touching this matter, having never met with any person in Persia or the Indies to inform me when the compass was first known among them, though I made inquiry of the most learned men in both countries. I have sailed from the Indies to Persia in Indian ships, when no European has been aboard but myself. The pilots were all Indians, and they used the forestaff and quadrant for their observations. These instruments they have, from us, and made by our artists, and they do not in the least vary from ours, except that the characters are Arabic. The Arabs are the most skilful navigators of all the Asiatics or Africans ; but neither they nor the Indians make use of charts, and they do not much want them ; some they have, but they are copied from ours, for they are altogether ignorant of perspective." The observations of Chardin, who flourished between 1643 and 1713, cannot be said to receive support from the testimony of some earlier authorities. That the Arabs must have been acquainted with the compass, and with the construction and use of charts, at a period nearly two centuries previous to Chardiu's first voyage to the East, may be gathered from the description given by Barros of a map of all the coast of India, shown to Vasco da Gama by a Moor of Guzerat (about the 15th July 1498), in which the bearings were laid down "after the manner of the Moors,' or "with meridians and parallels very small (or close together), without other bearings of the compass ; because, as the squares of these meridians and parallels were very small, the coast was laid down by these two bearings of N. and S., and E. and W., with great certainty, without that multiplication of bearings of the points of the compass usual in our maps, which serves as the root of the others. Further, we learn from Osorio that the Arabs at the time of Gama "were instructed in so many of the arts of navigation, that they did not yield much to the Portuguese mariners in the science and practice of maritime matters. (See The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, Hakluyt Soc., 1869 ; note to chap, xv by the Hon. H. E. J. Stanley, p. 138.) Also the Arabs that navigated the Red Sea at the same period are shown by Varthema to have used the mariner s chart and compass (Travels, p. 31) {{ti|1em|Again, it appears that compasses of a primitive description, which can hardly be supposed to have been brought from Europe, were employed in the East Indies certainly as early as several years previous to the close of the 16th century In William Marlowe s Navigator s Supply, published in 1597, we read: " Some fewe yeeres since, it so fell out that I had several! conferences with two East Indians which were brought into England by master Candisu [Thomas Cavendish], and had learned our language : The one of them was of Mamillia [Manilla] in the Isle of Luzon, the other of Miaco in Japan. I questioned with them concerning their shipping and manner of sayling. They described all things farre different from ours, and shewed, that in steade of our Compas, they use a magneticall needle of sixe ynches long, and longer, upon a pinne in a dish of white China earth filled with water ; In the bottome whereof they have two crosse lines, for the foure principall windes; the rest of the divisions being reserved to the skill of their Pilots. " Bailak Kibdjaki, also, an Arabian writer, shows in his Merchant's Treasure, a work given to the world in 1282, that the magnetized needle, floated on water by means of a splinter of wood or a reed, was employed on the Syrian seas at the time of his voyage from Tripoli to Alexandria (1242), and adds : "They say that the captains who navigate the Indian seas use, instead of the needle and splinter, a sort of fish made out of hollow iron, which, when thrown into the water, swims upon the surface, and points out the north and south with its head and tail " (Klaproth, Lettrc, p. 57). Furthermore, although the sailors in the Indian vessels in which Niccola de Conti traversed the Indian seas in 1420 are stated to have had no compass, still, on board the ship in which Varthema, less than a century later, sailed from Borneo to Java, both the mariner's chart and compass were used; it has been questioned, however, whether in this case the compass was of Eastern manufacture (Travels of Varthema, Introd. xciv., and p. 249). We have already seen that the Chinese as -late as the end of the 18th century made
voyages with compasses on which but little reliance could be placed ; and it may perhaps be assumed that the compasses early used in the East were mostly too imperfect to be of much assistance to navigators, and were therefore often dispensed with on customary routes. The simple water-compass is said to have been used by the Coreans so late as the middle of the 18th century ; and Dr T. Smith, writing in the Philosophical Transactions for 1683-4, says of the Turks (p. 439), " They have no genius for Sea-voyages, and consequently are very raw and unexperienced in the art of Navigation, scarce venturing to sail out of sight of land. I speak of the natural Turks, who trade either into the black Sea or some part of the Morca, or between Constantinople and Alexandria, and not of the Pyrats of Barbary, who are for the most part Renegade s, and learnt their skill in Christendom The Turkish compass consists but of 8 points, the four Cardinal and the four Collateral." That the value of the compass was thus, even in the latter part of the 