However, I supported my own and the spirits of my little company by telling them of the early navigators; how Columbus, Candish, Drake, Schouten and other heroic marine worthies of distant times had navigated the globe, discovered new worlds, penetrated into the most secret solitudes of the deep without any notion of longitude and with no better instruments to take the sun's height than the forestaff and astrolabe.
"The Frozen Pirate"
W. Clark Russell
The Portuguese first made that possible by using astronomical observations and inventing the quadrant and the astrolabe.
"The South American Republics Part I of II"
Thomas C. Dawson
There were also in this library an astrolabe, and a sphere with the signs of the Zodiac.
"The Care of Books"
John Willis Clark