NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: American navigation.
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Oct 31, 23:43 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Oct 31, 23:43 -0700
Douglas Denny, you wrote: "It is not just Americans who might have gone to sea with only a school atlas as the "navigation aid" available for a chart. And what's wrong with that anyway? " Well that's right. It's all about the p.r. If you "spin it" as traditional navigation, a navigator "in tune" with his surroundings, then the simplest chart is quite sufficient as long as it has the bare minimum of latitude and longitude lines in the right places and a scale sufficient to pick off the coordinates. But if you have bad p.r. and you get a nickname like 'Captain Calamity' well, then you're just another idiot who doesn't belong on the water. Of course, the latter C.C. does really sounds like an idiot, and he manages to get himself so much attention that I suspect he's more of a performance artist or a simple attention hound than a future mariner (or future marine casualty). Back to the story that George related, which may be true or may have been just a "sea story", it tells us nothing about the state of "American navigation" (the title George gave to the thread). It's only an example of something that the author considered an extreme, possibly absurd case. I suppose it's worth noting that Joshua Slocum also visited Gibraltar just about twenty years before this supposed cod merchant. Was he crazy? Maybe. But he clearly was not an example of standard American navigation in that era. He was fascinating precisely because he was so exceptional. -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NavList message boards: www.fer3.com/arc Or post by email to: NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList+@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---