NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Wolfgang Köberer
Date: 2013 Jan 13, 07:59 -0800
Alex,
there is, of course more literature on the "lunar story" in French (and France) than Marguet. An older treatise is: Guyot, Edmond, Histoire de la détermination des longitudes, La-Chaux-de-Fonds 1955, dealing with all methods to determine longitude. It is long out of print but you can buy it on the net for a mere 92,96 Euros (plus postage).
Lately Guy Boistel has done a doctoral thesis on "L`astronomie nautique au XVIIIème siècle en France: tables de la lune et longitudes en mer", s.l.,s.d. (probably Lille 2003, Atelier Nationale de Reproduction des Thèses) and published some more articles on that subject. And there is a collection of texts edited by Vincent Jullien: Le calcul des longitudes, Rennes 2002, with contributions by Vincent Jullien, Susanne Débarbat, Francois Bellec, Danielle Fauque, Philippe Despoix, Guy Boistel and some others, the cream of french historians of nautical science.
As one can see there is a lively discussion in France with a lot of research being done that isn't recognized abroad. Same with the discussions in Portugal where there is a host of people centered around the Academia de Marinha doing interesting research. But one has to be able to read more than English to be aware of this.
By the way: The Dutch have also been very much interested in the longitude problem since the 17th century: Huygens - who tried to construct a marine time keeper himself (without success) - acted as an expert for the Staten General and the OIC to assess the merits of proposals that were sent to these bodies - most of them by cranks and/or not really useful.
Same with the Spanish. And the first nautical treatise on the longitude problem was by a Portuguese: Ruy Faleiro, O regimento da altura de Leste-Oeste (ca. 1519), first published by Avelino Texeira da Mota and reedited in 1986.
Have fun
Wolfgang
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