Learning the Sextant

Captain W.D. Puleston, U.S. Navy.  Annapolis.  Gangway to the Quarterdeck.  Appleton-Century Company, 1942.

"Youngsters"?  How quaint!

Maxim Newmark.  Illustrated Technical Dictionary.  New York:  The Philosophical Library, 1944.

Funk & Wagnalls New Practical Standard Dictionary.  Britannica World Language Edition.  1946, 1957.

Interestingly, according to a 2016 CBC article, the Royal Canadian Navy continues to train sailors in the use of sextants as a back-up to GPS. The U.S. Navy had discontinued this instrument, but only recently brought it back as a precaution against cyber attacks which might render a ship's GPS unusable.  According to the CBC article:

All watchkeepers and navigators on a ship are required to be proficient with a sextant, and they are required to practise sextant use while at sea at least once every 180 days.
"It's a skill set that if you let erode, it's very hard to get back because it's not an easy piece of equipment to use or train on," O'Regan said.
"Once you get good at it offshore, you can get within a nautical mile of where the ship actually is."
O'Regan says that when sailors first get their hands on a sextant, they usually think the gadgets are "pretty cool," and O'Regan agrees.
"It sort of makes you part of a navigational community that we're still using the same skillset that the sailors in Captain Cook's age would have used," he said. "There's parts of Canada where Captain Cook and various other hydrographers and cartographers have used sextants to develop those charts. It makes you part of a big club."