In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, offering a prize of twenty thousand pounds—the equivalent today of some three and a half million dollars—for a “Practicable and Useful” solution. Cheap’s former vessel the Centurion had played a role in testing a potentially revolutionary new method. Four years before this voyage, it had carried onboard a forty-three-year-old inventor named John Harrison, whom the First Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager, had recommended as a “very ingenious and sober man.”
