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From: Frank Reed (no email)
Date: Sun Apr 02 2006 - 01:36:13 EST
George H, you wrote:
"The end-result of all this is to prove what I had suspected; that the old
Smalls lighthouse that Sumner saw, and its replacement in 1861, are within a
few feet of the same spot on the same rock, the only rock that's always above
sea level."
Nice to know. Thanks for pursuing that.
And you wrote:
"And it's all of 5 miles away from the spot that Sumner showed it on his
sketch map. Unless Sumner happened to possess a chart or light-list that showed
the light 5 miles North of where it really was, it seems that he falsified
the position of the light so as to make a more dramatic story out of the first
"Sumner line". In my eyes, that rather diminishes
the stature of Captain Thomas Sumner."
That doesn't make much sense as a story of "falsification" to me. If he was
making up a story, completely fictional and "falsified", then why would the
details be wrong in the most obvious parameter that he could have looked up in
a book? And what would be the motive?? It strikes me much more as a case of
someone attempting to re-construct the events long after they happened.
Clearly he spent years experimenting with his methods after the initial experience
in 1837. If he had remembered the general circumstances but not the exact
numbers involved in his sights in that year, he would naturally have started by
working backward from the position of Small's Light. He puts this down a
plotting chart, introducing some small error, and then works backward to the
details of the sight that gave the line of position. This seems like a probable
scenario to me. Navigators in that era rarely kept all the details of their
calculations. Sights were often worked up in chalk on a slate.
Of course, I would add that it's literally possible that he made up every
bit of the story and he had never even been to sea. The logic works regardless.
-FER
42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W.
www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
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