It all began with a colleague’s recommendation to try a particular online image search engine, one that I had not heard of.¹ At the time I was looking for examples of handheld armillary spheres and indeed the website quickly delivered one I had not seen before. However, the image I was led to was small and the object not promising.² Whereas I was seeking early examples, I imagined (from the handle and other visible features) that I was looking at something made in the 19th century. Still, the repository was surprising: the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, a US National Park Service site on the St John’s River within the (extensive) city boundaries of Jacksonville, Florida.

If they had an armillary sphere what else was in their collection? From almost 725,000 items, 72 are presented in the Preserve’s online image gallery. This selection includes archaeologically recovered pottery fragments, European 16th-century armour, a boxwood nocturnal identified as a mariner’s astrolabe and something labelled as “A navigation tool” (Fig. 1). Again, the image was too small to make out any detail but this appeared to be an early astronomical compendium, and one whose now-detached equinoctial dial followed a pattern found in English instruments from the decades around 1600. The fuller caption was tantalising: “Compendium or pocket-dial or sun-dial, circa 1577. Used for early navigation. Silver, three part dial, middle has engraving of single-masted sailing ship and names of European ports are listed around edges. (This was purchased from an antique dealer and is NOT original to the site.)”.

Might an Elizabethan compendium have somehow found its way to Florida’s Atlantic coastal wetlands? How had a date of c. 1577 been assigned to it and, if that was correct, was this therefore a “new” instrument by Humfrey Cole – since who else could be a plausible candidate as maker of an English compendium from the 1570s?

Cole has been extensively studied, and holds an important symbolic position as the first native-born instrument maker to practice the trade commercially. He was the subject of a 1998 British Museum exhibition.³ Shortly afterwards he featured prominently in Gerard Turner’s Elizabethan Instrument Makers (2000), where 26 of his instruments were catalogued. Two further Cole instruments have recently been published,⁴ bringing the total to 28, of which 25 are in the UK, with single examples in Florence, Liège and Berlin. Jacksonville would be on no one’s bingo card for a fresh discovery.

Some excited email correspondence with the Timucuan staff quickly followed, which resulted in a series of very helpful iPhone images (Fig. 2; volvelle image). Judging by the engraving hand and visible features, Humfrey Cole did indeed seem to be in Florida. An SIS research grant enabled a trip there in January 2026 and an opportunity to study the instrument up close (Fig. 3). The result was confirmation of this as an example of Cole’s work: a silver compendium slightly larger than his other surviving examples, with similar layout but novel iconographic features and some additional tabular information for medical astrology.

A full account of the compendium, distinguishing it from the later tidal disc which accompanies it, and also investigating its provenance and the rationale for its acquisition by the U.S. National Park Service, will appear in the SIS Bulletin.

Here I want to end on the further benefits of this grant-aided research visit. The armillary sphere which originally prompted the inquiry was much more interesting up close than suggested by its online image, which foregrounded what turned out to be a replacement handle. Plausibly dated to c.1500 it now forms part of my current study of a group of four surviving European handheld examples from before the 16th century.

Nor was this all. Apart from the English nocturnal, the Timucuan collection’s instruments include a lodestone, dividers, an 18th-century refracting telescope, and a 19th-century surveying transit. There is also another early instrument: a brass astrolabe signed “Faciebat Johannes Krabbe, Mundensis, 1582”. This was recorded in Alan Stimson’s account of mariner’s astrolabes.⁵ As he noted, it is actually a planispheric astrolabe of standard form whose only maritime association is Krabbe’s implausible assertion in print that it was useful for mariners. A local benefit of the research visit was to flag up the need for conservation of this astrolabe. From the perspective of the SIS, the National Park Service’s commendable decision to make some of the Timucuan collection accessible online has enabled more of their material to be brought to the attention of the instrument community.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the curatorial staff of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve for their invaluable assistance, particularly Alice Keith, Abbie Rains and Steve Kidd.

References

1 picryl.com, which bills itself as “The World’s Largest Public Domain Media Search Engine”.

2 Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve: Armillary Sphere.

3 Silke Ackermann (ed.), Humphrey Cole: Mint, Measurement and Maps in Elizabethan England, Occasional Paper, 126 (London: British Museum, 1998).

4 Silke Ackermann and Louise Devoy, “Humfrey Cole Revisited: Newly Found and Rediscovered Instruments Made by England’s First Native Scientific Instrument Maker”, Nuncius, 36 (2021), 67-94.

5 Alan Stimson, The Mariner’s Astrolabe: a Survey of Known, Surviving Sea Astrolabes (Utrecht, 1988), 62-3.