SAIL AND THE STREAM 293 



great circle courses. . . . Disregarding its exactness or inexact- 

 ness, we are able to say of him that he gave development in 

 his book to the principle now universally followed in laying 

 down a great circle course upon a chart of the Mercator pro- 

 jection/' 



After Hubbard a certain Captain Cyprian Southhack made 

 numerous charts of New England waters, and in 1720 pub- 

 lished The New England Coasting Pilot. His charts for some 

 time to come were included in The English Pilots Fourth 

 Booky and did much to start a more thorough coastal survey 

 of American waters. 



Just about the time of the Revolution Bernard Romans, a 

 Dutch engineer who became an officer in the Continental 

 Army, made some interesting charts of Gulf and Florida 

 waters, published in New York in 1775, with several copper 

 plates engraved by Paul Revere. Romans also published A 

 Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. But inter- 

 esting though they are these studies did not add much to our 

 knowledge of the Stream. What was perhaps the first Amer- 

 ican notation of the great current was made in 1735 by 

 Captain Hoxton of Virginia, who noted a strong northeast 

 current and gave directions how it might be avoided. 



At the time Franklin was getting Folger to measure the 

 Stream with thermal observations, William Gerard de Brahm, 

 a pioneer in the settlement of the south and a man of wide 

 education, published in 1772 The Atlantic Pilots which gave 

 descriptions and charts of the Gulf or Florida Stream at its 

 inception off our southern coasts. This chart, together with 

 the work of Franklin and his grandnephew Jonathan Wil- 

 liams, might well be considered the true start of oceanographic 

 science on this side of the Atlantic. Captain Truxton worked 

 with Williams, and in 1799 their combined data were pub- 

 lished in a book called Thermometrical NavigatioUy '\ . . tend- 

 ing to prove, that by ascertaining the relative heat of sea water 



