Common Core Standard For English Language Arts Page 15
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43Common Core State StandardS for engliSh language artS & literaCy in hiStory/SoCial StudieS, SCienCe, and teChniCal SubjeCtS
Example 3: The Longitude Prize (Grades 9–10 Text Complexity Band)
Excerpt
From Chapter 1: “A Most Terrible Sea”
At six in the morning I was awaked by a great shock, and a confused noise of the men on
deck. I ran up, thinking some ship had run foul of us, for by my own reckoning, and that of
every other person in the ship, we were at least thirty-five leagues distant from land; but,
before I could reach the quarter-deck, the ship gave a great stroke upon the ground, and the
sea broke over her. Just after this I could perceive the land, rocky, rugged and uneven, about
two cables’ length from us . . . the masts soon went overboard, carrying some men with them
. . . notwithstanding a most terrible sea, one of the [lifeboats] was launched, and eight of the
best men jumped into her; but she had scarcely got to the ship’s stern when she was hurled
to the bottom, and every soul in her perished. The rest of the boats were soon washed to
pieces on the deck. We then made a raft . . . and waited with resignation for Providence to
assist us.
—From an account of the wreck of HMS Litchfield off the coast of North Africa, 1758
The Litchfield came to grief because no one aboard knew where they were. As the narrator tells us,
by his own reckoning and that of everyone else they were supposed to be thirty-five leagues, about
a hundred miles, from land. The word “reckoning” was short for “dead reckoning”—the system
used by ships at sea to keep track of their position, meaning their longitude and latitude. It was an
intricate system, a craft, and like every other craft involved the mastery of certain tools, in this case
such instruments as compass, hourglass, and quadrant. It was an art as well.
Latitude, the north-south position, had always been the navigator’s faithful guide. Even in ancient
times, a Greek or Roman sailor could tell how far north of the equator he was by observing the
North Star’s height above the horizon, or the sun’s at noon. This could be done without instruments,
trusting in experience and the naked eye, although it is believed that an ancestor of the quadrant
called the astrolabe—“star-measurer”—was known to the ancients, and used by them to measure
the angular height of the sun or a star above the horizon.
Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans tended to sail along the coasts and were rarely out of sight of
land. As later navigators left the safety of the Mediterranean to plunge into the vast Atlantic—far
from shore, and from the shorebirds that led them to it—they still had the sun and the North Star.
And these enabled them to follow imagined parallel lines of latitude that circle the globe. Follow-
ing a line of latitude—“sailing the parallel”—kept a ship on a steady east-west course. Christopher
Columbus, who sailed the parallel in 1492, held his ships on such a safe course, west and west again,
straight on toward Asia. When they came across an island off the coast of what would later be
called America, Columbus compelled his crew to sign an affidavit stating that this island was no
island but mainland Asia.
Dash, Joan. The Longitude Prize.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. (2000)
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