NavList:

Yesterday I was helping my neighbor set up a replacement "cable tv" box. When it booted up, it spoke to me in a soothing voice, as devices often do these days... It asked aloud for some preference settings including my language preference. First up, English, of course. Next option was something that it pronounced as "espanawl" or maybe "espinall" (!!). This was plainly written correctly on-screen as Español. It was such a glaring error and so rare in recent years that I was compelled to call people into the room to hear it! The third language choice was "fransays" or "fransace" (rhymed with "face") for Français. Somehow that didn't sound as awful as "espanawl". :)

Anway, this ludicrous experience reminded me that I have had a NavList post sitting on the back shelf since early June. For some years I have owned a copy of the Spanish nautical almanac or "Almanaque Nautico" from the year 1854. I thought a typical month's pages might generate some discussion. Even if you don't speak or read Spanish, there's plenty that can be puzzled out and many interesting features that can be discovered just by browsing the numbers. I haven't done this yet myself, so dig in. There are many similarities with the British Nautical Almanac, naturally, though more so with the Nautical Almanac as it existed about twenty years earlier. Back in June I had photographed the pages for April, 1854. When I went to clean up the images this afternoon, I noticed that pages 6 and 7 were missing. I photographed June instead, as attached below.

But what was going on in April?? I checked the original volume. Every month has pages 6 and 7 except April. Strange, right? I pondered astronomical explanations... Maybe Jupiter in conjunction with the Sun? No, that was in early January. Perhaps something unique to Spanish longitudes?? No, of course not. Back to the book... Ahh... the obvious explanation: the pages were still stuck together, probably from the very day that they were printed, more than 170 years ago. :)

I'm including below a couple of page images from the month, and also a pdf of all the pages for June plus the title and errata pages. There's more in the original volume: an introduction, of course, and explanatory pages at the back that read just like the British prototype, a couple of tables, including refraction, and two star lists with position data. There's one list of 38 stars with exact coordinates and updating values during the year, clearly intended for astronomers working in observatories, and there's a separate less-detailed list but containing 62 stars. This one strikes me as "navigation stars" though I didn't see anything explicitly saying so. Anyone want to see that list?

A little warning and reminder: the almanacs do not tell us about the actual practice of navigation. These government-issue "nautical almanacs" tended to be conservative to the point of backwardness in every culture that published them (that I have seen). If you want to know how navigation was done in the real world and which tables were regularly used from these almanacs, then you have to turn to the primary source evidence -- the logbooks.

Frank Reed

File:

  

File:

File: