BOUND WITH:
Sailing Directions for the Circumnavigation of England and for a Voyage to the Straits of Gibraltar
Original blue cloth boards embossed with gilt image of ship "Victoria" on front cover and spine lettered in gilt. Frontispiece of The Molyneux Celestial Globe, a foldout map of Sailing Directions for the Circumnavigation of England and for a Voyage to the Straits of Gibraltar from a 15th century manuscript; Extensive Indices of Geographical, Biographical, and Names of Stars and Constellations; and a detailed Glossary. Concludes with information on the Hakluyt Society, its works, laws, rules, and its Subscribers. - (8vo), (lviii, 229, 37, 16) pages.
This important title on Globes contains the text of the 1638 English translation, "A Learned Treatise of Globes, both Coelestiall and Terrestriall: with their several uses. Written first in Latine and published by Mr. Robert Hues. Afterward Illustrated with Notes, by Io. Isa. Pontanus. And now lastly made English, for the benefit of the Unlearned. By John Chilmead, Mr. A. of Christ-Church in Oxon. "
(Title-page of the Latin original is dated 1594.)
Following the treatise with separate title page is the 37 page account "Sailing Directions for the Circumnavigation of England and for A Voyage to the Straits of Gibraltar (From a 15th Century MS).
Edited, with an Account of the MS. , by James Gairdner, of the public record office; and a Glossary by E. Delmar Morgan, Hon. Sec. Hakluyt Society.
Robert Hues, an English geographer, circumnavigated the world with Cavendish and Emery Molyneux, whose globes form the basis of this work. Molyneux's large terrestrial globe was the first to be made in England and was "corrected and reformed according to the newest, secretest and latest discoveries, both Spanish, Portuguese and English". Hues, in a short but brilliantly lucid treatise, discussed first the general characteristics and significance of rhumb lines in navigation, and then their particular use when represented on a globe, in the solution of various navigational problems.
Emery Molyneux was an English Elizabethan maker of globes, mathematical instruments and ordnance. His terrestrial and celestial globes, first published in 1592, were the first to be made in England and the first to be made by an Englishman.
Hue's Tractatus de Globis remained the standard work on globes for nearly a century. (Waters, The Art of Navigation in England, pp. 192-94).