An extraordinary number of books in the history of navigation have become available online. The majority of these are on Google books. These are listed mostly in alphabetical order except the list of Bowditch's Navigator immediately below.
Historical editions of “The New American Practical Navigator” by Nathaniel Bowditch:
Nathaniel Bowditch began working on a revised edition of Hamilton Moore's "Practical Navigator," a popular British navigation manual in the late 1790s (for editions of Moore, see below). Two editions of this Moore-Bowditch, Americanized and edited, were released in 1799 and 1800. The first true edition of Bowditch's "New American Practical Navigator" was published in 1802. There were editions released for the British market under the title "The Improved Practical Navigator" edited and somewhat re-written by Thomas Kirby.
The revision of 1837 included
many improvements and was the last in Bowditch's lifetime. It increased the number of lunars clearing methods
to four. The first lunar method was Bowditch's refined method. The
second was borrowed in its entirety from Thomson. The third was
Bowditch's original method (known usually as the "method of
Mendoza Rios" in British navigation manuals). The fourth was Witchell's
method. Editions of Bowditch's Navigator from 1837 through 1880 are
nearly identical (Nathaniel Bowditch died in 1838), but there are
some minor, interesting differences.
In 1868 Bowditch's Navigator was published by the US
government which purchased the copyright and the plates from the Bowditch family and other rights from Blunt.
From 1868 through 1880, the plates from the 35th edition, slightly modified to reflect government printing, were used for new
runs as needed:
The first major revision, really a complete overhaul, was
released in 1882, edited by P. H. Cooper. Note that large sections
have been completely excised and the book is now much shorter.
Bowditch's old chapter on lunars has been mostly dropped and the only
method for clearing lunars is Chauvenet's. Lunars were almost never
used at sea in this period.
Another major revision, edited by G. W. Logan, was released in 1903. This relegated even Chauvenet's lunar method to an
appendix:
From 1914, new editions of Bowditch appear every year or two with incremental changes
right through the middle of the Second World War. The first genuinely modern edition of
Bowditch is the justly famous edition from 1958. The most recent, published in 2002, is
available online from several sources. For reference, here is a version compiled as a single pdf file:
Several 19th century biographies of Nathaniel Bowditch, varying in quality are available online:
There
are numerous pilot guides and coast guides available on Google books.
These two are particularly famous and interesting to those familiar
with US waters:
American
Coast Pilot 1822
American
Coast Pilot 1847
The American Nautical Almanac in the early 20th century
is still only an extract from the hard-bound “American
Ephemeris & Nautical Almanac”:
American
NA 1911
Thomas Arnold's “Lunarian” does not seem to have found
much commercial success but it has survived in libraries. It's
similar in content and structure to editions of Bowditch from the
same period. The method of clearing lunars in this work appears to
have been extracted from an earlier edition of Moore's work on
navigation. That method was itself a reverse-engineering of
Bowditch's original lunar method:
Arnold
1822
A late 18th century epitome of navigation:
Atkinson
1770
Blackburne was at the forefront of “selling” the new
navigation of lines of position to navigators accustomed to separate
latitude and longitude sights in the early 20th
century:
Blackburne
1914 and Blackburne
Azimuth Tables 1908
Bowditch: see above.
The French “nautical
almanac” provided the model for the British Nautical Almanac
which was first published in 1767. It should be noted that the French
model does not appear to have been used extensively at
sea:
Connaissance
des Temps 1769
William Chauvenet's manual of spherical astronomy is still
considered an important reference work in positional astronomy.
