Global stars
Good heavens... how a globemaker mapped Captain Cook’s voyages and the stars above. John Vincent reports.
We have known that the world is round (well, an irregularly shaped ellipsoid to be precise) for more than 2,300 years, since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle (384-322 BC) had it all figured out, although it seems Pythagoras (580-500 BC) proposed the idea even earlier.
Explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s ship Victoria completed the first circumnavigation of the world in 1522, a clever trick if there was an edge. But all this has not stopped members of the Flat Earth Society, despite all evidence to the contrary, from believing in one of the great conspiracy theories: that planet Earth is flat.
Primitive and inaccurate world maps, still based on the theory that Earth was flat, were scratched on cave walls in the
6th and 5th centuries BC. But the first proper terrestrial globe (from the Latin globus, meaning round body, ball or sphere) was introduced to Peking by the Persian astronomer Jamal ad-Din Bukhari in 1267, although the first known mention is from a Greek geographer, Strabo (63 BC-24 AD), describing the Globe of Crates of Mallas from about 150 BC. Earliest surviving globe was made in Nuremberg by German textile merchant, navigator and cartographer Martin Behaim (1459-1507) in 1492. It is in the form of a linen ball in two halves, reinforced with wood, and maps, excluding the Americas, drawn by artist Georg Glockendon to Behaim’s specifications.
Now a pair of Regency globes by John Cary (1754-1835) and his brother William (1759-1825), one celestial (dated 1799), the other terrestrial (dated 1813-29), has fetched £87,500, well over twice as much as expected, at Berkshire auction house Dreweatts after surfacing from a charitable foundation.
Included on the terrestrial globe are the new “Tracks and Discoveries” made by Yorkshire navigator Captain James Cook during his three voyages from 1768-1780, along with those by others, including
Capt George Vancouver (1757-1798) and
Capt Tobias Furneaux (1735-1786). Jampacked with drawings, notes, dates, trade routes and salt and copper mines, the
28in wide globe shows Antarctica with no land but described as Firm Fields and Vast Mountains of Ice and Canada with no northern coastline. Cary’s New and Improved Celestial Globe lays out stars and nebulae as compiled by the Rev. Francis Wollaston, an astronomer, from leading authorities of the age. The constellations are depicted by mythical beasts, figures and scientific instruments. Zodiac, calendar scales and wind directions are included.
The Cary family business of scientific instruments and globe making was established by John Cary in Fleet Street, London, in 1782. In 1821 he was succeeded by his sons, John and George, who continued from an address in the Strand until the business was acquired by Henry Gould in 1852.
■ The world’s largest rotating and revolving globe, nicknamed Eartha, is at the DeLorme mapping corporation headquarters in Yarmouth, Maine, in the US. It has a diameter of more than 41ft and weighs about 2.8 tons.
The constellations are depicted by mythical beasts, figures and scientific instruments.
Spirited bidding: A bottle of Chinese spirit, Baijiu vintage 1952 Kweichow Moutai in a special dragon presentation cask, realised £5,200 at Elstob & Elstob of Ripon. A Ming-style Chinese blue and white stem cup adorned with an underglaze lotus meander and a line of script fetched £11,590; a two-part sterling silver candlestick by Damian Garridoa, circa 2000, went for £2,975; and a circular 19th century Chinese silk embroidery pulled off a major surprise, fetching £3,720 against an estimate of just
£50-£70.
Pedal power: At a Sheffield Auction Gallery toy sale, a rusty early 20th century French Renault pedal car fetched £1,620, twice its upper estimate, while at Tennants, a late 19th century penny farthing bicycle went for £1,680.
Stone age: Three works by stone carver and former quarryman Darren Yeadon,
51, who was brought up in Whitby, sold at
Tennants. Two entitled Fish made £575 and £1,440 respectively, while Nude went for £720.
Threepenny one: A threepenny token for Beverley Friendly Society, dated 1813, in the name of the Rev. Thomas Leck, went for £725 at Dix Noonan Webb in London.
Racing cert: Doncaster coachman-turned-painter John Frederick Herring Senior’s oil ‘Preparing for the Doncaster Gold Cup, 1825, with Mr Whittaker’s Lottery’, Mr Craven’s Longwaist, Mr Lampton’s Cedric, and Mr Farquharson’s Figaro realised £275,000 at a Christie’s sale of sporting art in London.
Hot stuff: A rare William IV silver mustard pot made in York in 1831 by James Barber, George Cattle II and William North, with a blue glass liner, was bought by a Yorkshire collector for a surprise £1,740 at Chiswick Auctions in London against a presale estimate of £200-£300.