NavList:

George, you wrote:
"Thanks to Frank for doing some extensive research, which provides more-than-sufficient evidence to back up his statement about Chauvenet's lack of navigational experience, and I have learned from that research. "

You're welcome. Glad you liked it. It was plenty interesting to me whether it did any good or not, and incidentally that was entirely derived from 19th century documents, mostly from the period 1839-1843. I had never read much about the steam frigates of this period before. The dates are interesting and relevant to me since they overlap the first year of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan's first voyage. For example, the day that Chauvenet is assigned the post aboard "Mississippi" as professor of mathematics, December 8, 1841, the Morgan is just off Cape Horn heading around into the Pacific in very nearly the same longitude as Chauvenet. They had been three months at sea by that date. Ten weeks later, when Chauvenet would have had his first taste of the sea, if he was still with the ship, on that one day run from Delaware to Norfolk, the Morgan was on the whaling grounds a few hundred miles south of the equator just east of the Galapagos Islands.

Similarly, on the last 19th century voyage of the Morgan, there is a day in 1896 (or maybe 97 --I should check) when the whaleship and Joshua Slocum's Spray are in the same longitude, around 140 East, though separated by thousands of miles in latitude.

-FER

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