NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Roger W. Sinnott
Date: 2017 Dec 12, 06:52 -0500
Thanks – I should have realized you folks had already studied the Essex incident up, down, and sideways!
Roger
On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 5:18 PM, Roger W. Sinnott <NoReply_Sinnott@fer3.com> wrote:
On Dec. 20, 1820, when they spotted land, they thought it was Ducie Island but we now know it was Henderson, 70 miles farther west. So that's one mistake lunars could have avoided.
Wouldn't have helped. Henderson, like Pitcairn, was not to be found in their copy of Bowditch. Only Ducie Island was listed with its Latitude and Longitude. Not that it really mattered, since their ultimate destination was the west coast of South America.
Captain Henderson had only discovered his namesake isle the year before. Pitcairn had been known to the Royal Navy since 1814, but a little misunderstanding at the time between the two nations obviously delayed the spread of that information. Not until the 1821 edition of Bowditch did Pitcairn make the list. Henderson was included in 1826.
Don Seltzer
