The First English Globe: A Recent Discovery

Abstract

Navigations,' was designed as a record of English enterprise in maritime discovery. The appearance of the globes was rightly hailed by Hakluyt and John Davis (amongst others) as material proof that English geography could now hold up its head with the leading schools on the Continent. Within two years such eminent geographers and mathematicians as Blundeville, Hood, Hues and Hariot had published books devoted wholly, or in part, to their description. The globes were presumably made and sold in considerable numbers, for William Sanderson, their patron and financier, spent over ?1000 on them. They now in the handes of many with whom I have to do, says the pupil in Hood's dialogue 2; and it must have been with pairs of Molyneux globes that the Warden of all Souls College and Sir Thomas Bodley provided their libraries at Oxford.3 Even in 1656 William Sanderson's son 4 was able to write that the globes are yet in being, great and small ones, Celestiall and Terrestriall, in both our Universities and in severall Libraries (here, and beyond Seas). Envisaging as it seems a large demand Molyneux made, at a

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