The Charting of the Oceans; Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps

Description

viii 136 pp. With index; hard covers with dust jacket, 1cm tear in dust jacket, 1st few pages lower right with folds, 75 coloured and 20 black & white illustrations.

First edition. This superbly illustrated book traces the history of charts not as technical documents but as eloquent witnesses to the discovery of the world beyond Europe, and to man’s evolving knowledge of the oceans. These charts employed a vivid artistic idiom which expressed man’s passionate feeling for the sea: the gilded compasses, the nightmarish sea-creatures, the stately ships, the royal crests – all these wre fused into a minor art-form which flourished for four centuries.