Title page

The brave men who went whaling in Greenland waters had to be expert navigators. Navigation consists, basically, of knowing where you are and in what direction you are travelling. The whalers used a magnetic compass to measure direction of travel, a sextant to determine their latitude (distance north or south of the equator), and a marine chronometer to measure their longitude (position east or west of Greenwich).

Hopefully, the task that you face in navigating through this site will be rather less demanding! This page is fully functional and you can use it to practise the various navigational aids that are available to you:

1. When left or right facing blue arrows are present, at the top and bottom right of a page, they will take you to the next or previous page of a series of pages.

2. The vertical blue arrow at the bottom left of a page will take you back to the top of that page.

3. The column to the left, the one with the pale blue background, contains the titles of the major components in each section of the site. Simply click on a title to go there directly.

4. The small images in the right hand column of the screen are all clickable and lead to new pages with extra information and a larger version of the image. Blue arrows on these pages will return you to the main page.

5. In some parts of the site you will come across blue, underlined words or phrases. Clicking on one of these will open up a new window containing extra information. The window can be enlarged and scrolled in the normal way. To close one of these windows simply click on it, anywhere, with the left mouse button.

6. At the bottom of some pages there is a section called Links containing external web sites. These will open up in a new window; to return to this site simply click on the X symbol at the top right corner of the new window.

Links:

John Harrison and the Longitude Problem
The Royal Observatory Greenwich