NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2025 Apr 7, 06:08 -0700
Well, that photo of a Troughton "double-frame" (or pillar sextant) is a nice coincidence. Yesterday morning, that's how I began day two of my Lunars workshop... because there was a "Troughton" listed among the instruments on the Bounty, and Wiliam Blight and his navigator-protege, Fletcher Christian, shot lunars with it. I showed a photo of a Troughton sextant from the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, VA and talked about its double frame a bit [brief video extract attached]. I don't know if the sextant on the Bounty was double-frame; that could have been an innovation in that nine-year interval between the Bounty's departure for Tahiti and the 1796 date listed for the instrument in the photo, but I have assumed that it was.
Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island, North America
