ABSTRACT
The story of John Harrison and his struggles to win the Longitude Prize in eighteenth-century England has come to be treated as a single, linear tale with a consistent moral: the just and heroic struggle of a virtuous individual against the calumnies of powerful vested interests. 1 While this account seems naive in its onesided appropriation of virtue, it is also much too simple and one-dimensional to cope with the complexities of the historical record. The different interests at work exemplified both reason and prejudice, and even within the Harrison faction he and his supporters waged their campaign to win the prize for some forty years and over that time adopted different stratagems in different circumstances.
