NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Errors in Charles H Cotter's "History of Nautical Astronomy".
From: William Allen
Date: 2003 Jul 29, 13:53 -0700
From: William Allen
Date: 2003 Jul 29, 13:53 -0700
George, Thanks. This is extremely helpful. Regards, Bill Allen -----Original Message----- From: Navigation Mailing List [mailto:NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM] On Behalf Of George Huxtable Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 1:29 PM To: NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM Subject: Errors in Charles H Cotter's "History of Nautical Astronomy". Errors in Charles H Cotter's "History of Nautical Astronomy". Back in 1968, Hollis and Carter published Charles H Cotter's thorough survey, "A History of Nautical Astronomy", which is properly regarded as a goldmine of information on that topic, not approached by any other publication. It is frequently referred to, in papers relating to early navigation. It's now long out-of-print, and hard to find secondhand. Unfortunately, an extraordinary number of errors (and some omissions) have recently been detected in Cotter's text, which detract significantly from its usefulness. Partly, it may have been due to sloppy proofreading, but in addition it appears that Cotter may have transcribed old publications without perceiving all the technical details. A list of known or suspected errors has been assembled as a joint effort by- JK Jan Kalivoda jan.kalivoda@FF.CUNI.CZ of Prague, and GH George Huxtable george@huxtable.u-net.com of Oxford; with contributions from- HP Herbert Prinz hprinz@ATTGLOBAL.NET In previous postings to Nav-L, these errors have been listed, for the benefit of owners of Cotter's book, and this list has been updated from time to time as new errors have surfaced. However, the error-list has expanded to the extent that posting on Nav-L is becoming impractical, so instead it has been made available in html text at- http://www.huxtable.u-net.com/cotter01.htm where it will be updated if we become aware of new errors. The present version is dated 29 July 03, and it contains many new entries. We recommend to owners of Cotter's book that it might be useful to print out this error-list and keep it with the volume, perhaps marking the relevant text pages in pencil. We hope that knowledge of these errors will, to some extent, neutralise them. We appeal to any readers to bring to our attention (either George or Jan) any further defects that they become aware of, or suspect, as we have no reason to think that our list is exhaustive. If readers find any defects in our list itself, we would like to know about those too. Although it's regrettable that so many errors exist, Cotter's book remains unrivalled as an account of how astro-navigation evolved. George Huxtable and Jan Kalivoda. ================================================================ contact George Huxtable by email at george@huxtable.u-net.com, by phone at 01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK. ================================================================