The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathay and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576-78.

p. cii-ciii, re the first voyage: The ship’s library included two works of André Thevet, the French royal geographer, his Cosmography, in French, which had been published only the previous year, and his Singularités de l’Amérique, both in French and in the English translation of 1568, by Thomas Hackett, under the title The New found World or Antarctike. It included William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse, published in 1559, which, to quote Professor Taylor, ‘contains little of purely geographical interest, but is notable for its exposition and illustration of the method of survey by triangulation….’ This volume and Dr Record’s Castle of Knowledge, 1556 (‘containing the explication of the sphere’), which they also took along, ‘were certainly adequate reference books for such astronomy and mathematical geography as was necessary to understand the principles of these various instruments’ (i.e. Cole’s instruments). As they took Medina’s Arte de Naviguar in the original it is to be presumed that the Master could read Spanish. The only English work included was Mandeville, ‘presumably for the sake of its account of the Far East, which was the ultimate goal of the expedition’. They also took ‘a Bible Englishe great volume’, possibly Richard Jugge’s Bishop’s Bible of 1572.

The collection of maps contained ‘a very great carte of navigation’, Mercator’s ‘great mappe universall in prente’, and ‘three other small mappes prented’. There were also ‘6 cartes of navigation written in blacke [on parchment] whereof 4 ruled playne & 2 rounde’, and ‘a great globe of metal in blanke in a case’. [Stefansson does not make clear where he took these lists from.]