Volume II is devoted to the instruments of astronomy including the
navigator's sextant:
Chauvenet
vol I 1864 , Chauvenet
vol II 1863
Students at the US Naval Academy in the late
19th and early 20th centuries learned
navigation from J.H.C. Coffin's textbook in nautical
astronomy:
Coffin
1898
H. Wilberforce Clarke's textbook on lunar distances
is dense with mathematics. It was written long after lunars ceased to
be important at sea, but some land explorers still employed them, and
accuracy was critical in the reduction of their observations:
H
Wilberforce Clarke 1885
“Hints to Travellers”
was an explorers' guidebook. For a wealthy Englishman of the period
intending to launch an expedition to a little corner of the
unexplored world, this was the guide of choice to field science
including positional astronomy:
Hints
to Travellers 1878 , Hints
to Travellers 1906
More navigation manuals:
Inman
1849 , Jeans
1853 , Jeans
pt I 1870 , Jeans
pt II 1868 , Kerigan
1828
Lecky's “Wrinkles in Practical Navigation”
is a must-read. Lecky describes the state of navigation in his era
and provides extensive practical advice still useful to navigators
today. His writing style is humorous and clear:
Lecky's
Wrinkles 1884
Andrew Mackay's treatise on longitude
includes detailed accounts of the mathematics of clearing longitudes
by various methods and in addition a fascinating history of the quest
for longitude as told by someone who was part of the process:
Mackay
1809
F. Marguet has written some of the best histories of
18th and 19th century navigation. If you read
French, these are highly valuable:
Marguet
1917 (French) , Marguet
1931 (French)[not Google Books]
Martin
1899
Maury
1843
The tables of Mendoza Rios (Jose de Mendoza y Rios) were
highly prized and frequently counted among the best tools for
nautical astronomy and especially clearing lunars:
Mendoza
Rios Tables 1801
[Note: the method of clearing lunars found
in various navigation manuals and labeled the “method of
Mendoza Rios” after his death was entirely
different]
Merrifield
1886
The most popular navigation manual in the late 18th
century in Britain and America was Moore's “New Practical
Navigator”. Nathaniel Bowditch edited an Americanized version
of this work in 1798-99. He and Edmund Blunt re-worked this into the
“New American Practical Navigator”. Google Books has the
1791 edition: Moore
1791. There are also editions published after Moore's death which
include a method of clearing lunars known as “Another Method”
which is clearly Bowditch's method reverse-engineered:
Moore
1807 , Moore
1810
Numerous
historical nautical almanacs are available on Google Books. This is a
representative sampling:
NA
1767 , NA
1797 , NA
1811 , NA
1815 , NA
1828 , NA
1864
After Moore, in Britain the popular navigation
manual comparable to the American Bowditch was Norie's “Epitome
of Navigation”. Norie included a large number of methods for
clearing lunar distances. In later years, Norie published a method of
clearing lunars using “Linear Tables” for the refraction.
This term is archaic. Today we would simply call these “graphs”
or a “graphical solution”.
Norie
1835 , Norie
1839 , Norie
1917 , Norie
tables 1836
A popular 18th century navigation manual:
Patoun
1734 , Patoun
1770
Another very popular British manual of navigation:
Raper
1840 , Raper
1882 , Raper
1908
Riddle
1824
Simms works on the adjustment and use of the sextant
details many of the finer points required by high-accuracy sights.
It's a bit dated but still good reading:
Simms
1858
Souchon's Treatise of Practical Astronomy includes many historical
details in the history of navigation and positional astronomy not
found elsewhere:
Souchon
1883 (French)
Sumner's booklet on finding lines of position. Though the method
did not catch on for decades, this early work explains it in terms
that seem modern even today:
Sumner
1845 , Sumner
1851
The
“Tables Requisite” included refraction data, dip tables,
mathematical tables and formulae, and all of the non-ephemeral data
required by navigators in addition to the changing, ephemeral data on
the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets published annually in the Nautical
Almanacs of the era:
Tables Requisite 1781
Tables Requisite 1802
Janet Taylor taught celestial navigation
in London in the mid-19th century and wrote several
important works on nautical astronomy. She also designed a few novel
variants of the sextant:
Taylor
1833 , Taylor
1837 , Taylor
1851 , Taylor's
Handbook 1865
Thomson's
Tables for clearing lunars were extremely popular. Though no more
accurate than any of a dozen other methods for clearing lunars
(despite legends to the contrary), his method was very short and easy
to work. Bowditch adopted Thomson's principal table into the “New
American Practical Navigator” starting in 1837 where it
remained through 1880. Though Bowditch's introduction claims the
table was re-calculated, that is very unlikely. It was simply copied.
Thomson's original tables also include many additional tables, advice
on shooting lunars, and methods for identifying the stars:
Thomson
1831 , Thomson
1845
Turner's Tables for clearing lunars were popular on some American
vessels. They are short, easy-to-use, but somewhat less accurate than
other widely available tables:
Turner's
Tables 1845
Wales
1794