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Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller
168
UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT FACSIMILE
OF A LOST “JEWELL” OF THE
JACOBEAN NAVIGATOR’S ART
331.WAYMOUTH, George.
The Jewell of Artes.
London, 1885 [40255] £22,500
Folio (335 × 200 mm). MS facsimile after the British Library
original of 1603-4, in a copy of the John and Abraham
Bateman binding, tan full morocco elaborately gilt, Royal
Arms of James I to the sides in a field of repeated rampant
lion devices, stepped arabesque corner-pieces filled with
strapwork and pointillé tooling, smooth spine densely worked
with a repeated pattern composed of various small bracket,
quatrefoil, and floral sprig tools, scrolled floral and foliate
edge-roll, a.e.g. Later plush-lined slipcase. 320ll., c.125pp.
of MS text within ruled red borders, seven pages of charts,
and approximately 200 pages of pen-and-ink drawings,
most coloured and captioned, some with overlays. Portrait
bookplate of James Phinney Baxter to the front pastedown
with quotation from his well-known poem “The Library”,
“Who learns and learns but does not what he knows, Is one
who plows and plows but never sows.” Very slight rubbing at
corners, head and tail of spine and over the cords, but overall
very good indeed.
Maine historian and philanthropist James Phinney
Baxter’s unique and extraordinary manuscript
replica of George Waymouth’s important manuscript
work on navigation, shipbuilding, fortification, and
instruments of war. The original manuscript was
presented to James I shortly after the beginning of
his reign in England and was lost to history until its
discovery by Baxter at the British Museum’s King’s
Library in 1885. A masterpiece of navigational
science, engineering, and draughtsmanship, the
work consists of detailed text in six books and
approximately 200 pages of drawings and diagrams,
many of them coloured and several with movable
overlays.
George Waymouth came from a family of Devon
fishermen and ship-builders, inheriting a share in
the Lyon from his grandfather and almost certainly
working in the Newfoundland fisheries in his
youth; by the 1580s he was building ships for which
he received royal subsidies. In 1602 Waymouth
proposed and commanded an East India Company
expedition to find the Northwest Passage which
collapsed due to the mutiny of his crew in appalling
weather conditions. On his return he was examined
by the Privy Council, the details of this interview
being relayed to the Company, and was exonerated
for the failure. The presentation to the King of the
original manuscript of the Jewell – perhaps compiled
in collaboration with the engraver and instrument
maker Charles Whitwell (see Taylor, The Mathematical
Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England) – may well
have been an attempt to repair his reputation while
bringing himself to the attention of the newlycrowned
monarch. Much of the preface is occupied
with a rehearsal of the causes of the voyage’s failure
and petitions for “maintenance and imployment
at home or for my necessarie releese enforced to
seeke the same a broade or in foraine cuntries.”
In the text he emphasizes “the explorercolonizer’s
need for a knowledge of navigational
instruments, shipbuilding, machinery, gunnery, and
fortification” (ODNB). The six books contain a series
of “demonstrations” of these sciences illustrated by
elaborate diagrams. The most substantial section
is that on “Diverse instruments for navigation”,
including the cross-staff, the quadrant, the astrolabe
and the compass, and techniques “for sea men
to keepe there reckonings of there shippes way.”
The second part is dedicated to “the manner of
building of shipp[s] by A geometrical proportion…
whereby any worke man of mean capacitie having
some small skill in Arithmetick and geometrie” can
avoid error and produce ships both “more offensive
and defensive than those nowe used.” Waymouth’s
“Engines”, include the use of inflated pig-skins to
help soldiers swim over rivers; a turntable device
edged with blades and mounted with “small
murdering pieces which will carry some 40 or 50
muskett bulletes” which can withstand assault and
carry a lethal fire “in to any one, or diverse partes
of the shipp where it is assaulted”, together with
a primitive tank and gunboat for riverine warfare.
