by David Barrie
West Indies, 138, 158
Westall, William, 168
Wester Till, 219
Western Port, 161
whaleboats, 34, 161, 208
Wilson’s Promontory, 161
winds patterns, 263–64
winter solstice, 23
Wolf Rock light, 267–68
Wolfe, James, 10
wooden vessels, 47
World War I, 6, 242, 301n2
World War II, 46, 301n1
Worsley, Frank
anecdotal descriptions of travels, xix
background, 240–41
on Endurance, 244–45
escape from pack ice, 247–50
James Caird journey, 251–59, 262
and organization of expedition, 241–42
and rescue of expedition members, 260–61
use of celestial navigation, xviii
Wreck Reef, 179, 180–81, 181–82, 190, 195
Wrinkles in Practical Navigation (Lecky), 226–27
Yarmouth, 9
Yelcho, 261
zenith distance, 19
zodiac, 25
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Author photograph © by Miranda Barrie
Plate sections:
Saecwen on the coast of Maine (Courtesy Louise de Mowbray)
The Nebra Sky Disc (© Anagoria)
Star-trails in the northern sky (© Babak Tafreshi, The World at Night)
Aquatint of the mutineers turning William Bligh and his crew from the Bounty by Robert Dodd, 1790 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Pastel portrait of William Bligh in 1791 by John Russell RA (Courtesy of the Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby)
Chalk drawing of Nevil Maskelyne attributed to John Russell RA, c. 1776 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Sextant made in London by John Bird c. 1758 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
A page from Charles Green’s journal (© The National Archives)
Lithograph of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville after a portrait by Zépherin Belliard, date unknown (Courtesy National Library of Australia)
Portrait of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, by J. B. Greuze (All rights reserved: Toulouse-Lautrec Museum—Albi—Tarn—France)
Probable portrait of George Vancouver by an unknown artist, 1796–98. Oil on canvas (© National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG 503)
“The Caneing in Conduit Street” by James Gillray. Hand-coloured etching, published by Hannah Humphrey October 1, 1796 (© National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG D12578)
Portrait of Captain James Cook by John Webber RA, 1782. Oil on canvas (Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased 2000 by the Commonwealth Government with the generous assistance of Robert Oatley and John Schaeffer AO)
Portrait of Matthew Flinders by Antoine Toussaint de Chazal de Chamerel (Courtesy Google Art Project)
Robert FitzRoy by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company. Albumen print on card mount, early-mid 1860s (© National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG x128426)
Alycone off the coast of Brittany (Courtesy the author)
A typical marine chronometer (Courtesy Royal Cruising Club; photograph by author)
The Spray in Sydney Harbour, 1896, by an unknown photographer (Australian National Maritime Museum. Reproduced courtesy of the museum)
Photograph of Frank Worsley by Frank Hurley (Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
Photograph of the Endurance crushed by the Antarctic ice by Frank Hurley (Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
Integrated images:
Fig. 1, 2, 3, 5 and The “PZX” Triangle: Diagrams by HL Studios
Fig. 4: Illustrations from John Seller’s Practical Navigation 1669
Fig. 6: Illustration of Hadley’s original octant, alternative form, 1730
Fig. 7: Page from the first Nautical Almanac, 1767 (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Fig. 8: Diagram of the Sumner Line, published in Sumner’s pamphlet, 1843
Fig. 9: Admiralty chart of Strait of Magellan, first published in the 1830s (Courtesy United Kingdom Hydrographic Office)
Photo Insert
Colin McMullen standing at the stern of Saecwen, holding the sextant and preparing to take a sight.
Colin as a midshipman aboard a Royal Navy warship in the 1920s.
Saecwen on the coast of Maine, with the author standing at the bow.
The Nebra Sky Disc, one of the earliest-known representations of the cosmos. Dating from about 1,600 BCE, it was discovered in Germany in 1999. The group of seven stars represents the constellation of the Pleiades as it would have appeared at that date.
Star-trails in the northern sky: a long-exposure photograph taken over the Grand Canyon showing the paths traced by each star. Polaris, in top center, being almost stationary, appears as a dot, while the stars at the greatest angular distance from it leave the longest trails.
The mutineers turning William Bligh and his crew from the Bounty, April 29, 1789. A cutlass is being thrown to the castaways from the great cabin, and breadfruit plants are growing in the pots hung over the stern. Aquatint by Robert Dodd, c. 1790.
A pastel portrait of William Bligh in 1791, by John Russell RA.
Nevil Maskelyne, at about forty-four. A chalk drawing attributed to John Russell RA.
