These are all, or nearly all, the publications brought out in English and relating to America prior to the enlarged edition of Hakluyt’s Collection, which was dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, and of which the third volume, bearing date 1600, was devoted to America. Compared with the publications of the Continent for the same century, they are strikingly fewer in number; and such as they are, it will be seen that of the thirty-four separate issues enumerated above only fourteen are of English origin, and of the whole number only twelve belong to the first three quarters of the century.
During this same century the literature of navigation took its origin. The Continental nations had already preceded. It was not till 1528 that the first sea-manual appeared in England, and no copy of it is now known. This was a translation of the French Le Routier de la Mer, the antetype of the later rutters. The English edition was called The Rutter of the Sea, and other editions appeared in 1536, 1541, and 1560 (?); the second of these adding, “A rutter of the northe, compyled by Rychard Proude.” None of these, however, recognized the American discoveries.
In 1561, Eden, at the suggestion of the Arctic navigator, Stephen Burrough (b. 1525, d. 1586), again tried to give some impulse to English interest by his translation of Martin Cortes’ Art of Navigation, which had appeared at Seville ten years before. (Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 151.) Cortes was the first to suggest a magnetic pole. Frobisher, when he made his first voyage, fifteen years later (1576), perhaps because Eden’s translation was out of print, took with him a Spanish edition of Medina’s Arte de Navegar,—a work which preceded Cortes’, but never became so popular in England.
In 1565 came a fifth edition of the Rutter of the Sea, and in 1573 William Bourne first issued his Regiment of the Sea, which long remained the chief English book on navigation.[442]
Eden put forth, at what precise date is not known, but not later than 1576, A very necessarie and profitable book concerning Navigation, compiled in Latin by Joannes Taisnierus, in which the translator intimates that Cabot knew more of the ways of discovering longitude than he had disclosed. See Carter-Brown Catalogue, p. 262. Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Society) gives the date 1579.
Such books, as the interest in America became more general, increased rapidly, and I note them in chronological order.
1577. Second edition, Regiments of the Sea.
1578. Edward Hellowes published in London, in a small tract, a translation, A booke of the Invention of Navigation of Antonio de Gaevara, Bishop of Mondonedo, originally printed at Valladolid in 1539.