{
  "id": "derrotero-de-las-islas-antillas-1837",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Derrotero de las islas Antillas (Direccion de Hidrografia, third edition, Madrid 1837)",
  "summary": "The Spanish state hydrographic office's sailing directions for the Antilles, the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Gulf of Mexico, printed at Madrid in 1837 as companion to its own charts. Its opening notice states what an official publication need not state: that the elements used do not all merit equal confidence, that reports of the same place disagree, and that the book is far from perfect - and it puts every Spanish pilot under standing order to send the errors back.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "navigation",
    "exploration",
    "americas",
    "caribbean",
    "science",
    "books",
    "spanish-empire",
    "navy"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "jorge-juan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "malaspina-expedition"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-navigation-manuals-in-england"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "casa-de-contratacion"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alcedo-diccionario-geografico-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "navarrete-coleccion-de-los-viages-tomo-v-1837"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "almanaque-nautico-del-observatorio-de-san-fernando"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relacion-del-ultimo-viage-al-estrecho-1788"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "corriente-del-golfo-y-el-canal-de-bahama"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mapa-geografico-de-america-meridional-1775"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tofino-atlas-maritimo-de-espana"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is the Derrotero de las islas Antillas?",
    "Who surveyed the coasts of the Caribbean and Tierra Firme for Spain?",
    "What did the Spanish Direccion de Hidrografia publish for navigators in the Americas?",
    "Did Spain admit the limits of its own charts of the Americas?",
    "Which meridian did Spanish charts of American waters use?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page of the third edition reads \"Derrotero de las islas Antillas, de las costas de Tierra-Firme, y de las del seno mejicano\", and states the relation between book and chart: it was \"formado en la Direccion de Hidrografia para inteligencia y uso de las cartas que ha publicado\". The imprint is Madrid, en la Imprenta Nacional, 1837, and the edition is announced as corrected and enlarged with recent notices, an appendix on the currents of the northern Atlantic, and a descriptive memoir of the rocks, shoals and reported dangers of that ocean.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The book is a compilation and says so. The office states that in forming it it had before it the two previous editions, made in 1810 and 1820; the observations and notices communicated by various Spanish navigators; what could be gathered from the academies of pilots and other archives of the navy; and the most essential of the sailing directions, printed and manuscript, that had been in use in the Spanish marine. No individual author is named on the title page: the corporate author is the office.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Behind the text stand two named surveys of American waters. The notice credits the exact descriptions and detailed reconnaissances made in the Antilles and on the coasts of Tierra Firme by the brigadiers of the navy Cosme Churruca and Joaquin Francisco Fidalgo - the charting expeditions of the last years of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, whose results the printed derrotero exists to make usable.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "To those it adds work done after the American mainland was lost to Spain. The office says it has now had before it the surveys made recently on the northern part of the island of Cuba, by order of General Angel Laborde, by the lieutenants of ship Manuel Moreno and Victoriano Diaz Herrera, running from the port of Nuevitas del Principe to cabo de San Antonio.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The same page records the traffic running the other way, and it is the detail a triumphalist reading would drop. Among the foreign works it has kept in view the office names the descriptive memoir of the northern Atlantic by the hydrographer John Purdy, printed in London in 1829; the sailing directions for northern America published at New York in 1833 by Edmund M. Blunt; and the notices frequently carried by the English Nautical Magazine. A Spanish official derrotero of American waters in 1837 is openly built in part on English and North American hydrography.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The office then grades its own evidence. Not all the elements employed merit equal confidence, it writes, and often the notices given for one and the same place by different navigators do not agree with each other; from which it follows that the work, \"lejos de haber llegado a su perfeccion\", can only be considered as standing in need of great improvements, which must come from new and repeated observations made with sagacity and intelligence and upon the precepts here established.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Those improvements are demanded of the reader. Only the navigator can make such observations, the notice says, and each is therefore expected to communicate to the Direccion Hidrografica the errors or inexactitudes he notices and the observations he has made or rectified touching the winds, tides and currents, the true position of the reefs and reported dangers, and the capes and principal points of the coasts - discharging an obligation laid on all Spanish pilots and navigators by a superior order, whose object is stated as \"su propia seguridad y el beneficio publico\". A printed book of the Spanish state is here a standing correction loop, not a closed authority.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Two notes fix the frame of reference of every figure in the volume. All the courses, bearings and distances given are true, or corrected for the variation of the needle. The longitudes are referred to the meridian of the old observatory of Cadiz, which is the meridian of the charts, and which the office places 5 minutes 22.5 seconds west of the observatory of San Fernando, 8 degrees 37 minutes 45 seconds west of Paris, and 6 degrees 17 minutes 22 seconds from Greenwich.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What the volume does not do should be said plainly, because it bounds what can be claimed from it. It gives no account of what the Churruca and Fidalgo surveys cost, how long they took or what they lost; it names no indigenous or creole pilot among the sources of local knowledge it compiles, though the coasts described had been navigated for centuries; and it records no reception abroad. The claims above are what the 1837 sheets themselves state, and the wider case for the influence of Spanish hydrography in American waters is not made here.",
      "sources": [
        "derrotero-antillas-madrid-1837"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of how the Caribbean was charted run through Blunt's American Coast Pilot and the British Admiralty, and treat the Spanish hydrographic office as background. The 1837 sheets are quoted here directly, and they invert the usual picture twice over. The Spanish office publishes for the safety of all navigators, refers its longitudes to Cadiz with the offsets to Paris and Greenwich printed so a foreign reader can convert, and binds its own pilots by superior order to send back every error they find. In the same paragraph it credits Purdy in London and Blunt in New York among its sources, and states that its own work is far from perfect and that its materials disagree with one another. Neither the achievement nor the dependence has to be imported from a critic: both are on the page, and the object also marks what the volume is silent about.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-11",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/derrotero-de-las-islas-antillas-1837",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Derrotero de las islas Antillas (Direccion de Hidrografia, third edition, Madrid 1837)",
    "description": "The Spanish state hydrographic office's sailing directions for the Antilles, the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Gulf of Mexico, printed at Madrid in 1837 as companion to its own charts. Its opening notice states what an official publication need not state: that the elements used do not all merit equal confidence, that reports of the same place disagree, and that the book is far from perfect - and it puts every Spanish pilot under standing order to send the errors back.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/derrotero-de-las-islas-antillas-1837",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-11",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Derrotero de las islas Antillas, de las costas de Tierra-Firme, y de las del seno mejicano, formado en la Direccion de Hidrografia para inteligencia y uso de las cartas que ha publicado. Tercera edicion",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=xDkvAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP7"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Derrotero de las islas Antillas (Direccion de Hidrografia, third edition, Madrid 1837)"
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}