Cortes, Martin:

$135,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

BREVE COMPENDIO DE LA SPHERA Y DE LA ARTE DE NAVEGAR CON NUEVOS INSTRUMENTOS Y REGLAS EXEMPLIFICADO CON MUY SUBTILES DEMONSTRACIONES. First edition of this groundbreaking early work on navigation, with mention of discoveries in the Americas and the East, and featuring an extremely important map of the New World.Martin Cortes (1532-89) was a cosmographer descended from a prominent Aragon family. His book is a great advancement over Pedro Medina's better-known Arte de Navegar (1545), and it was Cortes who inspired William Bourne to write Regiment of the Sea (1574), the first printed original treatise on navigation by an Englishman. Cortes' work is divided into three parts: an initial section on the cosmos, the size of the earth, and geographical climates; a second section on the courses of the sun and moon, the seasons, tides, and weather; and a practical manual on navigation and the construction of navigational instruments. The text includes a table of the sun's declination for four years, and another of the distance between meridians at every degree of latitude. "His instructions for making charts and for plotting courses of ships on them were widely followed. Most important of all, he first understood and described the magnetic variation of the compass, suggesting that the magnetic pole and the true pole of the earth were not the same" - PMM. Cortes' work was translated into English in 1561 and became a fundamentally important work for British navigators as Great Britain bec

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