Youngsters will find this boring and without bearing...
Navigators and seamen will relish in it...as Slocum traverses the Southern Trade winds east on his way to Polynesia...moving north after his trials at Magellan / Tierra Del Fuego
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Quoted from Slocum.
Unique was my experience in nautical astronomy from the deck of the Spray -- so much so that I feel justified in briefly telling it here. The first set of sights, just spoken of put her many hundred miles west of my reckoning by account. I knew that this could not be correct. In about an hour's time I took another set of observations with the utmost care; the mean result of those was about the same as that of the first set. I asked myself why, with my boasted self-dependence, I had not done at least better than this. Then I went in search of a discrepancy in the tables, and I found it. In the tables I found that the column of figures from which I had gotten an important logarithm was in error. It was a matter I could prove beyond a doubt, and it made the difference as already stated. The tables being corrected, I sailed on with self-reliance unshaken, and with my tin clock fast asleep. The result of these observations naturally tickled my vanity, for I knew that it was something to stand on a great ship's deck, and with two assistants, take Lunar observations approximately near the truth. As one of the poorest of American sailors, I was proud of the little achievement alone on my sloop, even by chance though it may have been.
I was en rapport now with my surroundings, and was carried on a vast stream where I felt the buoyancy of 'His' hand who made all the worlds. I realized the mathematical truth of their motions, so well known that astronomers compile tables of their positions through the years and the days, and the minutes of the day, with such precision that one coming along over the seas even five years later may, by their aid, find the standard time of any given meridian on the earth.
To find local time is a simpler matter. The difference between local and standard time is longitude expressed in time -- four minutes, we all know, representing one degree. This, briefly, is the principle on which longitude is found independent of chronometers, is beautifully edifying, and their is nothing in the realm of navigation that lifts one's heart up more in adoration.
Joushua Slocum
SV Spray
1898, Pacific Ocean, Southern Trade Winds, bound for the Marquesas out of Tierra Del Fuego
