Dudley, Robert

(b. Sheen House, Surrey, England, 7 August 1573; d. Villa di Castello, Florence, Italy, 6 September 1649)

navigation.

Dudley was the son of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Lady Douglas Sheffield. The legitimacy of Dudley’s birth was questioned in his lifetime, yet he was given every advantage commensurate with his father’s position in Elizabethan England. He was a student at Christ Church, Oxford, and at the age of twenty-one sailed in command of two ships to the West Indies. In 1596 he was in the battle of Cádiz with the earl of Essex and was knighted for his bravery. In 1605 Dudley left his wife and children in England and traveled to Italy, accompanied by one of the beauties of the day, Elizabeth Southwell. He established himself in Florence, became a Catholic, married Miss Southwell, and entered the service of the grand duke of Tuscany. He was put in charge of several major engineering projects, including the building of the port of Leghorn, and the beginnings of land reclamation near Pisa. He never returned to England; his assumed titles, earl of Warwick and duke of Northumberland, invalid in England, were confirmed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II in recognition of his services.

Dudley’s first work, an account of his voyage to the West Indies, was printed by Hakluyt in the second edition of his Voyages under the title “A Voyage... to the Isle of Trinidad and the Coast of Paria.” He had become interested in navigation while at Oxford, and the interest had been further stimulated by his close association with the great sea captain Thomas Cavendish, brother of his first wife. He continued to work on the pressing problems of navigation, including the determination of longitude; made a collection of the best and most advanced navigational instruments, now in the Florence Museum of Science; and at the age of seventy-three published his great work, Dell’arcano del mare (three volumes, Florence, 1646-1647). It is one of the great sea atlases of all time, magnificently engraved, and may justly be regarded as an encyclopedia of knowledge regarding the sea. It contains a treatise on naval strategy; a manual of shipbuilding; directions on building coastal fortifications; instructions to navigators, including the essential elements of nautical almanacs; and a set of maps of the entire world. It is these maps that give Dudley’s work special significance; Dell’arcano del mare is the first sea atlas with all maps drawn on Mercator’s projections, as modified by Edward Wright. The maps, virtually without ornamentation and restricted to the information essential to the seaman, are, in spite of errors and imperfections, among the milestones of naval cartography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See G. F. Warner’s biographical sketch and preface to the Hakluyt Society’s edition of Dudley’s Voyage (London, 1899); and Vaughan Thomas, The Italian Biography of Sir Robert Dudley(Oxford, 1861?).

George Kish