Larcum Kendall
His father was a mercer and linen draper named Moses Kendall, and his mother was Ann Larcum from Chepping Wycombe in Buckinghamshire; they married on 18 June 1718.
In 1765 he was one of six experts selected by the Board of Longitude to witness the operation of John Harrison's H4, which he was subsequently asked to duplicate.
"Kendall's watch has exceeded the expectations of its most zealous advocate," Cook reported in 1775 to the admiralty.
A seaman with watchmaking experience cleaned it and started it again, but in June the balance spring broke and it could not be repaired.
After some months ashore with Astronomer Lieutenant William Dawes, K1 was returned to HMS Sirius and travelled to Cape Town to collect supplies for the colony.
He took it to the West Indies and the Mediterranean and it was on board HMS Victory at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797.
K1 was described by John Gilbert, Master of the Resolution on Cook's second voyage as "The greatest piece of mechanism the world has ever seen".
He assured the Board that he would be able to modify Harrison's design to build a similar but simpler watch for around £200, half the price of K1.
William Bligh in his 1787 log of HMS Bounty, recorded a daily inaccuracy of between 1.1 and three seconds and that it had varied irregularly.
The timekeeper was taken by the mutineers following the loss of the Bounty, for which Bligh subsequently apologised to Sir Harry Parker.
The American ship's captain Mayhew Folger rediscovered Pitcairn Island in 1808 and was given the chronometer by the one remaining mutineer there, John Adams.
When he died, his family conveyed it to Captain Herbert of HMS Calliope, which sailed from Valparaiso on 1 July 1840, who gave it to the British Museum around 1840.
During Matthew Flinders' journey to Australia in 1801, astronomer John Crossley became sick and left HMS Investigator in Cape Town.
[1] A blue plaque (photo above right) about Kendall was unveiled on 3 May 2014 in the garden of Charlbury Museum, and erected on the wall of the Post Office,[12] close to his childhood home (since the house no longer stands).
