Supplement to the Connecticut Courant Volume 5; Containing Tales, Travels, History, Biography, Poetry, and a Great Variety of Miscellaneous Articles (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1838 Excerpt: ...and the fruit of your own labor, and will be the best work on navigation ever published;" a prediction that was wonderfully fulfilled to the letter. As an illustration of the dangerous blunders of Moore's work, I will mention a fact related to me by John Waters, Esq., of Boston. He states that in the begining of the year 1800, he was returning from Canton in the ship Eliza, and that somewhere this side of the Cape (he thinks off the West India Islands, ) in taking the sun's declination one day, they turned to Moore's "Table XVII. of the Sun's Declination for the years 1792, 1798, 1800, 1804," to which he had appended the remark, "each being a leap year." In consequence of thus erroneously making 1800 a leap year, he gives the declination on the 1st of March 7 deg. 11 sec. whereas by reference to the Nautical Almanac of that year, it will be found to be 7 deg. 33 sec. making a difference of twenty-three miles. Mr. Waters fortunately had a Nautical Almanac on board, and likewise a copy of Pike's Arithmetic, which explained the reason why the year 1800 was not leap year. Inconsequence of this he escaped the dangers to which other vessels in the same latitude were subjected; for he afterwards read in the newspapers of several ships that were wrecked solely by reason of that blunder. It was, indeed, quite time for Hamilton Moore to be laid up hjgh and dry, on the shelf. Before publishing his own work, Mr. Bowditch had prepared for Mr. Blunt two corrected editions of Moore's book, in which he had actually discovered and corrected eight thousand errors in the nautical tables, as he himself testifies in the preface to the last stereotype edition. Such was the germ of" The new American Practical Navigator," the first edition of whic...