Smooth sailing: from historical sea charts to 21st-century navigation.

The exhibition, held at Wadham on 8 and 22 May, included printed works from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Among those displayed were:

• several fascinating and large format volumes of contemporary working sea charts
• a manuscript dating from the 1680s with the diary entries of the English buccaneer Bartholomew Sharpe (Bartholomew Sharp - Wikipedia)
• the first edition of Captain James Cook's A voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world (1777).

A slideshow revealed some of the other pages from the books on display, to show others in addition to the ones that the books were open at. We played played excerpts from a forthcoming library film focussing on three of the sea charts above and comparing 18th-century sea navigation techniques with modern methods. Our present-day focus on sustainability chimed with the exhibition in that these explorers, many of whom were fascinated by the natural world, relied on wind power to travel across it, harnessing wind to navigate the world's oceans.

Alongside these treasures, we showed excerpts from 21st-century computer gaming with stunning graphics that took our visitors back to the 18th-century maritime world. In the adjacent Richard Hill Music Room, we played on a loop a short documentary featuring how the game was developed, and some of the historiacl research that was undertaken.

Our thanks to co-curators, Sam Johnson, who is researching ship building in the early modern period for his DPhil, and Alison Felstead . We are very grateful also to Wadham finalist Rupert Hill, who co-presented wth Sam the film that we featured in the exhibition.