Opening paragraphs.................

 

A hundred and fifty-seven castaways on a desert island in the South China Sea, the survivors of the wreck of HMS Diane, which had struck upon an uncharted rock and had there been shattered by a great typhoon some days later: a hundred and fifty-seven, but as they sat there round the edge of a flat bare piece of ground between high-water mark and the beginning of the forest they sounded like the full complement of a ship of the line, for this was Sunday afternoon, and the starboard watch, headed by Captain Aubrey, was engaged in a cricket-match against the Marines, under their commanding officer,  Mr. Welby.

-Patrick O'Brian,  The Nutmeg of Consolation

All retired now............................

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,

Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.

They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.

Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.

Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,

and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,

hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left

for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.

The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,

an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.

As for the others, the great ideas on horseback

and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down

that road you see on the final page of storybooks,

the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears

into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

-Billy Collins,  The Death of Allegory

from Sailing Alone Around The Room

Columbus makes a few mistakes....

     The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, and his calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus.  Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus, since all thought mistakenly that the  Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read and had looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.*
     Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by a European ship within a few weeks of its leaving port.  The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers.  Compounding his mistake was his misreading - in a Latin translation - of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Faghani, known in the West as Alfraganus.  The Persian's correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be the same as Roman miles.  In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones.  Had the Ocean not held the Americas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would have perished in the deep and never been heard from again.  This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known) attempts.

-Thomas Cahill,  Heretics and Heroes

*No one who knew anything thought the Earth was flat.  This was an anti-Catholic fable created by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Jean Antoine Letronne and disseminated widely to English speakers by Washington Irving in his unreliable biography of Columbus.

Columbus knew a thing or two......

     Columbus's good luck lay not in his miserably wrongheaded calculations about distance but in his accurate knowledge of the North Atlantic trade winds, which flow in a great clockwise circle.  How he came by this information we can't be sure.  It may have been the result of his own observations on his previous voyages, only some of which we know about.  In any case, it was information not widely understood at the time, even if in our own day it is common knowledge to transatlantic airline passengers.  As a result of his awareness of the trade-winds pattern, he was able to keep them at his back, plotting a southerly outgoing course and a northerly homecoming one, both of which enabled him to travel much more quickly than others had been able to do.  In this way, Columbus and his crew were saved from contrary winds, becalmings, and death by dehydration on the high seas.

-Thomas Cahill,  Heroes and Heretics: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World

On the benefit of rough waters..........

Opening paragraphs...................................

The Surprise, lying well out in the channel with Gibraltar half a mile away on her starboard quarter, lying at a single anchor with her head to the freshening north-west breeze, piped all hands at four bells in the afternoon watch;  and at the cheerful sound her tender Ringle, detached once more on a private errand by Lord Keith, cheered with the utmost good will, while the Surprises turned out with a wonderful readiness, laughing, beaming and thumping one another on the back in spite of a strong promise of rain and a heavy sea running already.  Many had put their best clothes - embroidered waistcoats, and silk Barcelona handkerchiefs around their necks - for the Surprises and their captain, Jack Aubrey, had taken a very elegant prize indeed, a Moorish galley laden with gold, no less - a galley that had fired on the Surprise first, thus qualifying herself as a pirate, so that the prize-court, sitting at the pressing request of Captain Aubrey's friend Admiral Lord Keith, had condemned her out of hand:  a perfectly lawful prize, to be shared according to the usage of the sea, or more exactly according to the Prize Law of 1808.
-Patrick O'Brian,  Blue At The Mizzen

Opening paragraphs...................................

A purple ocean, vast under the sky and devoid of all visible life apart from two minute ships racing across its immensity.  They were as close-hauled to the somewhat irregular north-east trades as ever they could be, with every sail they could safely carry and even more, their bowlines twanging taut:  they had been running like this day after day, sometimes so far apart that each saw only the other's topsails above the horizon, sometimes within gunshot; and when this was the case they fired at one another with their chasers.
-Patrick O'Brian,  The Wine-Dark Sea

Opening paragraphs............................

The sudden rearmament that followed Napoleon's escape from Elba had done little to thin the ranks of unemployed sea-officers by the early spring of 1815.  A man-of-war, stripped, dismantled and laid up cannot be manned, equipped and made ready for sea in a matter of weeks;  and the best vantage-points in Gibraltar were now crowded with gentlemen on half-pay who with others had gathered to watch the long-expected arrival of Commodore Aubrey's squadron from Madeira, a squadron that would do something to refurnish the great bare stretch of water inside the mole - an extraordinary nakedness emphasized by the presence of a few hulks, the Royal Sovereign wearing the flag of the Commander-in-Chief, and a couple of lonely seventy-fours:  no stream of liberty-boats plying to and fro, almost no appearance of true wartime life.
-Patrick O'Brian,  The Hundred Days

Diagrams.............................

Sea-faring men had long known how to find at what latitude they were sailing.  Finding longitude was a bit more elusive.  Without knowing both latitude and longitude, ocean-going sailors had no way of knowing their true location.  A bit disconcerting. In 1714, the British Parliament offered a reward of £20,000 to the person who solved the problem of discerning longitude.  It took a while, but by the mid-1700's John Harrison solved the problem with a sturdy and accurate time piece and some handy mathematical computations.  (It should be noted that £20,000 in 1714 is worth more than $10,000,000 today, and that Parliament tried to stiff Harrison.  Only an appeal to the Crown got him paid in full).  Diagrams and clocks below:

H1

H2

H3

H4