Good observation, Liz. He's some more perspective.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Shakespeare makes several allusions to seamanship in his writings. This is certainly one of his most memmorable:
- It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
We can assume that Shakespeare read John Davis' book, Seaman's Secrets, published in 1594. In fact, Sonnet 116 was published in 1609.
The navigator aboard a bark (clipper ship) uses both the sextant (or backstaff) to measure the height (angle) of celestial objects above the horizon -- and from that he determines the ship's location at sea.
Now latitude can be very accurately determined by measuring the height of the Sun at exactly high noon. An accurate time instrument is absolutely essential for other kinds of celestial observations, although as long as you know the daily error rate of the timepiece, you are OK.
It's longitude that is the hardest thing to get right and it stumped navigators for centuries.
Essential to navigating precisely is scientific study of the heavenly bodies which is printed in tables within a Nautical Almanac (beginning in 1767 in England) which predicts very nicely the location of the brightest stars, the moon and Sun by date and time.
And so in my time in the Navy (1974-1983) before GPS, we used the Almanac to calculate our position. Navigation was usually done two times a day -- sunrise and sunset. Why? Other than the noon sun fix, the brightest stars are only seen at that time. At night, the horizon is too indistinct to make an accurate reading.
When I was stationed ashore in Hawaii, I actually went out and spent (wasted) my money on buying a sextant of my own.
But my appreciation for the instrument increased after owning it and now I own a relic of my days on the sea.
And I learned a Mnemonic saying: "Captain! All de Rigging Seems Properly Polished" which allowed you remember the stars that can be seen in a clockwise rotation around Orion from the top: Capella, Aldebaran, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon, and Pollux -- the stars that are bright enough at sunset to be seen clearly.
My moment of pride was using the sextant aboard a Navy ship on the way home from a West Pac deployment.
The quartermaster recorded my readings as I quickly discovered the stars (which most navigators could not find on their own). Besides, that night was partly cloudy.
But returning to the chart room, they found that I made some very good readings and three arcs of position crossed each other on the chart in a very tight triangle. Ha!
So thank you, Liz, for allowing Time's Fool to remember his days wandering aboard an eastward sailing bark.
Here are some midshipmen enjoying the pleasure...
