NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Women Navigators
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Jun 6, 19:45 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Jun 6, 19:45 EDT
For more on Sue Howell and the events leading to her tragic death, you may want to read "Tall Ships Down" by Dan Parrott. It's an excellent book generally. Just a reminder, some events of the Celestial Weekend in Mystic are funded by the Susan P. Howell Memorial Fund. In addition to being a skilled navigation teacher, she also made good cookies (I knew her mostly when I was 15 to 17). Incidentally, Susan Howell also wrote an extensive series of navigation "Day's Work" problems which were very fun, and funny!, and could easily be published as another book. Ken, if you're listening, I've been trying to convince Don Treworgy that you two should make this happen. Probably the best example of a woman navigator historically is Janet Taylor. She ran a successful navigation school in London in the mid-19th century. She invented a combined calculator/sextant --seems ungainly and impractical but it's clever. She was the author of a very successful navigation manual which you can find, complete, on google books. Celestial navigation was apparently popular among captains' wives, when they sailed with their husbands, in the 19th century. There are examples in logbooks at Mystic Seaport. Hey, maybe it's actually "women's work".-FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
