Bruce William Collingwood Attributed (1 results)
More imagesPublished by n.d., [Newcastle 1821
Seller: Rulon-Miller Books (ABAA / ILAB), St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.Rulon-Miller Books (ABAA / ILAB)
Contact seller5-star seller4to, approx. 200 manuscript pages with entries covering the standard lessons and examples format found in other navigation manuscripts of this period. Bound in full polished calf, spine perished, inner hinges repaired, but the text clean and legible. Two old bookseller catalogue slips are pasted to the front pastedown attesting…to Bruce's authorship. A manuscript note on the verso of the front free endpaper by the bookseller, W. H. Robinson also notes: This book was done by Dr. Bruce the eminent antiquarian of Newcastle, author of Roman Wall. [signed] W. H. Robinson." One of the booksellers' description reads, "MSS - A 4to 177-leaved Manuscript written by Dr. Bruce (author of the Roman Wall) on Navigation, bound in calf. £3/10/-" John Collingwood Bruce (1805-1892) was from Newcastle, a city on the Tyne River which empties into the North Sea. Ships and shipping were almost certainly a part of his early life. He attended the University of Glasgow 1821-26 during which time this manuscript was likely composed. Bruce's book, The Roman Wall was published in London in 1851. Two "examples" in the manuscript bear the date 1814, and the watermark on the paper is "Garter / 1815." On the surface, these don't lend credibility to Bruce's authorship except my friend Mr. Greg Gibson tells me that often students just copied "examples" from other sources instead of just creating them themselves, and this would not have much bearing on the date of composition. And that the paper is watermarked 1815 does not confirm the date of composition either as paper stocks often sat around in stationers' offices. More likely is that this is, in fact, Bruce's manuscript, and that if this course was taken while he was at Glasgow University, he would have been in his early twenties. The manuscript is a good example of its type, somewhat more detailed than usual, but with fewer tables and no illustrations to speak of. Some of the topics covered include Navigation, Middle Latitude and Mercator Sailing, Keeping Track of Distance and Course, Compass Variation, Determining Latitude and Longitude, Hadley's Quadrant, and Keeping a Logbook. Typically, the teacher or "master" would have students copy each section of his copy in order to better familiarize themselves with, and memorize the contents of the lesson. Copies of student workbooks turn up fairly frequently, and are almost always clumsy, slipshod replications of the master's text. (Presumably, students were more concerned with learning the lesson rather than reproducing a beautifully lettered and illustrated copy.) Examples of source books for these lessons, such as this one, are scarcer.
