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Updated: June 29, 2025
A little later, Brice's scent became so distinct that the collie could abandon his nose-to-the-ground tactics and strike across country, by dead-reckoning, guided not only by his nose but by the sound of Gavin's steps. Then, in an access of delight, he burst upon the plodding man. "Why, Bobby!" exclaimed Brice, touched by the dog's rapture in having found him again. "Why, Bobby Burns!
We had also figured up the dead-reckoning separately, as much for practice as to avoid mistakes. We had varied a little on the dead-reckoning, and it proved that I was the nearer right, as the position of St. Augustine Light proved. The steam-yacht was under charter for a year to my cousin, Owen Garningham, a young Englishman, who was spending the winter in the South.
Nevertheless, dead-reckoning is often the only guide the sailor has to depend upon for days at a time, when storms and cloudy skies prevent him from ascertaining his true position by other means, of which we shall speak presently. Of course, in the early days of navigation there were no charts of the ocean.
If a captain can't see the sun he allows for how fast the ship is going, and for the time run and the currents, and all that, and then reckons up where he is. I travelled with a captain once, and so long as he stuck to dead-reckoning he was all right. He made out we were off Cairns, and that's just where we were; because we struck the Great Barrier Reef, and became a total wreck ten minutes after.
"What do you call a book-muster?" said the globe-trotter, who was spending a month in the country, and would naturally write a book on it. Why, a book-muster is something like dead-reckoning on a ship. You know what dead-reckoning is, don't you?
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.
"That's it, as true as you live, Captain Alick!" exclaimed Bob Washburn, the mate of the Sylvania, as he dropped the spy-glass from his right eye. "Your dead-reckoning was correct every time." "I have no doubt you are right, Washburn," I replied, referring to an open volume that lay on the shelf under the forward windows of the pilot-house.
All through the next day the Santa Maria and the Nina had to shorten sail in order not to leave the damaged Pinta behind; the three captains had a discussion and difference of opinion as to where they were; but Columbus, who was a genius at dead-reckoning, proved to be right in his surmise, and they came in sight of the Canaries on Thursday morning, August 9th.
On the forty-third day from land, a long time to be at sea alone, the sky being beautifully clear and the moon being "in distance" with the sun, I threw up my sextant for sights. I found from the result of three observations, after long wrestling with lunar tables, that her longitude by observation agreed within five miles of that by dead-reckoning.
As scientific knowledge advanced, instruments of peculiar and more complicated form were devised to enable navigators to ascertain more correctly their position on the surface of the sea; but they did not, and never will, supersede the method by dead-reckoning for this reason, that the latter can be practised at all times, while the former are useless unless the sun, moon, or stars be visible, which in some latitudes they are not for many days and weeks, when clouds and fogs shroud the bright sky from view.
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