Pilots and calculators of North Holland

Where they lived and worked

Reynier Pietersz. van Twisch and the “golden compass” (Hoorn)

Reynier Pietersz. van Twisch was a pilot who lived in Hoorn. In early 1597 he asked the States General for a patent on two instruments for use at sea: one for finding the declination of the compass and the longitude from sightings of the sun, and one for finding latitude from the sun or the stars when the horizon cannot be seen. On March 8, 1597 he was granted a patent of twelve years.

The “golden compass” (gulden kompas) is described in two nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographical dictionaries. The older one says that around 1598 Van Twisch came upon the idea of giving east and west distances in degrees and minutes, as was already done for south and north, and that he made “something of his own making”, which he called the golden compass. The 1912 dictionary calls it an azimuth compass kept floating horizontally, with a sight that threw sunlight onto a scale, and says that Stevin pictured it in 1599 and that seafarers found it without error. He died in Hoorn in 1613.

In October 1600, while the States were looking for a way to find longitude at sea, they asked Jacob van Straten to bring Van Twisch’s invention to The Hague. The States’ own records call his instruments inventions; the dictionary does not.

What is missing: no drawing by Van Twisch himself has turned up, and the dictionaries name no ships or years of the voyages. The 1912 dictionary says the patent of March 8, 1597 was for this instrument. The pilot in the States’ records and the Van Twisch of the dictionaries we take to be one man; all three tie him to Hoorn.

• Read the page on Van Twisch and the golden compass

Dirck Rembrantsz. van Nierop, 1610–1682 (Nieuwe Niedorp)

Van Nierop was born in Nieuwe Niedorp in 1610 and died there on November 4, 1682. He did not marry. He worked as a shoemaker, and the tax register of 1675 calls him “a shoemaker and astronomer”. A local chronicler calls him “a great mathematician, learned and renowned astronomer”. He defended the teaching of Copernicus.

• Read the page on Van Nierop

From 1654 he calculated astronomical and tide tables for almanacs. His Nederduytsche Astronomie was printed in Harlingen in 1653 and again, enlarged, in Amsterdam in 1658. His Eenige oeffeningen appeared in 1669, and a journal of Abel Tasman’s voyages is listed under his name, without a year. He left his instruments, books and papers to his nephew Pieter Rembrantsz. van Nierop, who in 1693 received a patent for the almanac calculations while living in Hoorn.

Jan Albertsz. van Dam, c. 1672–1746 (Hoorn)

Van Dam was born around 1672 and died in Hoorn on February 7, 1746. He was a surveyor, taught mathematics and navigation, and succeeded his father in the boarding school on the Nieuwsteeg in Hoorn, where navigation was taught. His father, Albert Jansz. van Dam, had been a pupil of Dirck Rembrantsz. van Nierop. From at least 1730 until 1746 Jan Albertsz. examined navigating officers for the Hoorn chamber of the Dutch East India Company (VOC); in 1709 he took over the patent for Van Nierop’s almanac calculations, and in 1715 he edited Van Nierop’s Nieuw Nieroper graad-boek. According to Zuidervaart, he taught mathematics to Tsar Peter the Great in 1697 and 1717.

He compiled De nieuwe Hoornse schatkamer ofte de konst der zeevaart (“The new Hoorn treasure chest, or the art of navigation”), printed in Amsterdam from 1712, and the catalogue of Dutch books lists many almanacs that he compiled between 1712 and 1746.

Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, c. 1534–c. 1606 (Enkhuizen)

Waghenaer was a pilot and chart maker, born and died in Enkhuizen. His Spieghel der zeevaerdt was printed in Leiden by Christoffel Plantijn in 1584, with a second part in 1585. It is often called the first printed sea atlas.

It put charts and sailing directions together with astronomical tables. The table of contents lists tables for the golden number and the epact, tables for the moon and for the declination of the sun, a list of stars with their declinations, a way to find the height of the pole from the stars, and tide tables.

Enlarge

Waghenaer’s chart of the Vlie and the Marsdiep, 1583Full sizeClose

West Friesland is the yellow land in the middle, and the Zuiderzee lies to its right. On a phone, pinch with two fingers to zoom.

Elsewhere in North Holland

Five more names, one line each: four tied to Alkmaar and one to Medemblik.

• Adriaen Anthonisz. (born probably in Alkmaar around 1543, buried there on November 20, 1620) was a surveyor and master of fortifications, and burgomaster of Alkmaar in 1582, 1584, 1588, 1589 and 1601. In 1584 he wrote a treatise against squaring the circle which, according to his son, gives 355/113 for π, known as “Metius’s ratio”.
• Adriaan Metius (1571–1635), his son, was born in Alkmaar and became professor of mathematics and astronomy at Franeker; his textbooks include Arithmeticae et geometriae practica (1611).
• Jacob Metius (died c. 1628), Adriaan’s brother, applied in October 1608 for a patent on a spyglass, a few weeks after Hans Lipperhey.
• Cornelis Drebbel (c. 1572–1633), born in Alkmaar, worked in London as an inventor and instrument maker. He is here as an inventor, not as an astronomer.
• Klaas Hendriksz. Gietermaker was born in Medemblik in 1621. He sailed at sea for a time, then taught writing, arithmetic, bookkeeping and land surveying in Amsterdam; his Vergulde Licht der Zeevaart, or the art of the navigators, appeared there in 1660.

And Cellarius?

Andreas Cellarius became rector of the Latin School in Hoorn in 1637. By then Van Twisch had been dead for 24 years, and Van Dam was not yet born. The Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660) pictures the universe; it is not a pilot’s guide. We found no source showing that Cellarius knew any of the people on this page, and we do not claim it. What the page does show is how much practical work with stars, ships and instruments went on around him.

• Who was Cellarius?

What we know and what we don't

• Known: Van Twisch, a pilot living in Hoorn, was granted a twelve-year patent on July 12, 1595 by the States of Holland and another on March 8, 1597 by the States General (a biographical dictionary of 1912; the second also in a published transcription of the States’ records).
• Known: Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt (1584) and Van Dam’s Hoornse schatkamer (editions from 1712) survive and are cataloged.
• Known: the corpus table of the Huygens Institute lists 80 letters of Van Nierop.
• Unknown: what the golden compass looked like in detail, and which ships and years its voyages were.
• Unknown: where Van Nierop is buried (an 1874 dictionary entry says “probably” in his birthplace, without a source), and whether anyone in Enkhuizen or Medemblik made almanacs in this period. We have not found one.
• Unclear: some lists place Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser, who named southern constellations, in Enkhuizen; the sources we found say Emden. Also unclear: an 1874 dictionary entry calls Van Nierop a skipper who died in 1662; the 1868 entry and an archive-based genealogy say a shoemaker who died in 1682, and we follow those.