Haselden, Thomas:

$18,500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE SEAMAN'S DAILY ASSISTANT, BEING A SHORT, EASY AND PLAIN METHOD OF KEEPING A JOURNAL AT SEA; IN WHICH ARE CONTAINED, RULES, SHEWING HOW THE ALLOWANCES FOR LEE-WAY, VARIATION, HEAVE OF THE SEA, SET ... First American edition of this work, and the first book regarding practical navigation to be printed in the United States. It appeared fully twenty years before any other similar work in America. ESTC locates copies at only seven institutions: the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Clements Library, and Yale University. Haselden was a prolific writer of guides for navigators and seamen, best known for his work concerning Mercator's chart and its uses. When the present work first appeared in 1722, he styled himself "Teacher of Mathematics...in the Royal Navy," and he was held in sufficiently high regard to be elected to the Royal Society in 1740, but he died before he could be installed as a Fellow. The present work was not issued in his lifetime, but was first printed by mapmakers Mount & Page in 1757. They kept it regularly in print (six more editions were issued between 1761 and 1775), and it had become a standard work by the time this Philadelphia edition was published, no doubt an attempt to provide a basic work for mariners whose supply of British editions was cut off by the American Revolution. The text covers a wide variety of information needed by sailors, from disc

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