NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Master & Commander
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2003 Dec 9, 17:16 +0000
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2003 Dec 9, 17:16 +0000
Bruce Stark forwarded from a friend of his: > For instance, the U. S. Navy > handles this situation in this manner: > > At about 10 minutes before calculated noon, the Officer of the Deck (the > conning officer) would send his messenger to find the Commanding Officer and > instructs the messenger to say, "The OOD conveys his respects and reports 12 > o'clock noon. Herewith are the noon position report and the fuel and water > reports. The chronometers have been wound and compared and he requests > permission to strike 8 bells on time." The CO takes the reports and says, > "Thank you. Tell him to make it so." At this point the messenger races up > to the bridge and reports to the OOD what the CO has said. By this time the > Navigator is observing the track of the sun. At his signal, the OOD > instructs the Bo's'n's Mate of the Watch to strike 8 bells. Thus an exact > noon is noted by the ringing of the ship's bell and it is dead accurate with > a well trained bridge watch. Sometimes this takes a bit of doing, but > rather quickly they all get on to it and we can all set our wrist watches > accurately. Interesting. My understanding (which may be faulty) is that the Royal Navy's practice, through the two World Wars, was to maintain ship's time on GMT, at least throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean. (They may have done something different in the Pacific theatre.) I can understand that other navies would prefer to use zone time. However, in an era of long-distance radio communication, wasn't it difficult if each ship used its own time based on its LAN? Navigation must use GMT, of course. Presumably logs of radio communications use that or some other zone time (perhaps that of the Admiral's headquarters). Orders from ship to ship could be similarly timed. Still, it sounds a bit awkward to have everyone's wrist watches set to a ship's time which differs from the time being used between ships. (Naturally, such considerations did not apply to merchant ships individually plying their trades in the era before general radio communications.) Trevor Kenchington -- Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250 R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251 Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555 Science Serving the Fisheries http://home.istar.ca/~gadus