NavList:

Spinning off from the homemade octant discussion...

Norm, you wrote:
"the sextant is part of the Slocum story (or myth) about finding a typo in a log table by disagreement [between] CN and DR. Most members of this board are of the opinion that it's myth, which makes it an even BETTER story."

I agree that it's a good story --indeed a real window into Joshua Slocum's personality. And I would not call it a myth though there is a 'mythic' issue here.

Slocum wrote very plainly that he wrestled with his calculations until at last he 'found an error' in his logarithm tables which he could prove beyond any doubt (or something like that, right?). The question is not whether we believe that these events happened, but whether we believe his analysis of them. This confused calculation happened at some stage in the process of clearing a lunar and working up a longitude from it. This was something that Slocum did only once on the entire circumnavigation, and he had very likely not done this in many years. There can be little doubt that he was out of practice. The calculations at first did not work, and then after some fiddling they did work. So he blames the tables! He's worked one lunar in perhaps a decade, at a time of some personal anxiety in this voyage, and somehow he finds an error in the tables that no one else ever detected?? That's a good tall tale.

This is the sort of story that one often hears from the very proud. Slocum considers himself an expert in celestial navigation. It cannot be that he made an error or was confused by some aspect of the tables. But he is a craftsman, not a carpenter: he DOES blame his tools. I take Slocum at his word that he found an error in the work and resolved it. I think he is simply being a braggart when he suggests that his tables were flawed while he himself was right all along. That fits with his curmudgeonly character and his somewhat delusional attitude towards the world around him. It's even more intriguing when we consider that Slocum had real reason for self-doubt on this day. He had been sailing out of sight of land for 43 days. Did he resort to a lunar to confirm his dead reckoning out of rational necessity? Creeping fear? Or maybe just boredom??

The 'mythic' aspect would be to imagine Joshua Slocum as some sort of perfect, ideal prototype of an ocean sailor, and that's the trap that many have fallen into including, for example, Geoffrey Wolff who wrote a biography of him a couple of years ago. Wolff, a professor of literature, knew nothing of celestial navigation of any sort and imagined that Slocum was a "mathematical genius," a world-class expert in celestial navigation. There is absolutely no evidence for that, and it's a rather crazy suggestion. Slocum was a skilled and experienced sailor, but a mortal and deeply flawed human being.

By the way, wouldn't that logarithm fantasy have been an interesting scene to incorporate into "All is Lost"? Imagine Redford's character struggling with his celestial work and plotting a fix in Kazakhstan (something I suggested earlier would have added a dose of realism to the navigation shown in the film). Then there might have been a brief follow-up scene with him somehow blaming his tables, tearing them in half and throwing them overboard. That kind of certainty in oneself to the point of pomposity and sheer delusion might even be a useful if not entirely necessary trait for a man or a woman sailing the ocean alone.

-FER

----------------------------------------------------------------
NavList message boards and member settings: www.fer3.com/NavList
Members may optionally receive posts by email.
To cancel email delivery, send a message to NoMail[at]fer3.com
----------------------------------------------------------------