Paris, Estienne Michallet, 1689.
8vo [175 x 115 mm] of (6) ll. including a frontispiece, 117 pp., 25 out of pagination folding plates. Red morocco, triple gilt fillet on the covers, flat spine decorated with grotesques, green morocco lettering piece, inner border, gilt edges. Ancient binding.
First edition of the best book of “Louis XIV famous seaman”, illustrated with a frontispiece title drawn and engraved by F. Ertinger representing a galleon in front of a fortified city and with 25 folding plates depicting navigation techniques. Polak, 8108.
Baptized in Armandaritz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) in 1652, dead in Pougues les Eaux in 1719, Renau d’Elissagaray was noticed by Duquesne with whom he worked in Brest’s shipbuilding industry.
“He proposed a new system of shipbuilding that Vauban made adopt and was in charge of putting into practice. A conflict having started in 1680 between France and the dey of Alger, Renau suggested to bomb the city with galiots he invented. Despite the council’s advice, Louis XIV accepted that he constructed five bomb ketches, which Renau brought in Alger and whose success surpassed all expectations.”
One of the best nautical treatises during the reign of Louis XIV preserved in its ancient morocco decorated with grotesques.
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