Thomas Harriot (c.1560–1621)

Thomas Harriot was born around 1560 in Oxfordshire, possibly in the city of Oxford. Little is known about his family background, except that his father was a commoner and that he had a married sister; he did not marry himself.

In December 1577, Harriot matriculated at St Mary Hall, Oxford, and received the degree of BA at Easter, 1580. Having soon thereafter acquired a reputation for being skilled mathematically, he was employed by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/4–1618) from at least 1584 to teach him and his sea captains the science of navigation in preparation for Raleigh’s enterprise to establish a settlement in America. Harriot himself travelled to the New World and was a member of the short-lived colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia from June 1685 until his return to England with Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) the following year. He had previously studied the Algonquin language with two native Americans who had been brought over to England in 1584, and used this knowledge to study the social and religious customs of the native people he encountered in Virginia along with the territory’s flora and fauna. After his return, Harriot published, in 1588, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found land of Virginia, which can be largely seen as a defence of Raleigh’s colonial enterprise.

From at least 1591 onwards, Harriot became an active member of the scientific circle around Henry Percy (1564–1632), ninth earl of Northumberland, conducting astronomical observations and optical experiments, partly aimed at improving navigational techniques. After Raleigh’s star began to wane, Percy took on the role of being Harriot’s patron. He granted Harriot rents from an estate in county Durham and gave him the use of a house on the grounds of Syon House, Isleworth. For his part, Harriot built up and maintained a substantial library and carried out an extensive range of scientific experiments and theoretical investigations on physical, chemical, astronomical, and other topics. Astronomically, he anticipated Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) in recognizing that the orbits of the planets were not circular. However, as he came to recognize himself, it was particularly in mathematics that Harriot excelled, making notable innovations and discoveries in the field of algebra, where he was able to build on the achievements of François Viète (1540–1603). Unfortunately, none of his mathematical papers were published during his lifetime, while his most complete work, the posthumously-published Artis analyticae praxis (1631) was disfigured through the poor editing of Walter Warner (1563–1643).

Both of Harriot’s erstwhile patrons met with ill-fortune. Raleigh was suspected of involvement with a plot to kill King James and incarcerated at the Tower before eventually being beheaded in 1618. Rumours that Percy had known of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 led to him likewise being imprisoned at the Tower until 1621. While there, he was regularly visited by the three most accomplished members of his circle, notably Nathaniel Torperley (1564–1632), Robert Hues (1553–1632), and Harriot, who kept him abreast of their continuing researches.

A malicious tumour led to Harriot’s death in the house of a friend in Threadneedle Street, London, on 2 July 1621, a month before Percy’s release from the Tower. He was buried in the nearby church of St Christopher le Stocks, which was later destroyed in the Great Fire. His extensive scientific papers, long feared lost, were rediscovered at Petworth House, Sussex, in the late eighteenth century; the bulk of them have in recent years been deposited in the British Library by Lord Egremont.