Gordon's Astrolabe at the Royal Scottish Museum

Abstract

THE executors of the late Mrs. Florence Cumming, 18, Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, have handed over to the Royal Scottish Museum an astrolabe which at one time belonged to Robert Gordon of Straloch, the famous Scottish geographer. Robert Gordon of Straloch was born in Aberdeenshire in 1580 and died in 1661. He studied at Aberdeen and Paris, to which latter city he went at the age of eighteen. When he first became interested in cartography is not known, but his later work brought him fame as one of the great map-makers of Scotland. At the request of Charles I, he prepared an atlas of Scotland, which was published at Amsterdam in 1648 ; and it is recorded that two years later he published in the same city a second atlas of Scotland, called “Theatrum Scotiae”, which he dedicated to Oliver Cromwell- possibly the same atlas with revised title to suit the changed circumstances. Gordon is particularly noted for his revision of Timothy Pont's maps of Scotland and Blaeu's Great Atlas of the World, published in Amsterdam in 1654, a wonderful atlas in eleven large folio volumes, of which volume six contains the maps of Scotland.