Who was Thomas Harriot? Not only the first in England to be documented as pointing a telescope at the night sky and drawing the Moon (just before Galileo in Venice), but he was also a navigator who had sailed to North America to set up the first English colony at Roanoke Island, had learnt the Carolina Algonquian language and had written a book about what he found: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

When a portion of court intrigue and Harriot’s connections with other key Elizabethan and Jacobean figures is added in, the result is a story which needs to be told. Tony Symes is keen, as an enthusiastic amateur, to talk about this all too often forgotten scientist and reveal the background against which Harriot was operating.

To learn more about the Renaissance and our exciting year long programme, don’t forget to follow our Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery webpage: https://www.brlsi.org/renaissance/

Anthony Symes CEng is a committee member of the Herschel Society and chairs the Programme Subcommittee at the BRLSI. He graduated in Physics at the University of Sussex and worked in IT, mainly on supervisory control systems.