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Errors in Charles H Cotter's "History of Nautical Astronomy".

Back in 1968, Hollis and Carter published Charles H Cotter's thorough
survey, "A History of Nautical Astronomy", which is properly regarded as a
goldmine of information on that topic, not approached by any other
publication. It is frequently referred to, in papers relating to early
navigation. It's now long out-of-print, and hard to find secondhand.

Unfortunately, an extraordinary number of errors (and some omissions) have
recently been detected in Cotter's text, which detract significantly from
its usefulness. Partly, it may have been due to sloppy proofreading, but in
addition it appears that Cotter may have transcribed old publications
without perceiving all the technical details.

A list of known or suspected errors has been assembled as a joint effort by-
JK   Jan Kalivoda    jan.kalivoda@FF.CUNI.CZ  of Prague, and
GH   George Huxtable george@huxtable.u-net.com of Oxford; with
contributions from-
HP   Herbert Prinz   hprinz@ATTGLOBAL.NET

In previous postings to Nav-L, these errors have been listed, for the
benefit of owners of Cotter's book, and this list has been updated from
time to time as new errors have surfaced.

However, the error-list has expanded to the extent that posting on Nav-L is
becoming impractical, so instead it has been made available in html text
at-

http://www.huxtable.u-net.com/cotter01.htm

where it will be updated if we become aware of new errors. The present
version is dated 29 July 03, and it contains many new entries.

We recommend to owners of Cotter's book that it might be useful to print
out this error-list and keep it with the volume, perhaps marking the
relevant text pages in pencil. We hope that knowledge of these errors will,
to some extent, neutralise them.

We appeal to any readers to bring to our attention (either George or Jan)
any further defects that they become aware of, or suspect, as we have no
reason to think that our list is exhaustive. If readers find any defects in
our list itself, we would like to know about those too.

Although it's regrettable that so many errors exist, Cotter's book remains
unrivalled as an account of how astro-navigation evolved.

George Huxtable and Jan Kalivoda.





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