A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
The chart of Portugal from Dell'Arcano del Mare.
Robert Dudley, 1590s. Engraving after a portrait by Nicholas Hilliard.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
A part of Dudley's Dell'Arcano del Mare.
The chart of Portugal from Dell'Arcano del Mare.
Robert Dudley was born on August 7, 1574, in Surrey, England. He was the son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Lady Douglas Sheffield. The legitimacy of Dudley’s birth was questioned in his lifetime, yet he was given every advantage commensurate with his father’s position in Elizabethan England.
Dudley was a student at Christ Church, Oxford.
At the age of twenty-one, Dudley sailed in command of two ships to the West Indies. In 1596 he was in the battle of Cádiz with the earl of Essex and was knighted for his bravery.
In 1605 Dudley left his wife and children in England and traveled to Italy, accompanied by one of the beauties of the day, Elizabeth Southwell. He established himself in Florence and entered the service of the grand duke of Tuscany. He was put in charge of several major engineering projects, including the building of the port of Leghorn, and the beginnings of land reclamation near Pisa. He never returned to England; his assumed titles, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, invalid in England, were confirmed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II in recognition of his services.
Dudley’s first work, an account of his voyage to the West Indies, was printed by Hakluyt in the second edition of his Voyages under the title “A Voyage to the Isle of Trinidad and the Coast of Paria.” He became interested in navigation while at Oxford, and the interest had been further stimulated by his close association with the great sea captain Thomas Cavendish, brother of his first wife.
Dudley was later busy with many projects in Tuscany, including the Livorno's breakwater and harbor fortifications, draining local swamps, and building a palace in the heart of Florence. He also designed new galleys, and he wrote his memoirs of navigation and seamanship between 1610 and 1620. Later, Dudley incorporated his notes into six volumes of Dell'Arcano del Mare (The Secret of the Sea), self-published in 1646-1647. He also wrote a Maritime Directory as a manual for the Tuscan Navy but it was never published.
Robert Dudley died on September 6, 1649, outside Florence in Villa Rinieri (now Villa Corsini a Castello). He was buried at San Pancrazio in Florence.
Robert Dudley went down in history as a distinguished explorer and cartographer who worked on the pressing problems of navigation, including the determination of longitude; made a collection of the best and most advanced navigational instruments, now in the Florence Museum of Science; and at the age of seventy-three published his great work, Dell’arcano del mare.
It is one of the greatest sea atlases of all time, magnificently engraved, and may justly be regarded as an encyclopedia of knowledge regarding the sea. It contains a treatise on naval strategy; a manual of shipbuilding; directions on building coastal fortifications; instructions to navigators, including the essential elements of nautical almanacs; and a set of maps of the entire world. It is these maps that give Dudley’s work special significance; Dell’arcano del mare is the first sea atlas with all maps drawn on Mercator’s projections, as modified by Edward Wright.
The maps, virtually without ornamentation and restricted to the information essential to the seaman, are, in spite of errors and imperfections, among the milestones of naval cartography.
After establishing himself in Florence, Dudley became a Catholic.
In England Dudley was married to Alice, the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh. She bore him seven daughters.
Later he left his family, sailed to Italy, and married Elizabeth Southwell. Together they had thirteen children, several of whom married into the Italian nobility. In 1631, his wife Elizabeth died the day after giving birth to her last child.
Despite the marriages of Dudley descendants, "No Dudleys in the line male now remained to carry on the name. After the third generation they became extinct in Italy."
Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicesterwas an English statesman and the favourite of Elizabeth I from her accession until his death. He was a suitor for the Queen's hand for many years.
