NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Early XVIII century nav book
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Mar 11, 22:53 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Mar 11, 22:53 -0400
Frank, > There's an edition of this book by Joshua Kelly from 1733 on Google Books: > http://books.google.com/books?id=xn1ZAAAAYAAJ. Any differences? I don't know. I did not compare. "My book" has MDCCXXIV in the bottom of the title page. The oldest Cel Nav book that I read was by Davis himself, the inventor of the backstaff, but the book did not contain any technical details on the instruments. It was purely theoretical and very terse. Astronomical part of the Kelly book is also of some interest: it probably reflects the state of knowlede of astronomy and math among educated people in the early XVIII century:-) This guy is not a seaman but apparently a professional teacher: he offers a variety of courses for young gentleman on a variety of applied math subjects listed in the Advertisement on the first page. I can try to make some list of XVI-XVIII books but there are probably not many. Alex.