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Updated: May 12, 2025
When they lay seven miles off us, to the South, we found the longitude, according to our chronometers, 142° 2' 38". Bellingshausen considered it to be 142° 7' 42". From failure of wind, we could not make the island of Romanzow till the morning of the 8th of March.
His observations were grounded on the distance of the moon, which always gives a false longitude unless there is an opportunity of seeing the moon at equal distances, right and left, from the sun. Our longitudes were fixed by good chronometers, which having been regulated at Cape Venus, could not in so short a time have made any important error.
A couch was to the left, the bed place to the right; my writing desk and the chronometers' table faced the door. It contained some lockers surmounted by a bookcase; and a few clothes, a thick jacket or two, caps, oilskin coat, and such like, hung on hooks. There was at the bottom of that part a door opening into my bathroom, which could be entered also directly from the saloon.
During that period many adventures of a more or less exciting nature befell them, which, however, we must pass over in silence. At the end of that time, the youth who had been sent for the Captain's sextant and other philosophical instruments arrived with them all thermometers, barometers, chronometers, wind and water gauges, pendulums, etcetera, safe and sound.
We commenced by unearthing various meteorological and astronomical instruments the thermometers of Baudin, Salleron, Fastre, an aneroid, a Fortin barometer, chronometers, a sextant, an astronomical spyglass, a compass glass.... In short, what Duveyrier calls the material that is simplest and easiest to transport on a camel.
Two weeks previous, at Pago Pago, in Samoa, I had asked my captain to compare our chronometer with the chronometers on the American cruiser, the Annapolis. This he told me he had done of course he had done nothing of the sort; and he told me that the difference he had ascertained was only a small fraction of a second.
He had, however, as yet no trustworthy means of reckoning longitude and no accurate gauge of distance traveled. The log-line was not invented until the 17th century, and accurate chronometers for determining longitude did not come into use until still later.
Whilst on shore getting observations for the errors of the chronometers in the afternoon, I could not avoid soliloquising as I gazed on the ship lying surrounded by lofty rocky heights, that towered above her masts till they appeared mere sticks.
Captain Fitzroy was in command, and he was especially commissioned to map the coast of South America from La Plata to Cape Horn and up the western side. In addition to this work, by carrying a set of accurate chronometers, he was to check up the longitude of the various ports to be visited in this circumnavigation of the globe.
Always the same impassible member of the Reform Club, whom no incident could surprise, as unvarying as the ship's chronometers, and seldom having the curiosity even to go upon the deck, he passed through the memorable scenes of the Red Sea with cold indifference; did not care to recognise the historic towns and villages which, along its borders, raised their picturesque outlines against the sky; and betrayed no fear of the dangers of the Arabic Gulf, which the old historians always spoke of with horror, and upon which the ancient navigators never ventured without propitiating the gods by ample sacrifices.
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