Welcome to the NavList Message Boards.

NavList:

A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding

Compose Your Message

Message:αβγ
Message:abc
Add Images & Files
    Name or NavList Code:
    Email:
       
    Reply
    Re: Navigation and whaling
    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
    -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
    

       
    Reply
    Browse Files

    Drop Files

    NavList

    What is NavList?

    Get a NavList ID Code

    Name:
    (please, no nicknames or handles)
    Email:
    Do you want to receive all group messages by email?
    Yes No

    A NavList ID Code guarantees your identity in NavList posts and allows faster posting of messages.

    Retrieve a NavList ID Code

    Enter the email address associated with your NavList messages. Your NavList code will be emailed to you immediately.
    Email:

    Email Settings

    NavList ID Code:

    Custom Index

    Subject:
    Author:
    Start date: (yyyymm dd)
    End date: (yyyymm dd)

    Visit this site
    Visit this site
    Visit this site
    Visit this site
    Visit this site
    Visit this site