Word: sextant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Indoctrination of Nazi fighters begins in school. History is fed to boys as a story of the great German destiny. Mathematics is taught in terms of bullet trajectories, range-finding, sextant-reading, aerodynamics...
Questioned, the sailors' grinning comrades told a fantastic story. In a soft. lifeboat, equipped with sails and an auxiliary motor, the missing men had stowed sextant and compass, fuel, a month's supply of food and water. Night before the Orinoco was seized, they slipped away, sailed quietly out of Tampico harbor, headed east across the Gulf. Presumably they hoped to clear the Florida Keys, make their way through the British blockade across 4,000 miles of open sea to an Atlantic port on the Nazi-occupied coast of France-a cruise some 800 miles longer than Captain...
...Renaissance. Without quite understanding why, he has committed himself, in the middle of a tabby life, to sail with Columbus on his third voyage, as guardian of the Spanish King's interests in the New World. On the voyage his mind fumbles toward the invention of the sextant, the use of Indian hammocks at sea, of pumps for bilge, copper sheathing against marine borers. He is fascinated -and so is the reader-by every detail of medieval navigation, by Columbus (half inspired zany, fur-collared "thespian"), by the cloudy jumble of zombie myth and fetal science which throng Columbus...