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Re: Published, Shackleton and Worsley, Journey to South Georgia Island
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2018 Dec 21, 17:05 -0500

I would like to add that not everything is in crystal clear, perfectly written text in the logbook during the journey to S. Georgia Island. Quite a few characters could only be decided when back fitting the known characters and the known procedure, to resolve the unknowns. In one place, the text runs off the page. It certainly wasn't a walk in the park.

It may not have been as difficult to resolve as the trip from the Ice to Clarence and Elephant Islands, but there was quite a bit of difficulty and effort expended to clarify every character.

It was for this reason that every entry Worsley made is repeated with full equations, forms and logarithms. Without that effort, we could never be sure of the result or the characters as we are now.

During the effort, George, Robin, Lars and I went over and over each numerical value until surety was achieved. Its hard to describe the level of effort that Robin undertook. He was like John Henry, tireless in his will to finish! I am also very indebted to Lars, in that he convinced me we could write this paper to conclusion. Thank you again Gents!

I want to also repeat what I said in the paper. I could not have even comprehended how to do this without George Huxtable. I started with a crude transcript from an obscure entry at Canterbury Museum. George realized the patterns present and kicked it off running and was instrumental in clarifying major portions of the transcript.

Henry Halboth provided very useful insight, in many back and forth communications on the problem of time. Cape Belsham was a conundrum. It is described as the "northernmost point of Elephant Island". Yet the point assigned that value, as shown in the paper, is clearly not the northernmost point. There is a difference in longitude between the two and as well, the '20 miles astern' entry by Worsley had to be accomodated. Longitude is time and time is longitude. Henry help me with this issue. I do hope you see this Henry! Thank you for your help!

Brad

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018, 4:32 PM Robin Stuart <NoReply_Stuart@navlist.net wrote:

Ed,
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. The occultation reductions in the log are all rather well labelled which I think would be essential when doing a calculation of this complexity manually. The occultation of 42 Librae on 24 June, 1915 was the first and has a bit more than the rest. It refers to “Close’s Text Book” and without that I think we might have been lost.
While on the topic of this paper I would like to draw Navlisters’ attention to Appendix A. This is a transcript and replication of the navigation on the passage from the ice floe to Elephant Island. Their target had been sighted at the time they launched the boats so the celestial was mainly used to answer the question “Are we there yet?”. These are detached pages in relatively poor shape and we thought it was important that they be preserved in this way. Images are not included as they are not much to see. Unlike the pages in the other paper, not all the text was decipherable even with the help of Canterbury Museum staff on the spot,
Regards,
Robin

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