Voyages of Discovery Series holds year's final lecture

The Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series hosted "The New Worlds of an Elizabethan Scientist," lecture this past Thursday in the Science and Technology Building. Dr. Stephen Clucas presented this academic year's final lecture in the series about Thomas Harriot, an English astronomer and namesake of ECU's Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences.

Clucas has been researching Thomas Harriot for over 20 years and a great deal of information is yet to be found on this influential international figure.

According to Dean Alan White of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, this lecture, along with the entire series, has been one of the premier academic events in North Carolina.

"The Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series was established in 2007 and is a model for our own voyages of discovery," White said.

Harriot is responsible for several academic New World discoveries and contributions to science, exploration, cartography and mathematics. In his explorations, he is noted to have been one of the first explorers of the North Carolina coastline.

"The New World was incredibly new to Harriot and his colleagues," Clucas said. "At this time there were several cartography errors and most people were unaware of the actual size of the New World. South America was very well represented, while North America was rather small and dismal."

One of the things Harriot encountered and appreciated was the floral life--most of it he'd never seen before--including the Sassafras plant.

"The New World was a good investment process and all the plants found were considered to be medicinal commodities," Clucas said.

Harriot also provided the first phonetic alphabet in which he recorded sounds of Native American peoples and then wrote down what each one meant. In Harriot's writings he suggested that the Algonquians, one of the indigenous peoples he encountered, looked like an easy people to govern and could be controlled with very little effort.

"This was not to learn about how people lived, but more so about power," Clucas said.

Along with his cartography and exploration skills, Harriot also was an accomplished astronomer. He made several observations at approximately the same time that Galileo was performing his own calculations and observations. Harriot also was documented for having made the first mapping of the moon in the summer of 1609. A year later he created a more complex mapping.

"With the instruments they had, Galileo and Harriot were only able to see a quarter of the moon at a time," Clucas said, "So you could only imagine how difficult this could have been for them."

Despite this, Harriot was able to use his skills as a gifted cartographer to make his moon mappings.

Along with his observations and calculations of the moon, Harriot also made several observations of the sun.

"In the 1600s, sunspots were a shock to people because celestial bodies were supposed to be perfect," Clucas said, "and Harriot was also a direct observer, and unlike others who reflected the light onto a screen, he would stare at the sun examining sunspots for sometimes as long as 30 minutes."

"Through all his efforts, Thomas Harriot proved to be a highly influential figure. He was not a man who would just take anyone's word," Clucas said. "He was going to go out [to] test it himself."

As a part of North Carolina's history and heritage, Harriot is remembered as a key figure in the state's early exploration efforts and also for his contributions to science.

This writer may be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com.