Daboll’s Practical Navigator...

New London: Samuel Green, 1820. "Being a concise, easy, and comprehensive system of navigation; calculated for the daily use of seamen, and also for an assistant to the teacher: containing plane, traverse, parallel, middle latitude, and Mercator's sailing; with all the necessary tables. concise rules are given, with a variety of examples in every part of navigation; also, a new, scientific, and very short method of correcting the dead reckoning; the rules for keeping a complete reckoning at sea..." This is the first edition of the second Practical Navigator (following Bowditch) published in the United States. Daboll was a teacher and almanac maker who wrote The Schoolmasters Assistant, the most popular mathematics text in America between 1800 and 1850. His Navigator was published two years after the authors death. It contains his method for dead reckoning which he formulated in 1799, and which method he has ever since practised, instead of the operbose, absurd, and erroneous Rules published by Robertson, Hamilton Moore, and others. With a frontispiece engraving depicting a quadrant and compass. Also, a fine, large bookseller's label of David Felt on the front pastedown. Very prettily bound in full contemporary mottled calf and red leather label. With the large contemporary advertisement, and the ticket of booksellers "Hunts & Shaw, Mercantile Wharf, Boston," on the verso of front flyleaf.. 8vo; iv, (4), 106, (2), (104 pages, containing nineteen tables). b/w frontispiece