Quotes About Sextant

His sextant is a natural extension of any seaman navigator; virtually a part of him. Even today, in a maritime world of satellite precision fixing, the sextants are as much a necessity as they were aboard the Indiamen of old. No well-run merchantman will make an ocean passage without each and every one of her deck officers reporting to the bridge before midday, sextant in hand in preparation for 'sights'.

Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.