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Bruce Stark wrote:
"The 1804 Moore lists  three places on Kuisin Island. "Nangasaki" is given as
32d, 52' N; 130d, 42' E.
The 1848 Norie lists eighteen places on Kiusiu Island. "Nangasaki City" is
given as 32d, 45' N; 129d, 52' E.
The two navigation manuals spell  "Nangasaki" the same, but have different
spellings for the island. "

And  Paul Flint asked:
"Is the diference in spelling significant?"

I very  much doubt it. I think it's nothing more than early difficulties
transliterating  Japanese place names into European characters. Later in the 19th
century, as  more Europeans and Americans learned Japanese and its extremely
simple phonetic  system, that second "n" would have seemed like an error. It's
listed as  "Nagasaki" by the beginning of the 20th century in two books I
consulted.

And of course there are simple typographic errors. For example, the 1826
Bowditch lists "Nangasky Harbor ent." at 32 44N and 129 46E. By 1842 and through
the 1870s, the spelling in Bowditch is corrected to "Nangasaky" but otherwise
 everything else is the same. Also, the "Kuisin" in 1804 Moore which Bruce
quoted  is bound to be an error that occurred during the manual copying process,
 possibly years earlier. The island in question is, of course, the big island
 Kyushu (as it's spelled today) and the spelling in the later 19th century
navigation manuals was "Kiusiu", which sounds about the same as Kyushu. But if
you write down Kiusiu in script and then ask someone to copy it over, you
could  easily wind up with Moore's "Kuisin". This same"Kuisin" is in Norie in
1819.

Here's a nice brief history of Russian naval adventures in  Nagasaki:
http://www.uwosh.edu/home_pages/faculty_staff/earns/askold.html

And  try googling "Nangasaky  NYPL":
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=nangasaky+nypl

This will take  you to a digital library site at the New York Public Library
with a nice chart  of the harbor of Nagasaki prepared by the famous Russian
naval officer I.F.  Kruzenshtern in about 1805. If you go to the enlarged
version, you can just  about make out the latitude and longitude of the city on the
chart as: 32 44  (and some seconds) N and some longitude which maybe reads 230
07 "W von  Greenwich". It's interesting that the Russian chart, published in
German, is  already referencing longitudes to Greenwich at this early date.

It seems  safe to assume that navigators near Nagasaki in the 1850s could
have confidence  in the charted longitude to within a few miles at least, and so
by doing some  accurate time sights with an artificial horizon from some shore
point they could  get the chronometer error and (with a few repetitions) the
rate as well with  good accuracy.

-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N  72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

   

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