Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 282, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 December 1917 — RULE OF THUMB NAVIGATION [ARTICLE]

RULE OF THUMB NAVIGATION

New England Sailors Stick to Sextant and Care Little for New-Fangled Nautical Instruments. Edward Hungerford, who made an Investigation for Everybody’s to find out where the men are coming from for our new,merchant marine, relates some interesting incidents showing the New England sailors* independence of new-fangled nautical instruments. “Ask them about navigation,” he writes, “and they will bring out, with loving care, the sextant -that was father’s or Uncle Jim’s or, more likely, grandfather’s or one of the great-uncle’s. They will point out the vernier scale upon its bright face and say Jo yonlandlubber that you are: “‘She shoots the sun. With IL.we get the latitude. A chart and the latitude —a lead line and jedgement—jedgment counts —and we can get anywhere between the Bermudas and Greenland? “ ‘How about the longitude?* yon venture. “‘You certainly are a landlubber. The salt lets you know that, with a single glance.’ Then he shows compassion and relates an anecdote: ‘"There was a fellow sailing out of Gloucester and someone gave him a chronometer —that’s the Instrument the scientific fellows get the longitude with. They explained it to him, an’ for three days he sailed by it—God knows where to. Then the dinged thing busts an’ he comes back to the sextant an’ gets to the banks only a little behind the rest of the fleet But if that chronometer hadn’t busted, by Judas Priest, stranger, he might have hit over in Portugal somewhere.’"