17th century, KO imperfectly recognized in the East may serve to explain how in earlier times that instrument, long after the first discovery of its properties, may have been generally neglected by navigators.The Saracen geographer, Edrisi, who lived about 1100, is said by Boucher to give an account, though in a confused manner, of the polarity of the magnet (Hallam, Mid. Ages, vol. iii. chap. 9, part 2) ; but the earliest definite mention as yet known of the use of the mariner s compass in the Middle Ages occurs in a treatise entitled DC Utensilibus, written by Alexander Neckam in the 12th century. He speaks there of a needle carried on board ship which, being placed on a pivot, and allowed to take its own position of repose, shows mariners their course when the polar star is hidden. In another work, De Naturis Rcrum, lib. ii. c. 89, he writes, "Mariners at sea, when, through cloudy weather in the day which hides the sun, or through the darkness of the night, they lose the knowledge of the quarter of the world to which they are sailing, touch a needle with the magnet, which will turn round till, on its motion ceasing, its point will be directed towards the north 11 (W. Chappell, Nature, No. 346, June 15, 1876). The magnetical needle, and its suspension on a stick or straw in water, are clearly described in La Bible Guiot, a poem probably of the 13th century, by Guiot de Provins, wherein we are told that through the magnet (la manette or I amaniere), an ugly brown stone to which iron turns of its own accord, mariners possess an art that cannot fail them. A needle touched by it, and floated by a stick on water, turns its point towards the pole-star, and a light being placed near the needle on dark nights, the proper course is known (Hist, litttraire de la France, torn. ix. p. 199 ; Barbazan, Fabliaux, torn. ii. p. 328). Cardinal Jacques do Vitry, bishop of Aeon in Palestine, in his History (cap. 89), written about the year 1218, speaks of the magnetic needle as w most necessary for such as sail the sea ; '[1] and another French crusader, his contemporary, Vincent de Beauvais, states that the adamant (loadstone) is found in Arabia, and mentions a method of using a needle magnetized by it which is similar to that described by Kibdjaki. From quotations given by Antonio Capmany (Questiones Crilicas) from the De Contemplations of Raymond Lully, of the date 1272, it appears that the latter was well acquainted with the use of the magnet at sea ; [2] and before the middle of the 13th century Gauthier d Espinois alludes to its polarity, as if generally known, in the lines : —
"Tons autresi cojnme 1 ainiant deceit [detournej
L aiguillette par force de vertu,
A ma dame tot lc mont [monde] retcnuo
Qui sa beaute" council et apercoit."
Guklo Guinizzelli, a poet of the same period, writes : "In those parts under the north are the mountains of loadstone, which give the virtue to the air of attracting iron ; but because it [the load stone] is far off, [it] wishes to have the help of a similar stone to make it [the virtue] work, and to direct the needle towards the star. [3] Brunetto Latini also makes reference to the compass in his encyclopaedia Livres dou tresor, composed about 1 260 ; and a letter written in 1269, attribiited to Peter Adsiger, shows that the declination of the needle had already been observed at that date. From Torfajus we learn that the compass, fitted into a box, was already in use among the Norwegians about the middle of the 13th century (Hist, Rcr. Norvcgicarum, iv. c. 4, p. 345, Hafnia?, 1711) ; and it is probable that the use of the magnet at sea was known in Scotland at or shortly subsequent to that time, though King Robert, in crossing from Arran to Carrick in 1306, as Harbour writing in 1375 informs us, "na nedill had na stane," but steered by a fire on the shore.
From the above it will have been evident that, as Barlowe remarks concerning the compass, " the lame tale of one Flavius at Amelphus, in the kmgdome of Naples [Flavio Gioja of Amalp-hi, cir 1307], for to have devised it, is of very slender probabilitie ; " and as regards the assertion of Dr Gilbert, of Colchester (De Magnete, p. 4, 1600), that Marco Polo introduced the compass into Italy from the East in 1260, [4] we need only quote the words of Col. Yule (Book of Marco Polo) : " Respecting the mariner s compass and gunpowder, 1 shall say nothing, as no one now, I believe, imagines Marco to have had anything to do with their introduction."
When and by whom the card was added are still matters of conjecture ; but the thirty-two points or rhumbs into which it is divided were recognized at least as early as the time of Chaucer, who, in 1391, wrote, "Now is thin Orisonte departed in xxiiii partiez by thi azymutz, in significacion of xxiiii partiez of the world ; al be it so that ship men rikne thilke partiez in xxxii " ( Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Skeat, Early Eng. Text Soc., Lond. 1872).
- ↑ Adamas in India reperitur .....Ferrum occulta quadam natura ad se trahit. Acus ferrea postquam adamantem contigerit, ad stellam septentrionalem ..... semper convertitur, unde valde uecessarius est navigantibus in mari.
- ↑ Sicut acus per naturam vertitur ad septentrionem dum sit tacta a magnete.— Sicut acus nautica dirigit marinarios in sua navigutione.
- ↑ Ginguene, Hist. lit. de I Italic, t. i. p. 413.
- ↑ "According to all the texts he returned to Venice in 1295 or, as is more probable, in 1296."—Yule.
