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Has anyone searched Moby Dick for lunars, noon sight or sextant? If
not, sounds like MD may be digitized and sitting somewhere searchable.
How do I go about it?

Hewitt

On 1/30/09, George Huxtable  wrote:
>
>  Clearly, Google Books has been busy of late digitising American popular
>  fiction of the 19th century, and d walden has had some fun searching out
>  references to lunars.
>
>  A repeated theme seems to be the rough-and-ready American mariner, rejecting
>  such gimmicks as lunars and chronometers.
>
>  And that seems to have had a resonance in real life, to judge by an account
>  by Silvio A Bedini, chronicler of American technology. He quotes from
>  Samuel Eliot Morison,s  "The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783-1860"
>  (1921), who noted that even in the early nineteenth century, the position of
>  a ship was generally still determined by dead reckoning with the use of only
>  a compass, log line, and deep-sea lead. Among examples of Atlantic voyages
>  made by American vessels using these traditional methods, he reported that
>  an American vessel was seized at Christiansand, Norway, because she had
>  arrived in port without chart or sextant. The ship was freed only after
>  other American shipmasters in the port protested that they frequently sailed
>  the width of the Atlantic without those aids, claiming that any comptent
>  seaman could do so."
>
>  And such seat-of-the-pants navigation seems to have applied particularly to
>  American whalers. Although I can't now recall chaper and verse, I've read
>  several accounts of merchant vessels being "spoken" by New England whalers,
>  asking for a position, who hardly knew what ocean they were in. Of course,
>  whalers were a rather special case. They would make incredible voyages from
>  New England ports, right through the Pacific and into the Bering Straits,
>  away for four years or so, only sighting land on the passage round the Horn,
>  and sometimes not even then. In mid-ocean, they didn't really care exactly
>  where they were, not making a passage from A to B, but simply wandering in
>  search of "fish". If these were Sperm whales, these could be anywhere on the
>  world's oceans.
>
>  George.
>
>  contact George Huxtable, at  george@hux.me.uk
>  or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
>  or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.
>
>
>
>  >
>

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