A section on various forms of mensuration follows,
how to measure the height of castle walls, the depth
of a well and the “most necessarie Instruments
to survey land with.” The “fifte booke concerning
fortification” contains a series of plans for complex
gun forts and castles, together with instructions on
mining and counter-mining, clearly demonstrating
Waymouth’s belief that the “the practise of
fortification nowe as necessarilie be imployed in the
land of Florida” as in Europe. The final part is on the
manufacture of ordnance and gun-carriages, and
the calculation of trajectories. In all a remarkable
navigator-artificer’s vade mecum, the possibility
of Whitwell’s contribution perhaps underscored by
the reliance on various elaborate “instruments.”
If Waymouth’s highly ingenious gift to the King did
not obtain for him the direct Royal patronage that
he was seeking, it may well have been instrumental
in obtaining him command of another expedition.
Catalogue 57: Travel Section 7: Mapping, Navigation and Naval History
In 1605 he found “sponsors from the worlds of
commerce and colonization: Plymouth merchants
interested in the cod fishery; Sir Thomas Arundell,
who wished to establish an American colony for
Roman Catholics; and possibly Arundell’s brother-inlaw,
the Earl of Southampton” (ODNB). Southampton
had been Essex’s collaborator in the planned rising
against Elizabeth, and on his accession James had
freed him from imprisonment and recreated him as
Earl. Perhaps James had shared the perusal of the
manuscript with his ambitious favourite, who put his
influence behind the mounting of the expedition. In
March 1605 Waymouth set off in the Archangell on a
voyage of exploration and possible colonization. It is
for this exploit that he is primarily known, one of the
earliest European expeditions to coastal Maine, which
is recorded in James Rosier’s A True Relation of the
Most Prosperous Voyage made this Present Yeere 1605
by Captaine George Waymouth… (London, 1605). His
true destination was probably the region between
Chesapeake Bay and Cape Cod, but pushed further
north by bad weather the expedition reached the
George River in present-day Maine in mid-May. They
remained a month in the Georges Islands, where they
traded with the local Abenaki Indians, eventually
capturing and bringing back four of them – together
with the famous Squanto, a visiting Patuxet, who
later served on John Smith’s 1614 voyage to Virginia
– for future use as guides and interpreters. The
expedition opened the way for the establishment of
the short-lived but historically significant Plymouth
Company Popham colony in Maine, founded in 1607.
It was whilst seeking fresh materials on this subject
in the King’s Library that Baxter was introduced,
through serendipity and the hard work of an intrepid
assistant librarian, to the previously misshelved
manuscript of the Jewell: “I followed him and he
took down a large manuscript volume elegantly
bound and laid it before me, entitled Jewell of Artes
by George Waymouth, which was a present by him
to James First. ‘I do not know as this is any interest
to you,’ said Kensington, ‘but as you instructed me
to call your attention to anything possibly relating
to your subjects I thought I would show it to you.’
… I immediately procured an expert to copy
and make facsimiles of the numerous drawings
which the book contained, and the binder of the
Museum had especial tools make that he might
make for a facsimile binding of the original.” On
his return to America Baxter made this replica
available to Henry S. Burrage who was working
on a new edition of Rosier’s account, leading to
a rapid reassessment of Waymouth’s reputation,
from that of “a competent English shipmaster
only”, a “rough and uneducated adventurer”, to
highly competent navigator at home in the worlds
of artificer-scientists and aristocratic patronage.
Waymouth considered the content of this work to be
close to a state secret, stating in his preface – with
perhaps a mingled sense of threat and promise
– that he had withheld it from publication for fear
that “foraine nations, for whome I nothing meant it
should reape as much proffit of it as this my natiue
countrie.” It is unsurprising therefore that the BM
copy remained the only contemporary version
known until 1971, when Henry C. Taylor bequeathed
his library on navigation and the early exploration
of America to the Beinecke. Amongst the collection
was another early 17th-century copy, almost
identical in content and binding to the BM’s, but
unfortunately possessed of no earlier provenance
than that of Taylor. The present manual facsimile
is by all accounts a perfect replica of the British
Museum copy with respect to its text, illustrations
and binding. The only significant differences are
that the text is executed in a neat and clearly legible
Victorian hand rather than crabbed 17th-century
script, and that no attempt was made to duplicate
the original paper. The Jewell of Artes, in both its
original undertaking and this unique manuscript
reproduction, represents major historical moments
of scholarship, craftsmanship, and discovery.
Offered here in the only obtainable copy.
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