Sextant
Page 33
CHAPTER 11: THE TRAVAILS OF GEORGE VANCOUVER
* The text says 45'' but this is clearly a mistake as the mean result of the lunar observations is shown as 30''.
* In this latitude that is a distance of almost thirty nautical miles.
* The pocket watch, however, was broken by one of the ship’s cats at the very start of the voyage. Gooch made excuses for her: “she is a very young cat & perhaps its beating attracted her notice.”
* Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores had been detached from Alessandro Malaspina’s great expedition. Malaspina was a Neapolitan subject of the Spanish king whose ambitious and well-equipped voyage of discovery from 1789 to 1794 doubled as an inspection of the Spanish colonial empire. His liberal recommendations were badly received after his return, and he ended up in jail. Galiano was to die in 1805 fighting the British at the Battle of Trafalgar.
* A small bath of mercury in which the angle between the reflected image of the sun and the sun itself could be measured: the correct observed altitude being half the resultant figure.
CHAPTER 12: FLINDERS—COASTING AUSTRALIA
* The return trip would usually be via Cape Horn, taking advantage of the westerly winds that prevail in the mid-latitudes of the South Pacific.
* Ignorance of the geography of the Southern Hemisphere was exploited for literary purposes by Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver was shipwrecked on the shores of Lilliput after being driven by a “violent storm to the north-west of Van Diemen’s Land” (chapter 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, which was first published in 1726). This would place Lilliput somewhere within the continent of Australia.
CHAPTER 13: FLINDERS—SHIPWRECK AND CAPTIVITY
* The reflecting circle—an instrument based on the same principles as the sextant but with a completely circular arc.
* It was Sir William who, in 1918, secured many of the papers left by Matthew Flinders after his death by donating them to the Mitchell Library in New South Wales—on condition that a statue was erected in his grandfather’s honor. This was unveiled in Sydney in 1925.
* Atala, first published in 1801, was inspired by Chateaubriand’s travels in North America.
* That is, equatorial.
CHAPTER 14: VOYAGES OF THE BEAGLE
* Actually his name was Fernão de Magalhães, but this was anglicized as Magellan.
* So named for the plight of the Spanish settlers who tried and failed to found a colony there in the sixteenth century under the leadership of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a mathematician and astronomer who had sailed with Mendaña to the Solomon Islands.
* Parts of the exposed southwestern coast of Tierra del Fuego remain uncharted to this day.
* FitzRoy duly established the three young people, with every modern convenience, on the southern shores of Tierra del Fuego, but the experiment was a complete failure. They soon fell out with each other, abandoned the habits they had learned in London, and reverted to their former way of life.
CHAPTER 15: SLOCUM CIRCLES THE WORLD
* Lloyd’s Register of Ships relayed a message from the Tanamo to a member of Colin’s family, in accordance with instructions left by him before his departure from the United Kingdom. This was a useful service in the days before satellite phones eliminated the need for it.
* Many ships have been lost on the Smalls. In 1991 a diver recovered a brass sword-guard just off the reef—presumably from a wrecked Viking vessel. It dates from c.1100 CE, and each side is finely decorated with a pair of stylized animals, interlaced with thin, snakelike beasts. On the top of the guard two animals with open jaws bite the place where the grip once projected through the guard.
* Now the process is even easier as handheld computers can perform all the necessary calculations. There is even an iPhone app that works out lunar distances (StarPilot).
* This is a mistake: Nuku Hiva is actually one of the more northerly members of the Marquesas Islands. Perhaps Slocum meant to write Hiva Oa.
CHAPTER 16: ENDURANCE
* Undetected, this error would have meant making our landfall on the French coast somewhere on the southwest coast of Brittany.
CHAPTER 17: “THESE ARE MEN”
* The James Caird—named after one of the principal sponsors of the expedition—is preserved at Dulwich College in South London.
* The current Admiralty chart (3597)—corrected in 2012—warns of “inadequate surveys” around Annenkov Island, and the southern shore of the island itself is marked with a broken line that means it has not been surveyed properly. The chart does, however, reveal an alarming isolated reef that “breaks” about three miles to the west of the island with the cheerful name of “Horror Rock.”