NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigation and whaling
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2009 Feb 18, 06:27 +0000
From: Geoffrey Kolbe
Date: 2009 Feb 18, 06:27 +0000
George [7344] wrote >and- "But is Geoffrey also claiming that he used dead reckoning, rather than >noon Sun altitudes, for his latitudes? That I would find hard to accept." No George, I did not claim that Slocum never used celestial navigation. I said that his book was a "celebration of the art of dead reckoning", which is quite different. I don't have the book "Sailing alone around the world" to hand, but there is a passage towards the back where he comments on the accuracy of all his landfalls during the trip, despite the fact that his navigation was largely dead reckoning - or words to that effect. Perhaps you can dig out the passage. The feeling I was left with, after reading the book, was that Slocum was pretty pleased in proving to himself that he was a good navigator - and to him, the epitome of good navigation was to be able to navigate by dead reckoning alone. I suspect this may have been a common feeling amongst navigators at the end of the 19th century - a harking back to the skills required in a previous age, just we do now, only we hark back to the time of Slocum! As to their concept of acceptable risk being different to ours, I would agree. I think sailors were a pretty fatalistic lot, ready to accept whatever came their way as there was not a lot they could do about it. I think the idea of "risk" was introduced by the insurance man and his insistence that the vessel be "well found" or he would refuse to insure. As a driving force for the introduction of the "new navigation", the insurance man is not much discussed. But I suspect that it was quite significant. Your comment about the voyages of whalers only being in part transits from A to B is a good one. Where a ship is busy hunting down whales in mid-ocean and the captain has more than enough to think about to bother himself with his exact position, I imagine it would be quite easy to loose track of longitude. Also, it strikes me that they were away at sea for extraordinarily long periods of time without landfall - longer, I suspect, than any other trading vessels - where they could not rely on the chronometer alone to keep good time. For these reasons, it may be true that whalers were, by-and-large, more reliant on the skills of finding longitude by lunars than other ocean going trading vessels of similar size. Their logs may reflect that fact. Geoffrey Kolbe --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---