NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Ed Popko
Date: 2023 Mar 15, 08:54 -0700
While cleaning out some PC folders, I found an image of a navigation workbook from an 1897 voyage of the Charles W. Morgan whaler. It has been a while since I took Frank’s 19th C Celestial Navigation course, so I thought I would try to decode it.
Most of the calculations were straight forward traditional practice. But two things struck me as odd. First, the Morgan was still hunting whales as late as 1897. In this log book example, they were just south of the Yellow Sea. Whaling was no longer a profitable business by the late 1800s. Why were they still out there?
Second, the final longitude position from the calculations is not the one from February 20th, but the AVERAGE of the longitude positions from the 19th and 20th.. Was averaging two different day’s longitude a common practice? If you were recording the ship's position, say at 12:00 each day, I would think you would average that day's a.m and p.m. sites instead.
Popko
