Читать книгу Lieutenant Hornblower онлайн

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"That's the greatest altitude I've ever measured" remarked Hornblower. "I've never been as far south as this before. What's your result?"

They compared readings.

"That's accurate enough" said Hornblower. "What's the difficulty?"

"Oh, I can shoot the sun" said Bush. "No trouble about that. It's the calculations that bother me--those damned corrections."

Hornblower raised an eyebrow for a moment. He was accustomed to taking his own observations each noon and making his own calculations of the ship's position, in order to keep himself in practice. He was aware of the mechanical difficulty of taking an accurate observation in a moving ship, but--although he knew of plenty of other instances--he still could not believe that any man could really find the subsequent mathematics difficult. They were so simple to him that when Bush had asked him if he could join him in their noontime exercise for the sake of improving himself he had taken it for granted that it was only the mechanics of using a sextant that troubled Bush. But he politely concealed his surprise.