07-15-2018, 08:12 AM
(07-09-2018, 10:44 AM)Fred_B Wrote: Good questions!
Harrison was very "wordy" and in one of the pamphlets he wrote the first sentence was 35 pages long.
What makes me pull out the remaining hair I have is the perpetual statement of, "the secret to knowing where you are is knowing what time it is". This line is repeated so many times and is largely false. They never tell you, or rarely tell you, that you need a sextant to measure the particular body and a lot of paper work.
Yes, we always follow the money....
Fred
I wish Slocum had been more informative about his navigation successes and misadventures. He wrote as though CN was a given even though he used the lunar method to get the correct time to adjust his tin clock. You get the feeling sometimes that he was happy just knowing which ocean he was in. Of course he was a merchant captain of barks and full rigged ships long before he took his solo circumnavigation; he probably felt that his readers would get bored with the numbers, and to an extent he was perhaps right. There is a sense of pride about his boat, however, as for the brand of sextant he used or its IE we may never know.
joe