NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Transcription of Worsley's Log
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Mar 22, 18:19 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Mar 22, 18:19 -0700
I'm just quickly scanning some of these messages, so I apologize if this has been brought up already... The type of navigation you're seeing in Worsley's logbook is 100% standard for this period of time. You may want to look at Dave W.'s run-through of a page from a "Navigational Notebook" from the Charles W. Morgan from 1896 located here: http://www.fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx?i=027590. As you can see the haversine method of working time sights was used there, too, day-after-day for months on end. In fact, it seems to have been quite the norm in this period. Also determining bearings and dlon dlat etc by calculation or table look-up rather than plotting (as we might do it today) was standard. There's a misconception, sometimes repeated on NavList, that navigators were all using celestial lines of position at least by 1900 (some even think that this occurred shortly after Sumner's initial publication over fifty years earlier), and it just isn't true. While some navies encouraged (even required?) their navigators to use the "New Navigation" it was not popular otherwise. Again and again, you will find authors bemoaning the low profile of the New Navigation in some circles. As late as the Second World War, most navigators on merchant ships still got their positions via morning/afternoon time sights for longitude, Noon Sun for latitude, and DR to keep everything up-to-date in between. Celetial LOPs were the exception. Of course, in history, there are always exceptions and exceptions *to* the exceptions, but "normal" navigation did not fully convert to the modern approach until the post-war period. Even in the late 1970s, just after I had learned "modern" celestial navigation via HO229 and plotting LOPs, I remember talking with an old navigator about celestial navigation, and I recall being a little disturbed that I couldn't figure out what the heck he was talking about. Why did he want to shoot the Sun when it was near the prime vertical (irrelevant to celestial LOPs but important for time sights). After some time, I realized that he had learned his navigation aboard merchant vessels in the 1940s and he still navigated in the 1970s by the methods he had learned 35 years earlier: time sights and Noon Sun. -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---