Lost at Sea exhibition material

This article offers descriptive list of some of the items included in Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550-1750, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger.

Tools for Finding Yourself at Sea

These exhibition materials focus on the tools English mariners and writers used—from atlases, sextants, and star charts to prayer-books, symbols, and stories—to find themselves on changing oceans.

Maps

Charts and maps were among the most basic tools for locating oneself at sea.

The Mariner’s Mirrour began as a groundbreaking Dutch atlas, but Anthony Ashley’s translation transformed it into an English book. The image on the title page shows many tools of the mariner’s trade, from upward-oriented celestial instruments including quadrants and astrolabes to downward-oriented lead lines that were used to measure the depth of a harbor. The English edition also places the English nation at the center of the maritime world by mentioning Sir Francis Drake. The Folger’s hand-colored copy, which is currently unbound and undergoing conservation, would presumably have been intended as a lavish gift, perhaps for one of the wealthy private families who helped underwrite English navigation.

Early modern maritime atlases were not used only by navigators and pilots. They were also aesthetic objects, designed to display early modern Europe’s changing vision of the world. This engraving of the New World was first published in 1617, and it was revised over the years. The example shown here comes from a Dutch atlas published in 1642, and hand colored at a later date. Close-up maps along the top feature major cities such as Havana, Cartagena, Cusco, and Rio de Janeiro. The vertical columns framing the map provide a mini-ethnography of native peoples, including Brazilians, Mexicans, Floridians, Virginians, and Greenlanders.

Listen to curator Steve Mentz discuss the navigational elements in the title page of The Mariners Mirror.

Items included

• Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer. Spieghel der Zeevaerdt (The Mariners Mirrour: wherin may playnly be seen the courses, heights, distances, depths, soundings, flouds and ebs, risings of lands, rocks, sands and shoalds, with the marks for th’entrings of the harbouroughs, havens and ports of the greatest part of Europe: their several traficks and commodities: together wth. the rules and instruments of navigation). London: John Charlewood, 1588?. Call number:STC 24931 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Samuel Purchas. Purchas his pilgrimes. London: William Stansby, 1625. Call number: STC 20509 Copy 2 Vol.3 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Atlas maritimus & commercialis; or, a general view of the world, so far as relates to trade and navigation. London: for James and John Knapton, William and John Innys; John Darby; etc., 1728. Call number: HF1023.A8 Cage and LUNA Digital Image.
• Luke Foxe. North-west Fox, or, Fox from the North-west passage. London: B. Alsop and Tho. Fawcet, 1635. Call number: STC 11221 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Willem Janszoon Blaeu. Americae nova tabula. Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1642. Call number: ART 252264 (size XL) and LUNA Digital Image.
• Edward Barlow. Meteorological essays, concerning the origin of springs, generation of rain, ... In two treatises. London: for John Hooke; and Thomas Caldecott, 1715. Call number: QC859.B3 Cage and LUNA Digital Image.
• William Cuningham. The cosmographical glasse, conteinyng the pleasant principles of cosmographie, geographie, hydrographie, or nauigation. London, 1559. Call number: STC 6119 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Martín Cortés. The arte of navigation. Contayning a breife description of the spheare, with the partes and circles of the same: as also the making and use of certaine instruments. Very necessarie for all sortes of sea-men to understand. London: Edw. Allde, 1596. Call number: STC 5803 and LUNA Digital Image.

Instruments

Determining one’s position at sea required expertise in using many complex instruments, including celestial, magnetic, and mechanical devices.

John Davis, captain of three Arctic voyages, combined mathematical skill with practical nautical experience. In 1594 he invented the “Davis Staff,” an important instrument which would be widely used for measuring the altitude of the sun. Davis reversed the traditional cross-staff, so that the sailor measured the shadow the sun cast on the staff rather than staring directly at the sun itself. This image in Davis’s book of maritime instruction represents a fairly simple early version of the staff, which would be refined and used into the eighteenth century.

