NavList:

   

Reply

What Frank and I have been discussing recently, is really the question of
how we draw statistical conclusions from what may be a biased body of
evidence, But following Brad's lead, it's worthwhile to widen it a little.

Brad and Geoffrey are shifting the question (as they have every right to do)
into distinguishing "good" or "careful" navigation from the rest. I wouldn't
presume to be able to do that. Instead, I was addressing two examples of
incompetent or irresponsibly careless navigation, which I think we would all
recognise as such, and wondering how common they were in practice, in their
era.

There are various levels of casualness that one might find in ocean
navigation, depending on the date.

From a couple of decades into the 1800s, a well-found vessel navigating the
oceans might be expected to carry either some sort of chronometer, or else
someone aboard who knew how to take and work lunars. A vessel with neither
would be putting those on board, and the vessel itself, at avoidable risk.
But those were times when a much higher level of risk was tolerated than
today. Morison's account of an American vessel arriving in Norway "without
chart or sextant" takes risk levels considerably further.

However, we have to accept that many successful voyages have been made
without such celestial aid. Let me list some examples-

1. Coastal navigators, keeping in touch with headlands, had always managed
without any such "fancy" navigation, until very recent times.
2. Before 1767, there was no way for a navigator to improve on
dead-reckoning for his longitude.
3. Without a clear sky and horizon, celestial navigation was impossible, and
that state of affairs could be common and persistent. Around the UK, I would
put such availability of celestial navigation at about 30%, to compare with
the 99.995% (or whatever) that we expect from GPS today. An account of an
Arctic whaling cruise in summer cited a compete month in which there was
never a clear sky and clear horizon together.

Ocean navigation can be done, successfully if riskily, without knowledge of
longitude. Following a rhumb line will always get you to the other side of
an ocean, somewhere. I have little doubt that there were many communities
around the World with skippers, unlettered, unlearned, and unnumerate, who
continued to feel their way about the oceans by seat-of-the-pants
navigation, log and lead and lookout, until natural selection claimed them
(and their crews). Accounts of such characters turn up in voyage journals;
and also, of course, in fiction.

The question I was asking was simply: how common were they? As the two
anecdotes I had quoted both related to early 19th-century American vessels,
how common were such practices among such vessels? And how common amongst
whalers, bearing in mind that whaling voyages were only in part planned
transits from A to B, and that navigational skills were likely to have been
passed down, within isolated communites, from father to son in the school of
hard-knocks, rather than in maritime colleges by examinations.

I'm not claiming to know any of the answers, nor to know where to find any
insight. But I'm suspicious of easy answers from museum collections, in
which those backward navigators are unlikely to have figured.

George.

contact George Huxtable, at  george@hux.me.uk
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc
To post, email NavList@fer3.com
To , email NavList-@fer3.com
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

   

Reply