a year.
The remaining fifty-three years of his life were spent in London, and were devoted to geographical research chiefly among the materials in the East India House. His most valuable works include the Bengal Atlas (1779), the first approximately correct map of India (1783), the Geographical System of Herodotus (1800), the Comparative Geography of Western Asia (1831), and important studies on the geography of northern Africa - in introductions to the Travels of Mungo Park and Hornemann. He also contributed papers to Archaeologia on the site of Babylon, the island of St Paul's shipwreck, and the landing-place of Caesar in Britain.
Beside his geographical and historical works James Rennell is known today for his hydrographical works about the currents in the Atlantic and Indian ocean. He started his research on these topics, when he was travelling by a sailing ship with his family from India to Britain after his retirement in 1777. During the extraordinary long voyage * around the Cape of Good Hope he mapped "the banks and currents at the Lagullas" and published the work about the today called Agulhas current in 1778. This is one of the first contributions to the science of oceangraphy, but Rennel was working mainly on other scientific topics during the next decades. After the death of his wife in 1810 he returned to the oceanographic topics. His numerous naval friends gave him a mass of data from their logs, which he assimilated to a chart of all currents in the Atlantic ocean. During his last years he wrote his final and most important work "Currents of the Atlantic Ocean", published postumeously by his daughter Jane in 1832, which was not significantly overtaken until 1936.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1781; and he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1791, and the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1825. While in India he had married (1772) Jane Thackeray, a great-aunt of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. He was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
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[edit] Note 1
In his own work "On the geography of Herodot", he has estimated a traveling time of four months for the voyage from London to Bombay by modern sailing ships (in the year 1800). For the return to England in 1777/78 he needed 11 months . Despite there was a stopover in St. Helena, where his daughter was born, the voyage has endured already six months until the arrival on that island in october 1777.
