NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Mar 31, 17:55 -0700
I'm selling a rare book -- Janet Taylor's "Principles of Navigation Simplified" published in 1837: ebay auction link. It's similar to a Norie or a Bowditch from the same era covering all the various calculations and methods of nautical astronomy (celestial navigation) including lunars, longitude by chronometer, latitude by double altitudes, etc., as well as dead reckoning and other forms of traditional navigation. Taylor also dabbled in the development of navigational instruments, and in the images below you can see her "calculator" which combined a reflecting sextant with arcs for computations. It did not succeed in the marketplace! Taylor also ran a successful navigation school in London, and of course all of this amounts to a life of impressive accomplishment for anyone, but vastly more so because she was a she, a woman, in the highly patriarchal society of Victorian Britain. Even with a beloved queen on the throne, it was a place where a woman alone had almost no rights. It's probably true that her marriage was one of financial necessity.
There are also links to a few of her works in the index that I maintain here that you can download for free as pdf's.
Frank Reed
