Word: ocean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Supplies and Accounts, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, etc.-had functioned like little feudal states. Bureau chiefs were jealous, prerogative-minded, ensnarled in procedure. Many a Secretary of the Navy talked wistfully about simplifying the Navy, but nothing was done until Pearl Harbor rocked Frank Knox. The two-ocean Navy, due for completion in 1944, was needed in 1942. Panting for construction speed, Knox created a new Office of Procurement and Material, put Admiral Robinson in charge. His powers were the naval equivalent of WPBoss Donald Nelson's. He could tell off any bureau chief...
ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA-Samuet Eliot Morison-Atlantic-Little, Brown...
...learn-by-doing methods that Francis Parkman used for his History of France in the New World. In the summer of 1939 Morison and some friends bought the barkentine, Capitana, which was "near enough to Columbus' larger ships in rig and burthen to enable us to cross the ocean under conditions very similar to those of his day. . . ." In the Capitana they explored the European end of Columbus' routes, then headed back across the Atlantic. "Our crossing from Gomera to Trinidad was approximately on the route of [Columbus'] Third Voyage, and we made exactly the same Trinidad...
...autumn afternoon Columbus' crews saw the last of the Canary Islands disappear. "By nightfall . . . the three ships had an uncharted ocean to themselves." How did Columbus know where he was on that sea? "The Admiral liked to pose as an expert in celestial navigation. . . . Yet the testimony of his own journals proves that the simple method of finding latitude from a meridional observation of the sun . . . was unknown to Columbus." He was unable to use the newly invented astrolabe, and probably had none aboard. The common quadrant was his only instrument of celestial navigation. Mostly he sailed by dead...
...volume, popular edition ($3.50) of Admiral of the Ocean Sea has been condensed to 671 pages by cutting out esoteric nautical data, pages of notes, a chapter on the origin of syphilis, other interesting superfluities...