"Dead reckoning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no'the," said he, raising his face from his labours. "Mr. Hay, you'll have to watch your dead reckoning; I want every yard she makes on every hair's-breadth of a course. I'm going to knock a hole right straight through the Paumotus, and that's always a near touch. Now, if this South East Trade ever blew out of the S.E., which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was disappointed. At noon the sun was hidden under a dense bank of clouds, and, as "dead reckoning" would have been of no avail, since they had no previous record to go by, he ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... or Cape Cod; dead reckoning, eye-sight, or star-gazing, all's one to your real dolphin. The shape of the coast between Fundy and Horn, is as familiar to my eye, as an admirer to this pretty young lady; and as to the other shore, I have run it down oftener than the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... two days our course has not been plotted. I sit down and do this now, for the purpose of finding where we are by dead reckoning. It is a clear night, and I take out the sextant to make observation for latitude, and I find that the astronomic determination agrees very nearly with that of the plot—quite as closely as might be expected from a meridian ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... route-surveys: sights are taken from mule-back, and distances are judged by the eye. True, the protractions come out well, but this is all the worse, suggesting the process commonly called "doctoring." For the style of thing, however, "dead reckoning" did well enough. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... For finding distance east and west the navigators of the fifteenth century had no such appliances as our modern chronometer and instruments of observation. They could tell how far they had sailed only by 'dead reckoning'; this means that if their ship was going at such and such a speed, it was supposed to have made such and such a distance in a given time. But when ships were being driven to and fro, and buffeted by adverse winds, this reckoning ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... can't take an observation with his sextant in all that time. Captains don't like it very well when it is cloudy for several days together, for then they have nothing to tell them just where the ship is, but what is called "dead reckoning." ...
— The Sandman: His Sea Stories • William J. Hopkins
... weather—for a wonder—with half a gale of wind from the eastward, blowing over our taffrail, to which we showed every rag that we could set upon the hooker. The actual passage occurred in the early morning—about six o'clock, according to our dead reckoning—and upon working out the sights that I had secured after breakfast for the determination of the longitude, I found that we were thirty miles to the westward of it, and far enough south to permit of our shifting our helm for the mysterious island to which we were supposed ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... day by day was at first determined by dead reckoning, to be verified later by observations for latitude. Dead reckoning was simply the compass course for direction, and for distance the mean estimate of Bartlett, Marvin, and myself as to the length of the day's march. On board ship dead reckoning is the compass course for ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... were now to thread. The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs; the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that time Columbus had reckoned that he had gone some 710 leagues from the Canaries, and if Zipangu were in the position that Tostanelli's map gave it, he ought to have been in its neighbourhood. It was reckoned in those days that a ship on an average could make four knots an hour, dead reckoning, which would give about 100 miles a day, so that Columbus might reckon on passing over the 3100 miles which he thought intervened between the Azores and Japan in about thirty-three days. All through the early ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... shall have a jolly trip of it," exclaimed Tom. "There is no necessity to bother ourselves by taking observations or keeping a dead reckoning, but, like the navigators of old, we shall never lose ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... for some time, Barney," replied Martin; "but you have your compass, and we can surely make the coast by dead reckoning—eh?" ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... observation. Captain Hackstaff wasn't one of those old skippers who do everything themselves with a pocket watch, and keep the key of the chronometer in their waistcoat pocket, and won't tell the mate how far the dead reckoning is out. He was rather the other way, and I was glad of it, for he generally let me work the sights he took, and just ran his eye over my figures afterwards. I am bound to say his eye was pretty good, for he would pick out a mistake in a logarithm, or tell me that ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... yeh," he said. "You're such a green goose, it makes me sick a bit. You hevn't reckoned out the chances, not quite. It's a kind of dead reckoning yeh hevn't had call ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... They're good men! And a good man who knows he's good will not take any slack from man or devil; so I cannot afford to lose those two. Skinner, I've got myself into an awful mess. Here I've been running by dead reckoning and now I'm on the rocks! What'll I do, Skinner? I'm licked; but, dang it all, sir, I can't admit it, can I? Isn't there some way to referee this scrap and ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... whose voyage is on the track of the trade winds nevertheless needs more than dead reckoning for his course; he needs to take the sun at noon, to study the heavens at night, and to con his chart. To follow one's interior drift only is to sail the ocean without chart or compass. The sail that is wafted by the impulses ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott |
