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Updated: June 23, 2025
Previous to my embarkation the room was the receptacle of a quantity of chronometers, sextants, charts, and other nautical apparatus. There were seventeen chronometers in one box, and a few others lay around loose. I never had as much time at my command before or since. Twice a day an officer came to wind these chronometers and note their variation.
Small wonder, then, if the little community, resenting all this threatened improvement off the face of the earth, got their powder-horns ready, took the covers off their trading flint-guns, and with much gesticulation summarily interfered with several anticipatory surveys of their farms, doubling up the sextants, bundling the surveying parties out of their freeholds, and very peremptorily informing Mr.
The stock-in-trade of this old gentleman comprised chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants, and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a ship's course, or the keeping of a ship's reckoning, or the prosecuting of a ship's discoveries.
Quadrants and sextants were the invention of a much later period. Indeed, considering that they had so little knowledge of navigation and the variation of the compass, and that their easting and westing could only be computed by dead reckoning, it is wonderful how our ancestors traversed the ocean in the way they did, with comparatively so few accidents.
Presently he would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of little houses and shops, with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the shops of instrument-makers, where to-day there are compasses and sextants and chronometers.
We had lost something in another way, though; for, when Mr Quadrant took the sun at noon, with all of us youngsters standing round him with our sextants, like a parcel of chickens gathered about an old hen, which indeed the master greatly resembled with his shock head of hair and fussy manner, the ship was found to be in latitude 44 degrees 5 minutes north and longitude 7 degrees 50 minutes west.
Now the admiral of the coast had this piratical privilege: and as, in former days, sextants and chronometers were unknown, sea-faring men incurred more risk than they do at present, and the wrecks which strewed the coast were of very great value. I had a proof the other day that this right is still exacted; that is as far as regards property unclaimed.
Very often, as the old maxim goes, the simplest things are the most startling, and that, too, from their very simplicity. So cherish no alarms, if thus we addressed the setting sun "Be thou, old pilot, our guide!" But thoughts of sextants and quadrants were the least of our cares.
Whether this could be done or not could only be ascertained by a more thorough examination of her bottom than had yet been possible. The midshipmen were summoned to assist. Adair and his officers stood with their sextants in their hands ready to note the sun's altitude should he burst forth, while the first lieutenant watched the chronometer. The tossing seas rose round the labouring ship.
Here is the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but oilskins, sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum. It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to nest in the masthead of a cattleship.
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