Abstract
William Wales was RMS master from 1776 to 1798.At the time of his appointment he was obviously full ofthe practical navigation experience that might be expected of anyoneaccepting the responsibility of preparing boys to take up sea-related apprenticeships. Between August 1768 and September 1769,he had coped with the wilds, and the bitter cold, of Hudson Bay, in Canada, on a successful Royal Society mission to observe a transit of the planet Venus. Then, between 1772 and 1775,he had accompanied Captain James Cook on Cook’s second major journey.During his time at Christ’s Hospital,Wales developed a more positive attitude towards the work of the Grammar School than had previous RMS masters, and Trollope and Pearce claimed that hesucceeded in stabilizing RMS operations. Both Trollope and Pearce lauded Wales as the greatest of the RMS masters, but in this chapter that assessment of Wales’s performance as RMS master is problematized.
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Ellerton, N.F., Clements, M.A.(. (2017). William Wales: RMS Master 1776–1798. In: Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, James Hodgson, and the Beginnings of Secondary School Mathematics. History of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46657-6_7
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