Masterpieces of navigation the Mariners' Museum

The Mariners Museum, one of the world's finest maritime museums, is situated in Newport News, Virginia, on the banks of the James River close to the important port of Hampton Roads. The museum was founded in 1930 by Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955) and Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), whose other philanthropies include the Hispanic Society of America in New York City and Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. They envisioned an institution "devoted to the culture of the sea and its tributaries, its conquest by man and its influence on civilization.

Because the museum began as a result of Archer Huntington's vision, the first major undertaking was to build a collection. An intensive period of acquisition during the 1930s both here and abroad ended with the beginning of World War II, although by that time most of the extensive collection had been acquired. Today there are approximately 35,000 two- and three-dimensional objects, 600,000 photographs and negatives, 78,000 books, and an archive of more than 1,000,000 documents.

Of particular note is a collection of navigational instruments not unlike those in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London, the Netherlands Maritime Museum (Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum) in Amsterdam, and the Danish Mercantile and Maritime Museum (Handels-og Sofartsmuseet pa Kronborg) in Helsingor, Denmark. (2) The Mariners' Museum has more than nine hundred such instruments divided into twelve general categories. (3) Of the twelve, three categories in particular--navigational, timekeeping, and meteorological instruments--have combined to distinguish the museum's collection. One of these three--the meteorological collection--has no known rival in the world. (4)

The technical evolution of navigational and timekeeping instruments is inherently linked to the historical development of the art and science of navigation. As early seafarers sailed cautiously along Familiar coastlines they developed an intimate knowledge of the daily movements of the sun, moon, and stars. They knew that by determining the height of the polestar above the horizon in their home port they could navigate in the open ocean and return home by sailing north or south until the star was at the same elevation. Once the observed star reached the predetermined altitude, returning home was just a matter of turning east or west and sailing in a straight line until home was reached. This technique, today called "sailing down the latitude," gradually spread until the latitudes of many coastal cities were common knowledge in the fifteenth century and movement between these ports was fairly routine. In many cases, the only instruments used to determine the altitude of the sun or polestar were the fingers of the hand or parts of the ship.

Obviously the consequence of an increasing number of voyages combined with rudimentary measuring systems was the frequent loss of ships, men, and tons of cargo. As the cost of ships mounted and cargos became more valuable the need for more precise navigational techniques became imperative. (5) During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the search for better ways of determining altitude led to the development of many new navigational instruments, most of them adaptations of instruments for making astronomical observations ashore. Examples are the quadrant, mariner's astrolabe, cross-staff, and backstaff, all of which are found in the museum.

The earliest astronomical instrument converted for nautical use was the quadrant, which in its nautical form is known today only from illustrations. The nautical quadrant was a simple instrument consisting of two straight edges (one of which was pierced with sighting holes) connected by an arc containing a scale divided into whole degrees from zero to ninety. A plumb bob hung from the apex of the instrument with its string crossing the degree scale. During use the quadrant was held vertically at the navigator's eye and the two sighting holes were lined up with the polestar. The point at which the string of the plumb bob crossed the scale indicated the height of the stain degrees of altitude, and concurrently the location of the ship in degrees of latitude. Of several astronomical quadrants in the museum the most important was made by Henry Sutton, a talented mathematical instrument maker and designer in London during the mid-seventeenth century (Pl. III). Although this elegant brass instrument was actually m ade for use on land, like the mariner's quadrant, it contains a scale capable of measuring altitude.

Another early navigational instrument that relied on the same principles as the quadrant was the mariner's astrolabe. Unlike the delicate quadrant, the mariner's astrolabe was a thick, weighty instrument typically made of cast bronze or brass. It too was a simplified version of an astronomical instrument used on land, but it was the first navigational instrument whose design reflected an attempt to solve the problems caused by using at sea an instrument that was designed for land. Mariner's astrolabes are fairly rare. To date fewer than one hundred are known, and only seven American institutions currently have one. (6) Not until December 19, 2000, at an auction at Sotheby's in London did the museum finally acquire an astrolabe, which it had been seeking for seventy years.