Robert Hues

Robert Hues (1553 to 1632) was an English mathematician and geographer who wrote a widely reprinted treatise on the use of globes in navigation. He studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, graduating in 1578, then took up geography and mathematics and learned navigation at a school set up by Walter Raleigh. On a voyage to Newfoundland his observations made him doubt the published values for the variation of the compass. Between 1586 and 1588 he sailed with Thomas Cavendish around the globe, taking astronomical observations and the latitudes of the places they visited, and he went again with Cavendish from 1591, observing in the South Atlantic and measuring compass variation at various latitudes and at the Equator, until Cavendish died in 1592. In 1594 he published Tractatus de globis et eorum usu, a treatise on the terrestrial and celestial globes of Emery Molyneux that went into at least twelve further printings. Later he served the Greys and the Earl of Northumberland, tutored the earl's sons, and ended his life in Oxford.