"Fly me to the Moon.."

Tin-glazed earthenware plate, Bristol  c. 1740   Glaisher bequest 1928. © Fitzwilliam Museum

This delftware plate celebrates a very early science fiction novel, The Man in the Moone, a discourse of a voyage thither.  Published in 1638 by a Spaniard, one "Domingo Gonsales", it tells the story of his travels, from his stay in St Helena,  where he trained the native wild swans as a means of aerial transport, to his escape off Tenerife when his ship home is attacked by the English.  Unable to land safely, the swans transport him higher and higher, reaching the moon after 12 days.  Here he finds a Christian Utopia among the Lunars. Becoming homesick, he travels back with his swans, landing in China.  From there his narrative is carried back to Europe by Jesuit missionaries.
The romance was very popular, meeting the 17th century interest in the lunar world, with the ideas of Copernicus and stories of distant voyages.    The real author was in fact Francis Godwin, Bishop of Hereford, and he probably wrote it in the late 1620s, inspired by classical and contemporary accounts of travel and astronomy.

The plate with its image taken from an illustration, was discovered in 1915 by Dr. James W. L. Glaisher, a Cambridge maths don, who was a prolific and organised collector, particularly of books and ceramics; his extensive collections now grace the Cambridge University Library and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

The image must have revived vivid memories for him, as his father (also James Glaisher) was a senior meteorologist at Greenwich Observatory, and took his schoolboy son with him on pioneering balloon ascents to collect weather data.