Page 34 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

All complaints about the iniquities of life were, however, temporarily set aside
by Christmas, my first away from home. Many would have liked to have phoned
home, but this was practically impossible, especially when located in the middle
of the ocean. All communications came through the Radio Officer (the R/O, an
important role in a small ship) and all messages were by way of Morse code, which,
with semaphore, deck officers were required to know. Spent thus, the season was
enjoyed in somewhat lonely circumstances. However, the captain hosted a party, we
cadets were given the day off, and dinner was more than acceptable with grapefruit,
soup, fish, turkey, Xmas pudding, mince pie and nuts … and, more importantly,
champagne (I had turned eighteen, nineteen days before!).

But being in the middle of a large ocean on a decrepit ship and having to do
what at that time I took as a martinet of a mate, the only option was to knuckle
under. I had also begun to wonder if we were going to get to our destination;
twice on December 30th we had to heave to, wallowing away in a modest swell,
while engine repairs were effected. The paint locker having been cleansed, (what
we were supposed to learn from this horrible exercise still eludes me) we were
back on the learning curve. While at Warsash, we had learned some of the
principles of celestial navigation, but actually coming up to the bridge at noon to
take sights was rather more complex a task than it had seemed in the classroom.
However, noon was simple in comparison with the calculations at dusk. Firstly,
actually finding the particular stars required was, in practice, quite difficult. And,
secondly, there was little time to find those heavenly bodies, sunset being quite
short because of the sharp angle at which the sun descended over the horizon
in lower latitudes; once the sun had set, the horizon against which the angle of
the stars had to be measured disappeared into the darkness in mere moments.
As there was no second chance once there was no horizon, this could result
in calculations indicating only that one was somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
(Without seeing the sky, which could happen for long periods in, for example, the
South-West monsoon, one was guided by ‘dead reckoning’, which means where
one’s course and speed, plus educated guesses as to the effects of tides and wind,
would supposedly take the vessel. It could be an inaccurate sort of navigation; in
1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell had lost a good part of a British Fleet on
the Rocks of the Isles of Scilly because of faulty dead reckoning, this when the
(Muslim-invented) astrolabe was in use, only some two decades before the sextant
was invented. The lack of a reliable navigational aids was, however, alleviated by
some extraordinary feats of seamanship; Captain Bligh and some crew were cast
into a small cutter near Tahiti in 1789 and navigated over 3,500 nautical miles to
Batavia, Java, a feat carried out with navigational equipment that was minimal
even for that day.)

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