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    Re: Navigation and whaling
    From: Geoffrey Kolbe
    Date: 2009 Feb 18, 06:27 +0000

    George [7344] wrote
    
    
    >and- "But is Geoffrey also claiming that he used dead reckoning, rather than
    >noon Sun altitudes, for his latitudes? That I would find hard to accept."
    
    No George, I did not claim that Slocum never used celestial navigation. I
    said that his book was a "celebration of the art of dead reckoning", which
    is quite different.
    
    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.
    
    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!
    
    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.
    
    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 loose track of
    longitude. 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. 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.
    
    Geoffrey Kolbe
    
    
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