Two late eighteenth-century navigational workbooks, manuscript,

Bookseller Notes

A pair of very handsome sailor's manuals in a fine calligraphic hand, illustrated extensively with navigational and astronomical diagrams (including a remarkable diagram of the solar system). These books give excellent insight into navigational education in the late eighteenth century, incorporating a multitude of practical scenarios, as well as three exemplar logs of common transatlantic voyages. William Shaw's education begins thus: 'The great end and business of navigation is to instruct the mariner how to conduct a ship through the wide and pathless ocean, to the remotest parts of the world, the safest and shortest way, in passages navigable.' Although the Royal Naval Academy had been founded in Portsmouth in 1733, only a vanishingly small number of sailors were educated there, and the Academy failed to achieve its objective of becoming the preferred path to becoming a naval officer. The traditional means of a sea-going 'apprenticeship' remained the preferred alternative and there was significant prejudice against graduates, as William IV expressed 'there was no place superior to the quarterdeck of a British man of war for the education of a gentleman'. It is likely therefore that William Shaw learned his trade at sea, and that these workbooks represent the kind of training one might acquire 'on the job'. The sections include: Plane, Traverse, Middle Latitude, Oblique, Current and Mercator's Sailing; Variation of the Compass; Of a Ship's Reckoning; To correct a Ship's Course for the Leeway, To correct the dead Reckoning; To find the apparent Time at Sea by an Observation of a Star, Spherical Geometry and Trigonometry; The Use of Globes; Astronomical Problems; A short abstract of Astronomy; The Copernican, or Solar System; To calculate the true Time of non or Full Moon; To calculate the true place of the Sun for any given moment of time; The Projection of Lunar Eclipses - including several examples with diagrams for specific dates and times in 1784 and 1787; To Project an Eclipse of the Sun; and Of the Horizontal Dial. The first manuscript includes a section on Geography which lists the nations, islands, and chief cities of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, the territories they claim as their own, and an additional list of British 'possessions'. With the outcome of the American War of Independence still undecided, the US states are listed as belonging to Great Britain (except for Louisiana, which was then in the hands of Spain), and alludes to the difficulties of the Spanish in colonising Patagonia ('formerly in possession of the Spaniards, now of the natives') as well as the vastness of Amazonia (an area 'little known by the Europeans').The three sample voyage logs contained in the second manuscript demonstrating the dominance of transatlantic voyages for trade and naval seafaring at this time: 'Journal of a voyage from London to Madeira. In the Nancy of London'; 'Journal of a voyage from Madeira to England'; 'Journal of a voyage from Liverpool to Barbadoes. In the Kitty of Liverpool'. One is apparently copied from John Hamilton's recently published Practical Navigator (1784), and all record the ship's daily progress, weather, wind directions and bearings, sail manoeuvres, and other vessels that are encountered. In the log for the voyage from Madeira, for example, it notes that they 'spoke with the Warrior, Sir James Wallace Commander, on a Cruise' (Wallace had been captured by the French during the Anglo-French War, being released in 1780), as well as encounters with 'the Hamilton from Carolina bound to London', and 'the Betsy bound for London' amongst others. The HMS Kitty, for which the Barbados voyage is recorded, was launched at Liverpool in 1784. Between 1788 and 1805 she made nine voyages as a slaver, and later became a privateer, cruising off the River Plate, before being captured herself by the French privateer Caffard in 1806. It is pleasing to conjecture that these books represent the education of the William Shaw who sailed with the notorious Jamaican privateer Batholomew Redmon and with him in 1793 intercepted The Lion, an American vessel en route to Philadelphia from St. Domingue, and made a successful claim for its cargo of claiming its cargo of sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and specie (National Archives: HCA 45/19/10). Whoever he was and wherever his travels took him, he was a fine calligrapher, and his workbooks are in remarkably good order.See: Harry W. Dickinson, Educating the Royal Navy : 18th and 19th century education for officers (Routledge, 2007).