HAKLUYT, Richard.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Made by Sea or Over-land, Second and greatly expanded edition, complete with the Wright-Molyneux two-sheet world map, which is found in very few copies. The map is the first world map produced in England and the first since Gerardus Mercator's original 1569 map to use the Mercator projection, which enabled navigators to plot courses as straight lines. The map was created by the English mathematician Edward Wright based on Emery Molyneux's globe of 1592 and Wright's own enhancements of the Mercator projection. Mercator had given no explanation as to the underlying mathematics used in the construction of his map and it was Wright who published this important information in Certain Errors in Navigation Detected and Corrected (1599).The map is in the second state with a cartouche in the lower left-hand side describing the discoveries of Sir Francis Drake. Neville-Sington & Payne's census gives verified information for 108 first issue and 121 second issue copies, that is 229 in total. Of these, the map is present in only 12 copies of the first issue and 13 of the second issue, 25 in total. All but one of these are in institutional holdings. Neville-Sington & Payne locate 32 non-institutional copies, divided exactly equally between first and second issue copies. The only one of these with a map is the Grenville-Crawford-Rosebery copy, bound in early 19th-century red morocco, which lacked the map u

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