Page:The life of Matthew Flinders.djvu/530

 constructed, nor of which so little care is taken afterwards, as the compass," he did not hesitate to write. ) Compasses were supplied to the Admiralty by contract, and were not inspected. They were stowed in storehouses without any regard to the attraction to which the needles might be exposed. They might be kept in store for a few years; and they were then sent on board ships without any re-touching, "for no magnets were kept in the dockyards, and probably no person there ever saw them used." When a compass was sent aboard a ship of the Navy, it was delivered into the charge of the boatswain and put into his store or sail-room. Perhaps it was put on a shelf with his knives and forks and a few marline-spikes. Flinders urged that spare compasses should be preserved carefully in officers' cabins. Magnets for re-touching were not kept in one ship in a hundred. Under these circumstances, he asked, "can it be a subject of surprise that the most experienced navigators are those who put the least confidence in the compass, or that ships running three or four days without an observation should be found in situations very different from what was expected, and some of them lost? The currents are easily blamed, and sometimes with reason. Ships coming home from the Baltic and finding themselves upon the shores of the Dutch coast, when they were thought to be on the English side, lay it to the currents; but the same currents, as I am informed, do not prevail when steering in the opposite direction." The last is a neat stroke of irony. Flinders strongly recommended that the Admiralty should appoint an inspector of compasses, that there should be at every dockyard an officer for re-touching compasses, and that a magnet for re-touching should be carried on each flagship. The recommendations may