David Burch Navigation Blog: One Rombe Wrong, and What Do You Get?

In the brand new edition of our textbook Inland and Coastal Navigation, we use throughout what we call the Small-angle Rule. It is an approximation to the tangent of 6º that says the sides of a 6º right triangle are in the relation of 1:10. This can also be scaled up to about 18º (3:10) or on down as low as you like, ie 3º (0.5:10 = 1:20). We use it to estimate DR errors (ie steering 6º off course, you get 1 mile off your intended track for every 10 you sail); to estimate current sailings; cross track corrections; and other applications. We were proud to have made up this convenient formulation that has so many applications, and is so easy to remember.

Last night, however, I got one more reminder that there is rarely anything truly original in traditional marine navigation. There have just been too many people working on it for too long. Rarely is something without precedent; it is just rediscovered or reformulated. And so is the case with our handy Small-angle Rule.

Below is a page of an early textbook with the unusual title M. Blundevile, His Exercises, published in 1594. This is in one of eight sections, called the Art of Navigation, Chapter 37. (I am crawling through books like this looking for something very specific, and if I find it, you will be the first to know!)

He is here in a section discussing compasses and related position reckoning and wants (as we do) to offer a way to make estimates of errors. This is the time period when navigators were just learning compass use on a global scale (Columbus had no idea how his compass worked on his famous voyage), and taffrail logs to measure distance traveled through the water were first described just 15 years earlier than this book, in 1580. The reference to Mariner's Card, refers to early form of a Mercator chart.

His angle units here are Rombes, which one learns earlier in the book is what we now call compass points. In fact, it is books like this where we learn where the concept of compass points (11.25º, 1/32 of a circle) comes from. His units are leagues, and since at this time the English were absorbing navigation from the Spanish as they developed their own, he deals with both Spanish leagues (2857 fathoms) and English Leagues (2500 fathoms), but the units do not matter at this point. (England and Spain were more or less at war during this period, so there was much competition in navigation.)

Below is a copy of his angle rule for DR errors. It is not directly our Small-angle Rule, but the principle is the same. That is, we skip the trig, and give specific values that can be scaled. Below this picture is the interpretation of what he means. In short, if you make good one point wrong from what you steered, you will be 19.6 miles off course for every 100 miles you log.