Neither Charmian
Nor Martin Knew As Much As I Knew About Navigation.
And all the
time the Snark was rushing madly along toward Tanna, in the New
Hebrides.
Something had to be done.
How it came to me I know not - call it an inspiration if you will;
but the thought arose in me: if southing is latitude, why isn't
westing longitude? Why should I have to change westing into
longitude? And then the whole beautiful situation dawned upon me.
The meridians of longitude are 60 miles (nautical) apart at the
equator. At the poles they run together. Thus, if I should travel
up the 180 degrees meridian of longitude until I reached the North
Pole, and if the astronomer at Greenwich travelled up the 0 meridian
of longitude to the North Pole, then, at the North Pole, we could
shake hands with each other, though before we started for the North
Pole we had been some thousands of miles apart. Again: if a degree
of longitude was 60 miles wide at the equator, and if the same
degree, at the point of the Pole, had no width, then somewhere
between the Pole and the equator that degree would be half a mile
wide, and at other places a mile wide, two miles wide, ten miles
wide, thirty miles wide, ay, and sixty miles wide.
All was plain again. The Snark was in 19 degrees south latitude.
The world wasn't as big around there as at the equator. Therefore,
every mile of westing at 19 degrees south was more than a minute of
longitude; for sixty miles were sixty miles, but sixty minutes are
sixty miles only at the equator.
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