Claret de Fleurieu

Ancien Regime

On 1 July 1765, he was made Enseigne de port, and on 27 July he went to Paris to study horology with Ferdinand Berthoud. He took part in a one-year sea campaign to test Berthoud's first marine chronometer, in an attempt to beat Britain in the race to find a reliable way to calculate longitude. The chronometers he thus refined with Ferdinand Berthoud for their later experiments were the object of major struggles with the king's horologer, Pierre Le Roy. Finally Claret de Fleurieu and Berthoud were entrusted with the task, setting out on the testing expedition from autumn 1768 to 11 October 1769 on the corvette Isis under Fleurieu's command.