One of the very first sextants, made in London by John Bird about 1758. With a radius of 18¼ inches, it is large in comparison with modern instruments. It is also unusual in having a pole that fits into a socket on the observer’s belt to help support its weight.
A page from a journal showing Charles Green’s lunar distance observations taken aboard the Endeavour off the Great Barrier Reef (box, center left). The latitude is prominently recorded (center right) and beneath it Green notes the unusual circumstances: “These Obs[ervations] very good the Limbs very distinct, a good Horizon. We were about a 100 yards from a Reef where we expected the Ship to strike every minute it being Calm & no soundings the swell heaving us right on.”
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. Lithograph after a portrait by Zépherin Belliard, date unknown.
Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. This fine portrait by Jean-Baptiste Greuze—probably painted in the 1780s—skillfully suggests the sitter’s combination of determination and charm.
A portrait, believed to be of George Vancouver, by an unknown artist, 1796–98.
“The Caneing in Conduit Street,” by James Gillray. Vancouver shouts “Murder!” and calls for his brother (in the center) to defend him, while Pitt (Lord Camelford) says, “Give me Satisfaction, Rascal!”
James Cook by John Webber. The official artist on Cook’s third voyage, Webber knew Cook better than any other artist and had seen him in his element. This touching portrait—painted in 1781, after Cook’s death—shows us a more vulnerable, less heroic figure than some other famous images of the great mariner.
Matthew Flinders, while held in captivity by the French authorities on Mauritius, painted by the amateur artist Antoine Toussaint de Chazal de Chamerel. Though unsophisticated, this portrait clearly reveals Flinders’s stubborn and prickly character.
Robert FitzRoy. Albumen print by unknown photographer, 1860s.
Alcyone, named after the brightest star in the constellation of the Pleiades, off the coast of Brittany.
A typical marine chronometer, similar to the one we used aboard Saecwen; the smaller dial at the top indicates when the mechanism needs to be rewound.
Joshua Slocum, by an unknown photographer (undated).
Slocum’s yawl, the Spray, in Sydney Harbor, 1896. Unknown photographer.
Frank Worsley aboard the Endurance. Photograph by Frank Hurley.
The Endurance crushed by the Antarctic ice and sinking as sledge dogs look on. Photograph by Frank Hurley.
About
the Author
DAVID BARRIE was educated at Bryanston School and Oxford University. He started sailing at an early age and gained extensive racing and cruising experience in bigger boats while still a teenager. In 1973 he cruised the coasts of Maine and Nova Scotia before crossing the Atlantic in the thirty-five-foot yacht Saecwen. Barrie became a member of the British Diplomatic Service in 1975, where he was involved in relations with South Africa and the United States, and in negotiations that paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Since leaving government service, he has worked in the arts and as a law reform campaigner. The great-great-nephew of J. M. Barrie, he is married with two daughters.
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Copyright
The Credits pages serve as a continuation of the copyright page.
SEXTANT. Copyright © 2014 by David Barrie. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-227934-7
EPub Edition APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780062279361
14 15 16 17 18 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Footnotes
INTRODUCTION
* The sextant was also a crucial aid to land-based explorers and indeed aviators; their stories, however, lie beyond the scope of this book.
CHAPTER 1: SETTING SAIL
* Actually, Christian was master’s mate.
* She was a “Saxon” class boat, designed by Alan Buchanan and built by Priors of Burnham-on-Sea, in 1961. Her name means “sea queen” in Anglo-Saxon.
* Each lighthouse has its own “characteristic” by which it can be identified—in this case a single flash every five seconds.
CHAPTER 2: FIRST SIGHT
* He once took a yacht to Mont St. Michel on the north coast of France, where the huge tides come in across the shallow mud flats at a dangerously fast rate, and on the same trip planted a flag on the central islet of the extensive and menacing nearby reef known as Les Minquiers. These are not exploits for the faint-hearted or inexperienced sailor.
CHAPTER 3: THE ORIGINS OF THE SEXTANT
* The southern tip of the Grand Banks that extend to the south of Newfoundland—once the home of the great cod fishery.
* A small adjustment has to be made to allow for the fact that Polaris is not quite vertically above the North Pole.
* Shakespeare is clearly referring to Polaris, but the last line of the quotation is puzzling. A plausible interpretation is that the “worth” of the star is unknown to the lovers who are the crew of a “wandering bark”; their inconstancy prevents them appreciating the true value of the star’s “height” even when they have “taken” it. They can measure its height but do not know how to deduce their latitude from it.
