**  A second window aside called by the
She-philosopher.com Library e-Publication page for
the Editor’s Introduction to Richard Flecknoe’s Brazilian travelogue
Lib. Cat. No. FLECK1656 (Part 1)  **

First Published:  October 2012
Revised (substantive):  5 July 2021

W I T H   C O M P L E T E   T E X T   O F   A L L

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F O R   C A L L I N G   P A G E

#1 (of 6)

the information collected was of uneven quality — “Travellers, however, were always very ready with offers.” In June 1661, “Lord Sandwich (the former Admiral Montague and Pepys’s ‘my lord’) proposed to test some newly invented apparatus of Robert Hooke’s on his voyage to Lisbon. This was a sounding instrument (without a line), together with bottom deposit and water samplers. Sir Robert Moray reported on some tests he had made with these in Spithead between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, and the upshot was that it was decided to attach instructions for such observations to the pamphlet entitled Directions for Sea-men ... which had originally been drafted by the Gresham Professor Laurence Rook, who died shortly before the Society was incorporated. Trinity House agreed to co-operate by distributing these pamphlets and collecting any reports received, while Jonas Moore promised to take a set of apparatus with him to the new English possession, Tangier, where he was going (Wren having refused the post) to direct the construction of a mole; Major (afterwards Sir Robert) Holmes promised to do the same on his next voyage. Thomas Digges had believed long since that reliable observations could be collected from untrained, uneducated observers and had been disappointed. The early Fellows and Officers of the Royal Society after distributing instructions and questionnaires without number must be presumed eventually to have learned the same lesson.” (Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, 100–101) ::

#2 (of 6)

“Seller’s book in 1668” — Presumably Seller’s English Pilot, with an engraved title-page advertising that the pilot-book was “furnished with new and exact draughts, charts, and descriptions: gathered from the latest and best discoveries that have been made by divers able and expert navigators of our English nation.” This made the use of old Dutch and French copperplates even more inexcusable. Moreover, Seller printed one of Sir Jonas Moore’s maps — Draught of ye Sands, Channels and Buoys ... from Southforeland to Orfordness ... — in his English Pilot, without permission, and before it was complete, drawing vigorous complaints from Moore. ::

#3 (of 6)

crudely produced by sailors — Even senior naval officers, such as Sir John Narbrough (bap. 1640, d. 1688), known to historians as “a highly competent navigator” (J. D. Davies, n. pag.), fell short in this regard. In a note written c.1694 for his projected History of the British Navy, Samuel Pepys — whose library included a copy of Narbrough’s Journal of his voyages in the Fairfax and the St. Michael, 1672 and 1673, illustrated by charts and colored drawings — recorded that “Mr. Evelyn, from the rudeness of Sir John Narbrough’s drawings extant in the Book of Voyages I sent him, observes to me the expectations he has of the effects of our mathematical boys’ educations in Christ’s Hospital upon that head, and gives me a very proper hint towards illustrating the usefulness of drawing in a navigator from the scandalous instances of the want of it visible in Sir John Narbrough’s original draught he gave me of the Magellan Streights, and the drawings therein of men and beasts done by his own hand.” (Pepys, Samuel Pepys’s Naval Minutes, ed. J. R. Tanner, 1926, 391) ::

#4 (of 6)

“Sir Jon. More” — That is, the mathematician, teacher, writer, surveyor, and patron of astronomy, Sir Jonas Moore (1617–1679). At the Restoration, Moore received the following public testimonial from the Royalist soldier, astrologer and almanack-maker George Wharton: “Whoever desires instruction in all or any of the Mathematical Sciences, or to have any Manors or other Lands Exquisitely surveyed and described, let him refer to my noble and most ingeniously learned friend Mr Jonas Moore.” (qtd. in Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, 233)
  Appointed Surveyor of Ordnance in 1673, and elected F.R.S. in 1674, Moore made the Tower of London (where he lived from 1669) “a centre of scientific observation, mathematical practice and patronage, the last most notably in bringing forward the young John Flamsteed, and furnishing him with instruments as well as in encouraging Edmund Halley.” (Taylor, Mathematical Practitioners, 233)
  His last work was the preparation of a 2-vol. textbook for the mathematical school at Christ’s Hospital, of which Moore was a Governor. Moore’s A New Systeme of the Mathematicks: containing I. Arithmetick ... II. Practical Geometry ... III. Trigonometry ... IV. Cosmography ... V. Navigation ... VI. the Doctrine of the Sphere ... VII. Astronomical Tables ... VIII. A New Geography ... Designed for the Use of the Royal Foundation of the Mathematical School in Christ-Hospital was completed by John Flamsteed and Peter Perkins, and posthumously published in 1681. The lavishly-formatted book featured handsomely-engraved diagrams, maps and illustrations, along with complete nautical, trigonometrical and logarithmic tables, besides a table of proportional parts, and was printed by a woman, Anne Godbid, with her partner, John Playford. ::

#5 (of 6)

collaborating with Richard Reeves — This Richard Reeves (aka Reeve, Reives) was typically referred to by contemporaries as the king’s perspective-glass maker. His shop — where Christiaan Huygens, with other physicists and mathematicians, watched a transit of Mercury across the sun on 23 April 1661 using one of Reeves’s telescopes, fitted with red glasses to save the observers’ eyes — was located “over against the Foot and Leg in Long Acre,” London.
  This Richard Reeves, the famous glass-grinder and optical instrument-maker (fl. 1649–1679), is sometimes confused with the turner (a craftsman who turns or fashions objects on a lathe) of the same name, Richard Reeves (aka Reeve), who killed his wife in 1664. (E.g., see Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, 47–8, for one such misidentification.)
  Hooke, who knew and worked with both artisans, wrote to Boyle with the news: “I am extremely sorry, that I have not been able sooner to send down the ball and socket you desired; ... but I hope to send it down to morrow morning, for Mr. Reeves (who understands these things, and I think he only, of all the turners I have met with) is at present in such a condition, that he can do nothing. Perhaps you may have heard of it: if not, in short, he has, between chance and anger, killed his wife, who died of a wound she received by a knife flung out of his hand, on Saturday last. The jury found it manslaughter, and he and all his goods are seized on; and it is thought it may go hard with him....” (Letter from Hooke to Boyle, postmarked Gresham College, 21 Oct. 1664; qtd. in Gunther VI, 206) ::

#6 (of 6)

“poetaster” — Flecknoe’s poetic skills were derided by a long list of contemporaries, as well as by modern critics. In his Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), the 17th-century theater critic, Gerard Langbaine, commented that Flecknoe’s “Acquaintance with the Nobility, was more than with the Muses; and he had a greater propensity to Riming, than a Genius to Poetry” (Langbaine, 199), which judgment is amply confirmed by Flecknoe’s light verses (in Letter XXIII) commemorating the death of his pet macaw during the return trip from Brazil.
  According to Flecknoe’s 21st-century ODNB biographer, “Flecknoe’s true milieu seems to have been the world of aristocratic family entertainments; his ventures into the public domain — whether through incessant vanity publication or ill-judged drama — brought ridicule and a reputation as the archetypally bad poet. ... His apotheosis in [Dryden’s] Mac Flecknoe as the king who ‘In Prose and Verse, was own’d, without dispute, / Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute;’ may have been unkind, but not unjustified.” (Hammond, n. pag.) ::