If Sabine Baring-Gould was
exceptional, it may well be that he was seeking to emulate his uncle Edward
Sabine (after whom he was named). Edward was born to Anglo-Irish parents at
Dublin in 1788, and Sarah, his mother, died within a month of his birth. He was
educated at Marlow and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and entered the
military in 1803, at fifteen, as a second lieutenant. He fought, with
distinction, in the Anglo-American War of 1812-15, when he commanded the
batteries at the Siege of Fort Erie (1814) and was twice mentioned favourably
in despatches.
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| Edward Sabine |
In 1816, he returned to England and dedicated the rest of his
life to scientific researches. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1818, and on the recommendation of the president and council he was appointed
as astronomer on the Isabella, which sailed to the Arctic under command
of Commander (later Sir) John Ross. The primary aim of the voyage was to
discover a Northwest passage that would enable ships to sail over the north of
the Americas, thereby linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (and thus
avoiding a voyage around the treacherous southern Cape Horn).
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| J Ross - Lancaster Sound - August 31 1818 |
The voyage was
considered to have been a failure when Ross returned early after finding
Lancaster Sound blocked by sea ice, despite objections from the other officers
(including Sabine and William Parry, the second in command), and a public row
ensued after their return.
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| Sabine's Gull |
Sabine recorded twenty-four species of birds at
Greenland, including the Fork Tailed Gull Larus sabini (named for him)
and his paper was well received by the Linnean Society in 1819.
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| Edward Sabine- A Memoir on the Birds of Greenland - 1818 |
A second
voyage, under the command of Parry, with Sabine and his elder brother, Joseph,
aboard the Hecla and the Griper sailed in May 1819, and although
this voyage also failed to find a Northwest passage, it did set a new ‘furthest
West’ record which stood for decades. Sabine made numerous magnetic
measurements and collected invaluable scientific data, for which he was awarded
the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1821.
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| E Sabine - Magnetical Log from 1st Ross expedition 1818 |
Sabine undertook further work on
magnetism, continuing experiments he had made on his first polar voyage, with
the seconds pendulum (a pendulum which swings through its complete arc in two
seconds, one second in one direction, another second in the other), at standard
gravity, with a length of 0.994 m (39.1 inches) – a length that was once the
standard metre. The length of the pendulum varies at different latitudes and by
use of extremely precise instrumentation, Sabine was able to ascertain the true
shape of the Earth (the planet is not a perfect sphere – it is an oblate
spheroid, flattened slightly at the poles). Sabine travelled half the Earth for
eighteen months to take his measurements, onboard the Griper now under
the command of Captain Clavering; Sabine later had an island off the east coast
of Greenland named after him, in honour of his work.
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| Sabine Island |
He also worked on the
problem of longitude, hoping to be able to calculate it by measuring the dip of
a compass needle, but the improved chronometers made available through the work
of John Harrison made the question largely irrelevant. In 1828, the Admiralty
abolished the Board of Longitude, but they retained three scientific advisers –
Michael Faraday, Thomas Young and Sabine; Charles Babbage objected in the
strongest terms to Sabine’s appointment, largely because he refused to accept
the scientific credentials of the Royal Society. To his credit, Sabine remained
aloof and refused to be drawn into the controversy.
Although the Duke of
Wellington had exempted Sabine from military matters on condition that he
continued to concentrate on his scientific endeavours, a crisis in Ireland
caused him to be recalled and sent to the land of his birth, where he managed
to maintain his studies and in 1835, completed a systematic magnetic survey of
Ireland, followed by the same in 1836 of Scotland, and England the following
year. Sabine then approached the Government with a proposal to carry out a
similar survey worldwide, establishing magnetic stations across the globe, as
part of an investigation of why there were alterations in the Earth’s magnetic
field (a phenomena which caused variations in compass readings).
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| Terrestrial Magnetism |
This ‘Magnetic
Crusade’ opened observatories across the British Empire and other countries
were invited to participate, and Sabine was appointed as superintendent of the
project, correlating the vast amounts of data and presenting the findings. In
1840, he commenced publishing a series of Contributions to Terrestrial
Magnetism to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,
which continued for the next thirty-six years, and resulted in the most
accurate magnetic survey of the planet possible at the time. It was, and is, a
remarkable achievement.
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| Edward Sabine |
In 1869, he was knighted and in 1877, he retired from
the army on full pay, with the rank of General. In 1826, he had married
Elizabeth Juliana Leeves, a remarkable woman in her own right, who, between
1849 and 1858, published a four-volume translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos,
a textbook on geophysics. She died in 1879 and General Sir Edward Sabine died
in 1883.
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| Edward Sabine |
In addition to Sabine’s Gull and Sabine Insel, a tree Pinus
sabineana and a crater on the Moon are named after him. Sabine Crater lies
immediately adjacent to the landing site of the first manned moon landing of
Apollo XI in July 1969.
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