Word: sextant
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...California and laugh it off. Tireless investigation has uncovered a new but reliable formula which may solve the problem. Climb Lowell House Tower and tap base bell with weather vane (unobtrusively removed from Dunster House at high noon three days before). Number of echoes indicates proper month. Using standard sextant, determine latitude and longitude. Look at watch to find time of day. Multiply sum of these results by the height in rods of new Chapel Tower. By the time this is done, spring will be over and the matter may safely be dropped...
...transport pilot, took off from New York last week for Bermuda, Azores, Paris. Instead of a radio the plane carried a small cargo of advertised foodstuffs for "the first payload flight to Europe." In "rocking" the plane off the still water the flyers knocked to the floor their sextant - only navigating instrument aboard - but instead of turning back they elected to guess their course. Navigator MacLaren guessed right at first, picked up two steamers about halfway; guessed wrong thereafter and turned back to safety at Norfolk...
...pointed crazily to East and West. Beside him stolid Dutch Evert Van Dyk held the controls, stared straight ahead. In the cabin behind him Radioman John Stannage frantically worked key and dials. Navigator J. Patrick Saul searched in vain for a patch of sky that he might fix his sextant to a star. Now their latest radio bearing showed them 175 miles east of the Cape, when they had thought it only 75 miles...
Following inexorable British custom, the Kenilworth Castle hove to just at the moment when by the sextant of her Navigating Officer she was "crossing the Line. A gangway was lowered. In their oldest clothes hilarious passengers who had never bisected the Equator before, trooped from bar to boat deck. Up the boarding ladder came His Majesty King Neptune, shrouded in whiskers, accompanied by his Queen, his Barber, the members of his Court, all liberally smeared with burnt cork...
...fact, he may be very wise about certain things, such as farms, or gasoline engines, or boats, and he can talk to you almost with eloquence about what makes the bees swarm, or what causes that sputter in your motor car, or how to shoot the sun with a sextant. If you take the trouble to ask, he will perhaps reveal to you his shy ambition to become a ranger in the government forestry service, to join the merchant marine, to be a dairy farmer, or to set up in business with his printing press...