Samuel Sturmy intended his lively volume to educate his brothers, sons, and any other young men who wanted to go to sea in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on his own experience in a career spent traveling from Bristol to Virginia and the West Indies, it presents clear instructions that could be used with no greater mathematical knowledge than arithmetic. The volume also contains instructions for using navigational instruments, such as this nocturnal, which was designed to use the altitude of a given star to compute time at night.

Listen to curator Steve Mentz discuss the "Davis Staff."

Items included

• John Davis. The seamans secrets. London: John Dawson, 1626. Call number: STC 6370 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Mariner's astrolabe. Replica of an instrument from Valencia, ca. 16th-17th century. Call number: na.
• Thomas Blundeville. M. Blundevile his exercises, containing eight treatises, the titles whereof are set downe in the next printed page: which treatises are verie necessarie to be read and learned of all young gentlemen, that have not beene exercised in such disciplines: and yet are desirous to have knowledge as well in cosmographie, astronomie, and geographie, as also in the arte of navigation, in which arte it is impossible to profite without the helpe of these, or such like instructions. London: John Windet, 1606. Call number: STC 3148 Copy 1 and LUNA Digital Image.
• Samuel Sturmy. The mariners magazine; or, Sturmy's mathematical and practical arts. London: E. Cotes, 1669. Call number: 151- 383f and LUNA Digital Image.
• Edmund Gunter. The description and use of the sector, crosse-staffe, and other instruments. London: William Jones, 1636. Call number: STC 12523 and LUNA Digital Image.
• John Blagrave. The mathematical jewel, shewing the making, and most excellent use of a singuler instrument so called: in that it performeth with wonderfull dexteritie, whatsoever is to be done, either by quadrant, ship, circle, cylinder, ring, dyall, horoscope, astrolabe, sphere, globe, or any such like heretofore devised. London: Walter Venge, 1585. Call number: STC 3119 and LUNA Digital Image.

Sermons and Prayers

Early modern believers and theological writers represented the sea as a space of divine power and revelation.

The clergyman James Janeway’s publications typified seventeenth-century efforts to combine realistic sea-stories with Providential theology. In A Token for Mariners, Janeway brought together accurate historical narratives with Providential interpretations. He also provided ready-made prayers and sermons for events at sea, from shipwreck to victory in battle. This image shows a shipwreck in the Providentialist view: the ship is in danger, the men are clinging to a broken mast, but the eye of God looks unblinking down to control everything.

Preachers often sought to reveal the secrets of the deep, and one anonymously published volume took the claim literally. Vox Piscis, or The Book-Fish consists of three theological treatises supposedly discovered in the belly of a recently-caught codfish. The tracts were actually reprints of radical writings by the sixteenth-century martyr John Frith. Placing Frith’s words in the fish’s belly transformed them into divine wisdom from the bottom of the sea. From the belly of the cod came a nonhuman voice proclaiming God’s will to an England that was again becoming divided by religion.

Listen to curator Steve Mentz discuss Janeway's theology of salvation on the sea.

Listen to curator Steve Mentz discuss The Book-Fish.

Items included

• James Janeway. A token for mariners, containing many famous and wonderful instances of God’s providence in sea dangers and deliverances. London: for T. Norris, and A. Bettesworth, 1721. Call number: BV4590.J3 1721 Cage and LUNA Digital Image.
• Thomas Jackson. The raging tempest stilled. London: John Haviland, 1623. Call number: STC 14305 Bd.w. STC 14319 Copy 3 and LUNA Digital Image.
• John Davenport. The saints anchor-hold in all storms and tempests. London: Benjamin Harris, 1661. Call number: BV4253.D2S2 Cage; displayed frontispiece.
• John Frith. Vox piscis: or, The book-fish contayning three treatises which were found in the belly of a cod-fish in Cambridge Market, on Midsummer Eve last, anno Domini 1626. London: [Humphrey Lownes, John Beale, and Augustine Mathewes], 1627. Call number: STC 11395 Copy 1 and LUNA Digital Image.
• John Flavel. Navigation spiritualiz’d: or, A new compass for seamen consisting of XXXII points of pleasant observations, profitable applications, and serious reflections: all concluded with so many spiritual poems. London: for Tho. Parkhurst, 1698. Call number: F1173.2; displayed sig. A3.