22 Dec 2008

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"219717","attributes":{"class":"media-image mt-image-none","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","width":"450","height":"494","alt":"F9025-001.jpg"}}]] One of the newest additions to the Museum's fine collection of navigational instruments is this sextant from the turn of the twentieth century. For those who don't know, a sextant is an instrument used to measure angles at sea (or on land) for the purposes of finding one's position. In many ways this example is unexceptional for the period - a standard design with all the normal fittings in its wooden box. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"219718","attributes":{"class":"media-image mt-image-none","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","width":"450","height":"271","alt":"F9025-004.jpg"}}]] But the reason we acquired it is because we know who owned it - a young man named John Duncan Campbell, who won it as an astronomy prize while on HMS Conway, a training ship for the merchant navy. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"219719","attributes":{"class":"media-image mt-image-none","typeof":"foaf:Image","style":"","width":"450","height":"337","alt":"F9025-005.jpg"}}]] Campbell seems to have been a good student and won several other prizes, including the special summer prize (a pair of binoculars), a telescope for proficiency in seamanship and a bible as a King's Gold Medal candidate. After qualifying as a midshipman in July 1904, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Campbell joined the sailing vessel Invernneil, owned by G. Milne & Co.