NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Joshua Slocum's navigational methods
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2005 Apr 17, 23:51 EDT
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2005 Apr 17, 23:51 EDT
I wrote earlier: "That's what one would normally use for celestial navigation, lunars or otherwise, in that era. Or is that what you meant? Those trig tables would be found in any of the standard navigational manuals of the era. Perhaps he had Bowditch's "Practical Navigator" or more likely Norie's "Epitome of Navigation" (since it's established that he taught himself navigation originally --decades earlier-- from Norie)." And Dan Hogan you replied: "Or more likely a set of Trig Tables like "six place tables"." I'm not sure I'm understanding the distinction you're making here. You do agree that Slocum probably had a Bowditch or a Norie with him right? Do you think he would have needed tables *beyond* the ones in one of those standard navigation manuals? And also: "Well Slocum was a very experienced seaman and a LOT of the old time sailors I knew did not know how to swim." Right. I agree now that the ability to swim has no bearing on Slocum's prudence of lack thereof. But what would a prudent man do? You suggest that it would have been prudent to do lunars now and then (and prudent navigators with cargoes at risk in the early 19th century took lunars every two weeks or occasionally a little more often so that's about right). But we already know, I think, that Joshua Slocum wasn't particularly "prudent" since he wasn't willing to hand over a few bucks to get his chronometer fixed up. He could have navigated scientifically with the best available tools of late 1890s celestial navigation, but he didn't. -FER http://www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars