Casdave check the OP. This isn’t a question about the modern navy and what you say is just plain wrong about the Napoleonic-era British navy and we are in GQ
Nothing to add, except that a high school friend of mine is a HUGE fan of the Aubrey/Maturin books but, oddly enough, has no patience for the lengthy descriptions of ropes, sails, manuevering, etc. He told me he just says to himself, “Now they are sailing the ship very skillfully” and skips ahead.
A major concern on old time sailing ships was fire-the lined were coated in pitch, the whole ship was highly flammable. Did each ship have a firefighting unit?
Just about everyone was trained in damage control of all kinds, including putting out fires. There wasn’t a “firefighting unit,” as such.
That’s exactly what I do. Once in awhile I’ll labor through one of the sailing/battle descriptions, with the aid of A Sea of Words, but in the end it isn’t worth the translating effort.
Is that why Daylight Saving time flips over at 2am?
No.
At one time it used to be midnight, but someone decided that 2am was less disruptive.
O’Brian wrote a slim companion book for the A-M series detailing day-to-day life in the Royal Navy. I don’t recall the name of it (I read a library copy) but it starts out with a young man becoming a midshipman and details his and the sailors’ life on board – how the watches work, what they ate and when, etc.
And speaking of middies, in the movie Master and Commander, there’s a short scene of Aubrey teaching several of them how to fix local noon with a sextant.
Arg. This is like arguing about whether toast is toasted. No, you don’t toast the toast, it’s already toasted! If you toasted it again it would be ruined! You don’t toast toast, you toast bread!
If someone says toast is always toasted, they are correct. The toasting occurs in the past, not the future.
I was just channel surfing the other day and caught a few minutes of Master and Commander. The ship was in some weather and it looked like the crew were hoisting a new yard up one of the masts. Someone said something about if they couldn’t sail through the weather they’d sail around it, and then an order was given to the helm to turn south.
WTF? You don’t just steer wherever you want without also trimming the sails, and that’s going to take a lot of hands, and orders, to man the braces. Plus, I don’t know if you want to be doing all that sail handling when there are men and equipment up in the rigging installing a new yard.
For a series that’s so praised for its authenticity, that scene didn’t play out as I would expect.
It’s a film, dammit!
