Sextants at Greenwich

Dr W.F.J. Moerzer Bruyns Sackler Research Fellow in the History of Astronomy and Navigational Sciences National Maritime Museum Greenwich Dr Willem F.J. Moerzer Bruyns (1943) was trained as navigation officer at the Amsterdam Nautical College and briefly sailed as a junior officer for the Amsterdam based 'Netherland' Line. He joined the Netherlands Maritime Museum in Amsterdam in 1969 and retired as Senior Curator of Navigation in 2005. In 1995 he was Huntington Fellow at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, and from 2005-2007 Sackler Research Fellow in the History of Astronomy and Navigational Sciences at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich in London. Since 1972 Moerzer Bruyns has published several books and over ninety-five articles in scholarly journals, on the history of navigation and navigational instruments and on nineteenth-century Dutch Arctic exploration. He also wrote over fifty book reviews on these subjects in scholarly journals. In 2003 he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.

An Introduction to the History of Celestial Navigation ; The History and Development of Instruments for Measuring Altitude at Sea, before the Octant ; The Invention of the Octant, its Development and Diffusion ; The Sextant and Further Improvements in the Eighteenth Century ; Innovations and Production in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ; Collecting and Interpreting Navigational Instruments at the National Maritime Museum ; The Catalogue ; Appendices