Grin! Good catch! I was definitely trying to use four directions, not three, so “Northwest by West” wasn’t my intention. I wanted another halving. I just screwed up the order!
(I learned it as additive: North-West is 315. West North-West backs this westward by 22.5 degrees, so it’s 292.5. North by this, to North by West North-West pushes it northward again by 11.25 degrees, for 303.75. The only absolute rule is you can’t contradict yourself by saying such things as West by North-East.)
And, wait… The Cardinal direction always comes last? Not necessarily! Olde Timey nautical talk permitted “West by North-West” just as easily as “North-West by West.” It’s one of those lingo things where people talk loosely and others understand them.
Also, the Alfred Hitchcock film, North by Northwest. Googling “West by Northwest” also gives gobs of hits. I’m willing to accept that they are technically wrong, but…
(Reading a lot of old-time naval guff, and the construction “knots per hour” is so often used, it might just as well be correct.)
The movie title isn’t a direction although it appears to be. Apparently it was simply the working title for the movie. Even so, Hitchcock enjoyed the ambiguity, as he acknowledged that there was no such direction.
My father told me it was supposed to mean “travelling north on NorthWest Airlines” but this is pushing things.
It’s true on all topographic maps, the compass doesn’t point to grid north, or the geographic North pole except in general way, Magnetic north is somewhere around the Ellesmere islands. So depending on location one will be east or west of Grid north.
If one is using a compass alone for navigation it won’t matter, or using a map alone, it won’t matter. Once we start shooting bearings on the map and transferring these figures to the compass, and vice versa, the declination must be taken into account.
A really great place to observe and practice orienteering and triangulation, backbearings and such is the American desert Southwest, where there are plenty of unique landmarks and strange shaped rock formations visible for dozens of miles in any direction. Of course with modern GPS and google Earth and the rest of it, map and compass is a dying art.
There was a recent news blurb about a young lady who was driving on a road that had a rock slide and thus closed, and she was crying because there was no alternate route or somesuch on her smartphone. There were maps available at the nearby convenience store. The military is no doubt suffering similar problems in training. "Ok fellas, an EMP strike has taken out the sats, gotta use a map and compass now.
If you were standing directly between the North Pole and the Magnetic North Pole, wouldn’t the magnetic declination be 180 degrees?
Grin! I like it! But, then, I read a lot of the kinds of stories where the wind backs a point and the helmsman falls off to match and someone holystones the halliards and scuppers the futtocks and so on.
(Dr. Watson was right: William Clark Russell does write fine sea stories!)
The helm can also be instructed to steer “full and by”; you’re not so much trying to hold a specific course as you’re trying to keep the sails full of wind. If you come a little too close to the direction of the wind, you’ll see one of the upper sails start to flutter a bit (called a “luff”), so you just bear away from the wind a bit until the luff stops.
There are also bearings relative to the ship. Something straight in front of you is “dead ahead”. Something about 10 degrees left of that is “one point off the port bow”. Something to your left and a bit behind is “one point abaft the port beam”. It’s its own world with its own language.
Just as one example, it’s always “North-West” but never “West-North,” even though the two would mean exactly the same thing. Just conventions and practices.
(Question: does Longitude always come before Latitude, the way x always comes before y?)
Compass needles point north-south, not east-west. Also the stars (appear to) revolve around the celestial north pole (or the celestial south pole). Thus for navigators (in the northern hemisphere) the fundamental reference point has always been north. Compass roses are numbered from North, and the numbering proceeds clockwise which is the direction in which celestial bodies appear to travel. All this was standardised at about the same time (and for about the same reason) that clock-dials were standardised with ‘12’ at the top. By the time NATO came along - hell, by the time the US Army came along - it had been a done deal for centuries.
Drat. I keep hoping for easy-to-remember rules, but sometimes, the world doesn’t offer them!
How would Horatio Hornblower (or Nelson) have done it? Lat then long? Or would he have even cared which order, and just stated them as he wanted…in a firm voice of steely command, naturally?
If you are using the system of latitude and longitude then it is latitude then longitude e.g., 12º34’S 123º45’E. Chessic Sense’s example is not lat/longs but is a related grid reference system.
In other words you can have an easy to remember rule that says latitude first then longitude, but don’t try to extend the rule to other grid reference systems.
It already conflicts with the mathematical convention of x, then y. (But, then, so does the angular reference that I started out asking about. Clearly, mathematics, by itself, is not a sufficient introduction to navigation, although it is certainly helpful.)