NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2015 Jun 23, 00:15 -0700
Don wrote: Journal and Logbook are often used interchangeably. What we call a logbook today was more commonly referred to as a journal in the 18th century.
In the Royal Navy, the practice was to make hourly recordings of course, speed, wind direction, etc. on a chalk logboard. These entries were then copied into an ink and paper ship's logbook. It was a daily obligation of the ship's officers to use this raw data to fill out their own journal, including not only the 24 hourly observations but their own navigational workings and additional comments and personal observations. Typically the Master's journal would have the most detailed entries. Both the Captain and the Master were required to periodically submit their journals to the Admiralty. Many of them are still available from the Public Record Office. Some Lieutenant's journals are also archived there.
In my post of two years ago, my reference to Bligh's Journal is the same thing as the Captain's Logbook.
Thank you Don. I only got into the UK National Archives site as far as text photos once. Now it’s asking me to register in order to see the text. However, it seems to be a harder to read original from which the ‘Fateful Voyage’ logbook text is taken. There would also seem to be ‘pay for’ electronic copies available from Amazon. Did you see anything in any copy about Bligh having a Sextant in the launch? I couldn’t find anything in the ‘Fateful Voyage’ text, but I didn’t read every word on every page. All I did was use ‘Control F’ and type in ‘sextant’. It seemed to work. It picked up
