NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigation and whaling
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Feb 22, 04:44 -0800
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 Feb 22, 04:44 -0800
Geoffrey, you wrote: "I don't have the book "Sailing alone around the world" to hand, but there is a passage towards the back where he comments on the accuracy of all his landfalls during the trip, despite the fact that his navigation was largely dead reckoning - or words to that effect. Perhaps you can dig out the passage." There are several complete copies of this available online. If you visit Google Books, after you locate the book, you can search within this book specifically for specific phrases and words, try, e.g. "latitude" and "longitude". Slocum doesn't come right out and say that he navigated by dead reckoning, and that has led to some confusion. Back in December of 2003, when I first started posting, I had a hell of a time convincing folks here that that's what he was saying. A great many people who have read SAATW in the past few decades can't imagine that anyone with a brain would sail by dead reckoning (for longitude), and so they've assumed that the single lunar observation described implied that he used lunars frequently, determining his longitude with the Moon every few days. That always struck me as way off, but given the consensus belief in this group that Slocum was the 'last practical lunarian', it was slow-going persuading people. I found the nail for the coffin of that point of view a year or two later in the Slocum biography by Teller in a letter that Slocum wrote to his editor in New York when he was nearly two-thirds of the way around the world. There he makes it clear that he was getting longitude by dead reckoning and states explicitly that he had taken only one lunar observation up to that point. And you wrote: "The feeling I was left with, after reading the book, was that Slocum was pretty pleased in proving to himself that he was a good navigator - and to him, the epitome of good navigation was to be able to navigate by dead reckoning alone. I suspect this may have been a common feeling amongst navigators at the end of the 19th century - a harking back to the skills required in a previous age, just we do now, only we hark back to the time of Slocum!" Yes. Exactly. However, it may be worth pointing out that George is technically correct in this case. He said that such navigators would soon fall victim to natural selection, and sure enough, Slocum was lost at sea just a few years later. That probably had nothing to do with navigating by dead reckoning, but Slocum was clearly a risk-taker. Geoffrey, you wrote: "As to their concept of acceptable risk being different to ours, I would agree. I think sailors were a pretty fatalistic lot, ready to accept whatever came their way as there was not a lot they could do about it. I think the idea of "risk" was introduced by the insurance man and his insistence that the vessel be "well found" or he would refuse to insure. As a driving force for the introduction of the "new navigation", the insurance man is not much discussed. But I suspect that it was quite significant." Yes, you're probably right, but the route may be rather indirect. Here in the US, there's an annoying little rhyme posted at various intersections and on road signs. It says "Click it or Ticket". That is, fasten your seat belt, or the police will write you an expensive ticket. Clearly, this law exists only to serve the needs of the insurance companies by making injuries more predictable. On the other hand, what should they care? They can always charge higher premiums if the risks are higher. But their representatives get it in their heads that they are doing a public good as well as controlling their financial risk so they lobby in the halls of government, find politicians who wish to be seen as saving lives, and pretty soon drivers are being accused of crimes when they have done nothing more than leave the seatbelt unfastened [ok, I'll stop ranting now --and no I've never been ticketed for this]. Back to the specific case of navigation on the oceans, what is the role of laws and regulation? One factor cited for the decline of British whaling compared to American whaling was the rather stringent set of laws that were applied to licensing the "whale fishery" in Britain back in the early 19th century. There were all sorts of regulations and rules that would make a modern euro-crat drool with envy. Relevant to this discussion thread, among those laws was an explicit requirement that every whaling vessel had to carry a logbook detailing the vessel's position, events on board, and so on. But these regulations do not seem to have ever required any specific TYPE of navigation. Since the "old navigation" was still practiced aboard a great many merchant vessels as late as the Second World War, it doesn't seem that these methods of navigation were much affected by regulation. And consider the case today where many vessels are legally required to carry sextants, but no one aboard ship is required to do so much as open the case during any voyage. Regulations with respect to navigation do not seem to have impacted the methods --not yet, at least. And you wrote: "Your comment about the voyages of whalers only being in part transits from A to B is a good one. Where a ship is busy hunting down whales in mid-ocean and the captain has more than enough to think about to bother himself with his exact position, I imagine it would be quite easy to lose track of longitude." Of course, there's no "losing track" after chronometers became common. During the "Peak Whaling" period and after, it would have been rare for a whaleship to go to sea without a chronometer or two. But in general, yes, there's good evidence that they were less bothered with navigation when they were "on the whaling grounds". The vessel's position might be recorded every three days instead of each and every day. Nonetheless, they still did record positions. The logbook was part of the legal and commercial record of the voyage. This applied especially when vessels were sailing close to the shores of other nations. There were a number of incidents in the Sea of Okhotsk where logbooks from whaling vessels were presented as evidence in diplomatic arguments between the USA and Imperial Russia. The Charles W. Morgan at one point c.1893 picked up a small boat with ten starving prisoners escaped from a camp on Sakhalin, if I remember correctly. Exact positional information from these incidents was considered critical. And you wrote: "Also, it strikes me that they were away at sea for extraordinarily long periods of time without landfall - longer, I suspect, than any other trading vessels - where they could not rely on the chronometer alone to keep good time." Three or four months at sea without entering port was normal during the period of "Peak Whaling". One month without entering port is probably closer to the facts in the period of "Post-war Whaling". Is that too long to trust a chronometer? How about two chronometers? And you proposed: "For these reasons, it may be true that whalers were, by-and-large, more reliant on the skills of finding longitude by lunars than other ocean going trading vessels of similar size. Their logs may reflect that fact." This is possible, but I haven't seen any evidence of that in logbooks. I've seen evidence of lunars in use aboard vessels of all sizes and types whenever they're engaged in long ocean voyages. -FER PS: Some of you may enjoy "Life and Adventure in the South Pacific": http://books.google.com/books?id=CfJEAAAAIAAJ It recounts a voyage of the "Emily Morgan" which was a sister-ship of the "Charles W. Morgan", c.1849-53. There are fine descriptions of life aboard a whaling vessel. The book is politically incorrect and quite racist in many places, but you get an excellent sense of the frequency of interaction between these whaling vessels in the Peak Whaling period and the peoples of the Pacific islands and the countries around the Pacific Rim. It's what "Moby Dick" would be if "Moby Dick" were a book about whales and whaling. :-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---