The Whys And Wherefores of Navigation

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI Latitude Meridian Altitude It is surprising to us, in these advanced days of nautical science, to read of our adventurous ancestors of a century ago navigating their ships to all parts of the known and unknown world with nothing to guide them but their dead reckoning and the latitude crudely obtained by the method of meridian altitude. Many of our finest ships, as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century, sailed to China and back with no knowledge of their longitude save what the master guessed it to be. Even in later days much navigating has been done in the less lucrative trades by mariners who had no knowledge of the method of finding longitude. It required more time and distance to navigate by latitude and dead reckoning only, as it was not always safe to lay a course from an indef