Word: sextant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...57th day of his perilous 477-mile trek along the jagged ice fields of the Arctic Ocean, Japanese Explorer Naomi Uemura last week took a sextant sighting, then another and another. At last he was sure. With the 17 huskies who had pulled his sledge, he was at the top of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole alone by way of the frozen Arctic...
...great Yankee skipper Joshua Slocum used only the simplest of navigational instruments-a compass, a sextant and his famous "dollar clock"-when he sailed his 37-ft. Spray round the world alone from 1895 to 1898. The solitary skipper of a spanking new sloop called the Oxy will find his life at sea far easier than Slocum's when he sails in a singlehanded race across the Atlantic next year. If he wants to relax and leave the helm, all he will have to do is flip a switch on an electronic self-steering device; day or night...
Another of the firm's innovations will add speed and accuracy to a deep-water sailor's celestial navigation. Taking sextant sights on sun, moon or stars from the pitching deck of a small craft is difficult under the best of circumstances. Most skippers turn to a crew member to note the precise time of their measurements, and such teamwork allows ample room for error. With no one to note the time for his sights, Oxy's skipper will rely on a specially designed quartz chronometer built into the handle of his sextant...
...says, afraid of "annihilation, of being surrounded by what is hostile, of loss and of being lost." The test that he devised for himself was formidable. Equipped with little more than a knife, a badly calibrated sextant and a crash course in Arabic, he planned to cross from the Atlantic to the Nile, a journey of 3,600 miles that had never been completed by a traveler alone...
...great. For the North Pole is a purely theoretical location hovering over immense seas of drifting, heaving ice. To Rawlins, Peary's claim that he made a beeline to the Pole over such terrain in-50° F. temperatures is hard to swallow, particularly since he used his sextant sparingly. On the last leg of his trek, he ordered his only thoroughly trained navigator to stay behind. Peary's recorded speeds of the final march far exceed the rate he had managed previously. Others have noted that the logs Peary presented as evidence were surprisingly clean considering that...