* This is true for almost all practical purposes, but movements of the earth’s crust mean that its geographical position may be subject to small changes.
* The words “Ushant and Scilly” remind me of the classic sailor’s song “Spanish Ladies”—one of Colin’s favorites—which incidentally sheds some light on old-fashioned navigation:
Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies
Adieu and farewell to you ladies of Spain,
For we’ve received orders for to sail to old England
And hope in a short time to see you again.
We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true British sailors
We’ll rant and we’ll roar o’er aºll the salt seas
Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England
From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues.
We hove our ship to with the wind in the southwest
We hove our ship to, boys, fresh soundings to take.
It was forty-five fathoms and a fine sandy bottom
So we squared our main yard and up-Channel did make.
* Unless the two points both happen to lie on the equator, which is itself a Great Circle.
CHAPTER 4: BLIGH’S BOAT JOURNEY
* The method is explained in Chapter 15.
* This did not bring any special credit to Bligh. Promotion beyond the rank of post-captain was simply a matter of seniority: anyone could reach “flag rank” if they lived long enough.
* A length of rope was carefully knotted for this purpose and attached to a small wooden board. Bligh taught several members of the crew how to count seconds “with some degree of exactness” in order to time how long it took to run out when the wooden “log board” was thrown over the side.
CHAPTER 5: ANSON’S ORDEALS
* As well as being a device for measuring speed and distance, the log is—confusingly—also the journal that records a vessel’s course, distance run and position (when known), as well as the weather and anything else the watch-keeper feels like mentioning.
CHAPTER 6: THE MARINE CHRONOMETER
* In fact it is not quite motionless: it revolves around the celestial north pole in a tight circle.
* A process that gives rise to the “precession of the equinoxes.” It also wobbles slightly, an effect known as “nutation.”
* They did not complete their work until 1743, and one of their number, Charles-Marie de La Condamine, daringly returned home by crossing the Andes and descending the Amazon to the ocean on a raft—the first European ever to make this journey. There was romance, too: Godin fell in love with the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Peru, and they eventually married after a twenty-year separation. See Danson 37–42.
* It is a curious fact that the position of the island of Tahiti—on the far side of the world and discovered by Captain Samuel Wallis only in 1767—was by then much more accurately known.
* Occultations of stars by the moon could be observed with greater ease, but—as we shall see—the necessary predictions of the moon’s movements were not yet available.
* This meant that Harrison had in the end received rather more than £20,000 from the public purse, though he had incurred significant expenses and complained that he was still £1,250 short.
CHAPTER 7: CELESTIAL TIMEKEEPING
* Improvements to the quality of mirrors, shades, and lenses also added to the accuracy of sextants during the latter part of the eighteenth century.
* Maskelyne himself fixed the longitude of St. Helena during his stay there and presumably estimated the longitude error on his arrival there retrospectively. I am grateful to members of the Cambridge Digital Longitude Project for advice on this point.
* Futile attempts to find a “Northwest Passage” in the Canadian Arctic continued to waste lives until the end of the nineteenth century, by which time it was clear that the route was of no commercial utility. With the gradual retreat of the ice, that judgment may soon change.
* Dalrymple was in 1795 to have the distinction of becoming the first Hydrographer of the Navy.
* Larger vessels, like the frigate employed by Bougainville, though faster and bigger, would probably have broken their backs if beached.
* That is, the “chains”—see Glossary.
* It is worth pointing out that the trade winds are not gentle zephyrs: they often blow hard. The great advantage they offered in the days of sail was their regularity and predictability.
* Even as late as 1821 the Admiralty owned only 130 chronometers, and it was not until 1859 that all captains’ commands were required to carry three chronometers. I am grateful to Richard Dunn of the National Maritime Museum for this information.
CHAPTER 9: BOUGAINVILLE IN THE SOUTH SEAS
* This tactic suited Saecwen—with her long, heavy keel and low freeboard—well. Light-displacement modern yachts with high topsides might run the risk of being rolled over and dismasted.
* Carteret’s purser, by the name of Harrison though no relation of the watchmaker, had fixed its longitude by lunar distances.
* A reference to the Judgment of Paris. Dressed as a Phrygian shepherd, the Trojan prince Paris had the awkward task of choosing which of three goddesses—Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—was the most beautiful, with dire consequences for Troy.
* Anacreon (582–485 BCE) was an ancient Greek lyric poet. François Boucher (1703–70) was a famous painter of pastoral scenes often peopled with naked nymphs and goddesses.