|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: man has devised, makes possible the surest and easiest method by
far of ascertaining longitude. Yet the Pilgrim sailed in a day
when the chronometer was just coming into general use. So little
was it depended upon that the Pilgrim carried only one, and that
one, going wrong at the outset, was never used again. A navigator
of the present would be aghast if asked to voyage for two years,
from Boston, around the Horn to California, and back again,
without a chronometer. In those days such a proceeding was a
matter of course, for those were the days when dead reckoning was
indeed something to reckon on, when running down the latitude was
a common way of finding a place, and when lunar observations were
|
