The English in their theories of navigation had long depended on the teachings of the Spaniards, and Eden had translated the chief Spanish manual in his Arte of Navigation of 1561.
WYTFLIET, 1597.
[2nd part]
[WYTFLIET, 1597. (complete view)]
![[WYTFLIET, 1597. (complete view)]](#5846783241346312924_illus-630-631.jpg.id-9161287192700141533.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Ship's log.
A great advance was possible now, for a new principle had been devised, and an estimate of the progress of a ship was no longer dependent on visual observation. The log had made it possible to put dead reckoning on a pretty firm basis. This was the great new feature of the Regiment of the Sea, which the Englishman, William Bourne, published in 1573; and sixteen years later, in 1589, another Englishman, Blunderville, made popularly known the new instrument for taking meridian altitudes at sea, the cross-staff, which had very early superseded the astrolabe on shipboard.
The inclination or dip of the needle, showing by its increase an approach to a magnetic pole, was not scaled till 1576, when Robert Norman made his observations, and it is not without some service to-day in that combination of phenomena of which Columbus noted the earliest traces in his first voyage of 1492.
THE CROSS-STAFF.
Italian discoverers.