The Importance of Perspective In Understanding the Flat Earth Model, part 4
From the booklet: The Sea-Earth Globe and its Monstrous Hypothetical Motions: or Modern Theoretical Astronomy
1918
Note: Punctuation and grammar is as in the original.
CIRCUMNAVIGATION
Many people foolishly imagine that ships can sail in a straight line due E. or W.; but if a line be drawn all round a sphere, it would make a circle, a chalk mark round a football for instance. A circle is not a straight line, as I once had reason to remind an educated gentleman in a public debate. He was known, too, as “the Leicester astronomer!”
In the above figure the magnetic north “pole” is represented at N; and if a ship, sailing round the outer circumference, keeps the point of the compass always towards N and steers at right-angles to it the course described will be a circle.
A small flat island could be circumnavigated in the same way, with a powerful magnet in the middle of the island; the ship thus describing a circle. But if a vessel took a straight line course from A, it would sail in the south-westerly direction towards S.W.
On a globe it would be impossible for the horizontal needle always to point to the north magnetic “pole” from different parts of a spherical sea, as anyone many prove by laying a needle at various points as a tangent to a large ball. But on a flat surface the needle always points to the centre while the ship describes a circle – which doubt fact not only again explodes the globular theory, but establishes the truth of a plane earth and sea!
We have years ago many times pointed out this fact in our literature, and as a result one professor has had the honesty to make the following confession: –
“The earth has been circumnavigated a great many times…We can (we could?) journey round the globe, sometimes travelling on land, and sometimes on the sea…This would appear to be a certain proof that the earth’s surface is curved. Nevertheless it has been pointed out that circumnavigation would be possible if the earth had A FLAT SURFACE with the north magnetic pole at its centre. A compass needle the, would always point to the centre of the surface, and so a ship might sail due east and west, as indicated by the compass, and eventually return to the same point by describing a circle.” (Caps mine.) – Prof. R. A. Gregory, F.R.A.S., Elementary Physiography.
Yet, thoughtless teachers still refer to the schoolboy proof that circumnavigation proves the earth a globe!
