1589. Thomas Blundeville’s Brief Description of Universal Mappes and Cardes, and of their Use, and also the Use of Ptolemy his tables.
1589. A sixth edition of Eden’s version of Martin Cortes’ Arte of Navigation appeared. Good copies of this small black-letter quarto are worth about seven guineas. It is known that Hakluyt about this time was endeavoring with the aid of Drake to found in London a public lecture for the purpose of advancing the art of navigation.
1590. Robert Norman translated from the Dutch The Safeguard of Saylers, or Great Rutter. Edward Wright corrected and enlarged this in 1612. Norman was the inventor of the dipping-needle, in 1576.
1590. Thomas Hood’s Use of the Jacob’s Staffe; also a dialogue touching the use of the Crosse Staffe. These were instruments for the taking of latitude. The astrolabe, an instrument of remote antiquity, had been adapted to sea-use by Martin Behaim; but it was soon found that it did not adapt itself to the automatic movement of the observer’s body in a rolling sea, and in 1514 the cross-staff was invented, or at least was first described.
1592. A third edition of Bourne’s Regiment of the Sea, corrected by Thomas Hood.
1592. Thomas Hood’s Use of both the Globes, celestiall and terrestriall, written to accompany the Molineaux globes.
1592. Thomas Hood’s Marriner’s Guide.
1594. John Davis published his Seaman’s Secrets, wherein is taught the three kindes of Sayling,—Horizontall, Paradoxall, and Sayling upon a great Circle. He held up the example of the Spaniards: “For what hath made the Spaniard to be so great a Monarch, the Commander of both Indies, to abound in wealth and all Nature’s benefites, but only the painefull industrie of his Subjects by Navigation.” No copy of this first edition is known. The second edition, 1607, is in the British Museum, and from this copy the tract is reprinted in Davis’s Voyages (Hakluyt Society ed.).
1594. M. Blundevile, his Exercises, with instruction in the art of navigation. This proved a popular instruction book.
1594. Robert Hues printed in London a Latin treatise on the Molineaux globes, Tractatus de Globis, et eorum usu. This includes a chapter by Thomas Hariot on the rhumbs, or the lines which so perplexingly cover the old maps.