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I am looking for verification of, for me, one of the most extraordinary claims made by Slocum in Sailing Alone. He said that off Valparaiso dead reckoning and star sighting differed by an intolerable amount and after taking many more sightings he concluded that there was an error in his trig table. Sure enough, he spotted a discontinuity, corrected it, by, I must conclude, interpolation, and after so doing, Stars and taffrail log and 'tin clock' agreed. To me, a physicist and mathematician, this is a wonderful tale. It is well known the Bowditch set to correcting tables and found many errors. But to find an error BACKWARDS is sheer genius. My dream is to see that page of tables and that error. Wouldn't that be marvelous!? Does anyone know more about this claim and any proof that it actually happened?

Norm Goldblatt
Mountain View, Ca.
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