NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Real accuracy of the method of lunar distances
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Jan 7, 08:42 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Jan 7, 08:42 -0500
Frank, There were very few corporate entities back then, but plenty of rich people (this was the era of "regressive" taxes). Whaling ships were a profitable venture, and two chronometers would have helped them chase whales around the Southern Ocean, so I expect they were considered necessary equipment. Also, chronometers may have started to come down in price by then. How about the situation in the 1820s? Fred On Jan 7, 2004, at 4:50 AM, Frank Reed wrote: > Apparently chronometers were sufficiently inexpensive before steamers > dominated the oceans. In most of the whaleship logbooks I've seen from > the 1840s and 1850s, there is mention of a second chronometer. > Whaleships did not live or die by tight schedules and they were not > operated by large rich corporate entities, yet even they could justify > the cost of more than one chronometer at that (fairly early) date. >
