To have one patron imprisoned in the Tower may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness. Perhaps Thomas Harriot, Renaissance polymath and client of both Sir Walter Ralegh and the ninth Earl of Northumberland, had good reason to direct his attention from worldly troubles.
At 9pm on Wednesday 26 July 1609, Harriot, then living in the grounds at Syon House, directed his telescope at a five-day-old crescent moon. It made him first person to train such an instrument on the skies and map the moon.
Telescopes were the latest technology: one had first been patented the previous autumn, and it’s possible that Harriot had built his own. Not all his moon drawings survive, but a composite map from 1610 suggests he thought he was drawing coastlines and continents, islands and seas. It was his navigational and cartographic skill that drew him to Ralegh; he had lived for a year in Ralegh’s Roanoke colony, where he learned the Algonquian language and studied their customs.
Harriot never published, however. His work lay undiscovered until 1784; his moon map wasn’t published until 1965. It thus seems apt that, although there is a crater on the moon named in Harriot’s honour, it is on the far side, where no-one can actually see it.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the July 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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