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Updated: June 29, 2025
This device, however, seems to have been abandoned or forgotten in Columbus's day, when there was no more exact method of estimating dead-reckoning than the primitive one of spitting over the side in calm weather, or at other times throwing some object into the water and estimating the rate of progress by its speed in passing the ship's side.
With a hurrah which indicated the sincerity of these orders, the crew sprang to obey them, and with foreyards braced to starboard and head-sheets flat, the ship Wilmington paid off, wore around, and bringing the young breeze on the port quarter, steadied down to a course for Sandy Hook, which the captain, with hands released, but still under the influence of those threatening pistols, worked out from the mate's dead-reckoning.
During three centuries the whole of the coast of Terra Firma has been laid down too far to the south: this has been owing to the current near the island of Trinidad, which sets toward the north, and mariners are led by their dead-reckoning to think themselves farther south than they really are.
He secured the figures by his dead-reckoning; but the carefully kept log-book also showed longitude by chronometer sights, taken when the sun shone, with his old quadrant and older watch, and corrected to bring a result plausibly near to that of the reckoning by log and compass. But the log-book contained no reference to the loss of the chronometer. That was to happen at the last.
Columbus, however, knew by the signs as well as by his dead-reckoning that he was somewhere close to land; and with a fine demonstration of confidence he increased the ration of water, instead of lowering it, assuring the crews that they would be ashore in a day or two.
This device, however, seems to have been abandoned or forgotten in Columbus's day, when there was no more exact method of estimating dead-reckoning than the primitive one of spitting over the side in calm weather, or at other times throwing some object into the water and estimating the rate of progress by its speed in passing the ship's side.
If his navigation had been more haphazard he might never have found again the islands of his first discovery; and the fact that he made a landfall exactly where he wished to make it shows a high degree of exactness in his method of ascertaining latitude, and is another instance of his skill in estimating his dead-reckoning.
By far the most important element in the navigation of Columbus, in so far as estimating his position was concerned, was what is known as "dead-reckoning" that is to say, the computation of the distance travelled by the ship through the water.
We knew pretty well what it was; Carera kept his small stock of charts in the after cabin, and always spread them out on the cabin table to lay off his course and distance run, so that we had had abundant opportunity to refer, as often as we pleased, to the particular chart he was using on that trip, and had met with no difficulty whatever in keeping a private dead-reckoning of our own, from which we were already aware that we might expect to make Dolphin Head, the highest point of land at the extreme westernmost end of Jamaica, on this particular morning.
It was in July, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, call it July Fourth that Captain Stephen Girard was skirting the coast of the Atlantic, feeling his way through a fog toward New York. He was not sure of his course and was sailing by dead-reckoning. Suddenly the fog lifted. The sun stood out, a great golden ball in the sky.
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