NavList:

Greg Wrote.  So I guess Capt Cook was a pretty tall sailor for 1769 ( 6'2" I think? Wonder if he kept banging his head on the 4'6" high oak beams?) .So say ht of eye about 2m gives dip -2.5'. assuming he is standing roughly sea level on land? The Endeavour pictures of Venus Point observatory look pretty low, about sea level?Sun SD and ref correction +15', so taking Hc 50°5.3' and applying corrections in reverse, gives Hc -12.5' =49° 5.3' for Cook' Hs, assuming no IE?

Greg.  I do believe that’s why Naval officer’s were allowed to toast the Sovereign’s health sitting down. http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_sheet_loyal_toast.htm
 

Greg, Francis.  I’m not sure Hc and Hs would have been needed on the day.  They don’t appear to have had need of quintants, sextants or octants.  They were using three high powered telescopes to record the times Venus crossed the Sun’s edge in order to, amongst other things, eventually calculate the distance of the Earth from the Sun.  It turns out the results were compromised slightly by something known as “Black drop effect” although, at the time, the Royal Society discourteously and wrongly put this down to observer error. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1769_Transit_of_Venus_observed_from_Tahiti  I wish we’d had Google in the late 50s early 60s when I was doing homework for school. Dave