Cartography · a Light

An admiral wrote sailing directions for every Mediterranean harbour

Piri Reis is remembered for a fragment of a world map, but his working book was the Kitab-i Bahriye, the Book of the Sea. He compiled it in 1521 and expanded it in 1526 for Sultan Suleiman: around two hundred charts of the Mediterranean coasts, harbour by harbour, each with facing text on the depths, the anchorages, the currents and the winds, where to take on water and where the rocks lie. It is a pilot's manual rather than a display piece, and much of it records what he had seen himself in a lifetime at sea. He was executed at Cairo around 1553, in his eighties, after a campaign in the Gulf went wrong. Copies of the book kept being made regardless.

Piri Reis · Kitab-i Bahriye, 1521 and 1526