The Quadrant and the Sextant: Taking the Measure of the Cosmos in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

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Notes

1. The pipe is the sailor’s staple. For example, of Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod and a Cape Cod native, Ishmael recollects:

He kept a whole row of pipes … ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter, then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his leg into his trousers, he put his pipe into his mouth … You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe (120).

2. The difference between a quadrant and a sextant is that the former determines one’s latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun or some other heavenly body, whereas the latter determines one’s position by measuring the angle between the horizon and a heavenly body. Both navigational instruments fix one’s situation relative to the heavens.