Tom Cunliffe

The Financial Times, an excellent organ for those with a bit of spare cash, isn’t my usual newspaper, but a copy came my way recently. Among the impenetrable material about company directors, stocks and shares, I discovered an article centred, of all things, on compass error. I’ll come back to this unlikely reference in a while, but to remind ourselves of the sort of practical slip-up that can befall this generally reliable instrument, we’ll fold away the broadsheet for now and slide off instead to the Atlantic Ocean somewhere north of South America. The events took place long before GPS was heard of, so position was by astro or nothing. Unfortunately, my only deck watch had taken the plunge a week earlier, meaning that while my latitude was good to a couple of miles, I was without reliable longitude. As luck would have it, the boat was exactly due