Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/262

This page needs to be proofread.
*
*

250 N A V N A Y until the election of Garcia Ramirez on the death of Alphonso I. (VII. of Castile). In 1234 Theobald, third count of Champagne, was crowned at Pamplona as Theobald I., having been adopted as heir by Sancho VII., and through Joanna, the granddaughter of Theobald, who married Philip the Fair of France in 1284, the crowns of France and Navarre became united in the person of Louis X. They were again separated on the death of Charles IV. of France without male issue ; Joanna II., the daughter of Louis X. and wife of Philip, count of Evreux, was crowned queen of Navarre at Pamplona in 1329. Her great-granddaughter Blanche was married first to Martin of Sicily and afterwards to John, son of Ferdinand of Aragon ; the second after her death made himself king of Navarre in spite of the claims of his son Charles, taking the title of John II. He was followed in 1479 by his daughter Eleanor, the wife of Gaston de Foix, and after her death in the same year Francis Phoebus, her grandson, succeeded, being crowned in 1482. At his death (1483) his sister Catherine, wife of Jean d Albret, naturally succeeded, but, the latter having fallen under the papal ban, Ferdinand the Catholic in 1512 seized the whole of what is now Spanish Navarra, only the small portion of the king dom on the French side of the Pyrenees being retained by Henry II., son of D Albret (1516). Her grandson, Henry III. of Navarre, became king of France (Henry IV.) in 1589, and united non-Spanish Navarre to the French crown in 1607. NAVARRETE, JUAN FERNANDEZ (1526-1579), sur- named El Mudo (The Mute), an eminent Spanish painter of the Madrid school, was born at Logrono in 1526. The illness which deprived him of his hearing occurred in early infancy, but at a very early age he began, it is said, to express his wants by sketching objects with a piece of charcoal. He received his first instructions in art from Fray Vicente de Santo Domingo, a Hieronymite monk at Estella, and afterwards he visited Naples, Home, Florence, and Milan. According to the ordinary account he was for a considerable time the pupil of Titian at Venice. In 1568 Philip II. summoned him to Madrid with the title of king s painter and a salary, and employed him to execute pictures for the Escorial. The most celebrated of the works he there produced are a Nativity (in which, as in the well-known work on the same subject by Correggio, the light emanates from the infant Saviour), a Baptism of Christ (now in the Madrid Picture Gallery), and Abraham Receiving the Three Angels (one of his last performances, dated 1576). He executed many other altarpieces, all characterized by boldness and freedom in design, and by the rich warm colouring which has acquired for him the surname of " the Spanish Titian." He died at Toledo in February 1579. NAVARRETE, MARTIN FERNANDEZ DE (1765-1844), Spanish historian, was born at Abalos, Logrono, in 1765, received his early education at the seminary in Vergara, Guipuzcoa, and entered the navy as a midshipman in 1780. His ship was engaged in the unsuccessful operations against Gibraltar in 1782, and afterwards in the suppression of Algerine pirates. Ill-health compelled him for a time to withdraw from active service, but he was able to devote the leisure thus forced upon him to historical research, and in 1789 he was appointed by the crown to examine the national archives with a view to the publication of a series of documents relating to the maritime history of Spain. Rejoining the navy in 1793, he was present at the siege of Toulon, and afterwards received command of a frigate. From 1797 to 1808 he held in succession various important posts in the office of the minister of marine. In 1808 the French invasion led to his withdrawal to Andalusia, and the rest of his life was entirely devoted to literature. In 1819 appeared, as an appendix to the Academy s edition of Don Quijote, his Vida de Cervantes, the best biography of the great poet and humorist that has as yet been written, and in 1825 the first two volumes of the Colecdon de los Vicijes y Descubrimientos que hicieron por Mar los Espaiioles desde fines del Siglo XV., characterized by Humboldt as " one of the most important historical monu ments of modern times," were published. The third followed in 1829, and the fourth and fifth in 1837. After the publication of his Life of Cervantes, Navarrete s literary merits received ample recognition : various public posts were conferred on him, including that of director of the hydro- graphical institute, and in 1837 he was made a senator and director of the academy of history. At the time of his death, which occurred on October 8, 1844, he was assisting in the preparation of the Colecdon de Documentos Ineditos para la Historia de Espana. The last two volumes of the Colecdon de Viajes were published posthumously, as also were a Disertadon sobre la Historia de la Nautica (1846) and the Biblioteca Maritima Espanola (1851). NAVIGATION "VTAVIGATION is the art of conducting a ship across _L the ocean. It is here treated to the exclusion of seamanship, which forms a distinct subject. The present article will give, first, a view of the history of the art from the time of the epoch-making voyages of Columbus and the Portuguese, with special reference to advances made in England, and then a sketch of practical naviga tion as the art now stands. Up to the time of the Portuguese exploring expedi tions, sent out by Prince Henry, which led to the dis covery of the Azores in 1419, and the rediscovery of the Cape Verd Islands in 1447 and of Sierra Leone in 1460, navigation had been conducted in the most rude, uncer tain, and dangerous manner it is possible to conceive. Thousands of years had passed without the least improve ment being introduced, except the magnetic needle about the beginning of the 14th century (see COMPASS and MAGNETISM). Prince Henry did all in his power to bring together and systematize the knowledge then obtainable upon nautical affairs; he also established an observatory at Sagres (near Cape St Vincent) in order to obtain more accurate tables of the declination of the sun. John II., who ascended the throne in 1481, followed up the good work of his grand-uncle. He employed Roderick and Joseph, his physicians, with Martin de Bohemia, from Fayal, to act as a committee on navigation. They calculated tables of the sun s declina tion, and invented the astrolabe, or at least recommended it as more convenient than the cross-staff. The king established forts and settlements on the coast of Africa ; that at St George de la Mina was on the Gold Coast, showing by the position a great geographical advance. The backward state of navigation at this time is best understood from a sketch of the few rude appliances which the mariner had. He had a compass, a cross-staff or astrolabe, a moderately good table of the sun s declina tion, a correction for the altitude of the pole star, and occasionally a very incorrect chart. The first map or sea chart seen in England was brought by Bartholomew Columbus in 1489, and the first map of England was made in 1520. Decimal arithmetic was invented by Simon Stevin about the end of the 16th century. Watches were unknown till 1530, and immediately Gemma Frizon or Frisius seized the idea for the purpose of ascertaining the difference of longitude between two places. They were too rough to be of use, and their advocate proposed to correct them by water clocks or sand-clocks. Almanacs were first published in Poland in 1470, and in London three years later. These contained tables of the sun s declina tion and that of many of the stars, and tables for finding