The Nautical Magazine first appeared in 1832, and was published monthly well into the twenty-first century. It covers a wide range of subjects, including navigation, meteorology, technology and safety. An important resource for maritime historians, it also includes reports on military and scientific expeditions and on current affairs. The 1848 volume devotes considerable space to the Arctic, and particularly mentions Sir James Ross, who, having recently published an account of his voyage to the Antarctic (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection), came out of retirement to lead the first search party for Sir John Franklin. It also contains lists of hurricanes in the West Indies since European settlement, information on lighthouses and a serialised feature on Madeira. Other coverage includes reports of piracy and murder, gruesome sentences handed down by courts martial, the meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bombay and vocabulary from a Micronesian language.
