Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-11T01:21:39.623Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Navigation and Hydrography, Oceanography's Eyes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2011

Get access

Extract

Writing in 1623, Samuel Purchas declaimed, in Purchas his Pilgrimes, ‘The Sea yields the world to the world, by this art of arts Navigation’. In those days navigation and its handmaid hydrography were, indeed, each more of an art than a science, though the British had made great progress in the preceding 50 years towards making them scientific. I have taken as my thesis today that it was not until these two positionfinding ‘arts’ had become thoroughly scientific that there could be a science of oceanography. So I have called navigation and hydrography oceanography's eyes, for they enable the oceanographer to know where he is in the ocean and where phenomena occur in the ocean, both prerequisites to the observation, collection and organisation of positive knowledge about the seas and the oceans, which I take to be the basis of scientific oceanography.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References to Literature

Albuquerque, L., 1962. Introduçtion ão à Historia dos Descobrimentos. Coimbra.Google Scholar
Bensaude, J., 1912. L'Astronomie Nautique au Portugal a L'Époque des Grandes Découvertes. Bern.Google Scholar
Cortesão, A., 1971. History of Portuguese Cartography, II. With two chapters on History of astronomical navigation by L. de Albuquerque. Coimbra.Google Scholar
Cotter, C. H., 1968. A History of Nautical Astronomy. London., Google Scholar
Deacon, M., 1971. Scientists and the Sea 1650-1900. A Study of Marine Science. London.Google Scholar
Fontoura Da Costa, A., 1939. A Marinharia dos Descobrimentos. Lisboa.Google Scholar
Haring, H. D., 1964. Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the time of the Hapsburgs. Glouster, Mass.Google Scholar
National Maritime Museum, 1962. Four Steps to Longitude. London.Google Scholar
Penrose, B., 1952. Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance 1420-1620. Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
Ritchie, G. S., 1970. British Hydrography since Cook. Jl Roy. Soc. Arts, 118, 270-283.Google Scholar
Sadler, D. H., 1968. Man is not Lost. A record of 200 years of astronomical navigation with The Nautical Almanac, 1767-1967. London.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W., 1958. The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Stuart Times. London and New Haven.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W.,,1964. Galileo and longitude: fundamental contributions to a fundamental problem. Physis, 6, 287301.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W.,, 1966. Portuguese Nautical Science and the origin of the Scientific Revolution. Acad. Int. Cult. Port., 2, 165191.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W.,, 1967a. The Rutters of the Sea. The sailing directions of Pierre Garcie. New Haven and London.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W.,, 1967b. Science and techniques of navigation in the Renaissance. In Singleton, C. S., Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, 189237. Baltimore.Google Scholar
Waters, D. W.,, 1970. The Iberian bases of the English Art of Navigation in the 16th Century. CoimbraGoogle Scholar