HTML Entities
HTML entities, for those who don’t know, are codes used for special characters on web pages. & is the entity for &, " for ” (that’s supposed to be a straight quote, but gd tumblr insists on turning it into an curly quote), etc. Not all have names but there are decimal and hex forms for all of them. For & the decimal would be & and the hex &. In the early days of Fateful Voyage I kept running across this hand-drawn symbol, sort of a vertical ellipse with a dot in the middle and search as I might I couldn’t find an entity for it. Of course I had no idea what I was looking for, and searching for such things as symbols navigation, symbols celestial navigation, symbols geographic position, and on, and on, got me nowhere. So, I made my own symbol. 
. That is the actual image from the Fateful website and it appears hundreds, if not thousands, of times throughout the site. The HTML code that makes that appear on the page is, <img alt=”Odot” src=”../images/Odot.jpg”>, so you can see why I spent so much time looking for an entity code.
So. Some four years later I’m transcribing the Flinders log, when, on the page for November 26, 1792, he uses the symbol ☽ instead of the word Monday. I looked ahead and found that he continued using strange (to me) symbols for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc. Now, I recognized that first symbol, a crescent moon, which also appears all over the website, and I knew it stood for Monday because it was where Monday was supposed to be, and moon, moonday, Monday isn’t such a stretch, even for me. But the others, not a clue. I knew that many of our English days got their names from old gods, i.e. Thursday is Thor’s day.
So, I look up Tuesday on Wikipedia and find this, “The English name is derived from Old English Tiwesdæg and Middle English Tewesday. This was a loan translation of Latin dies Martis, originally associating the day with the planet Mars. The Germanic name translates Mars, the god of war, as Teiwaz (Old English Tiw).” So I look for an entity for Mars, sure enough there is one and it’s the same one Flinders used. So the symbols are for planets (which I would have recognized right off if I were into astrology.) Wednesday is Woden’s day, Woden corresponds to Mercury, Mercury has an entity, which Flinders used for Wednesday.
I make a little table with the code, symbol, planet (heavenly body then), and day:
☽ ☽ moon Monday
♂ ♂ Mars Tuesday
☿ ☿ Mercury Wednesday
♃ ♃ Jupiter Thursday
♀ ♀ Venus Friday
♄ ♄ Saturn Saturday
☉ ☉ Sun Sunday
And there it is (the last one of course,) it was the Sun, a circle with a dot in it. Now even if those clerks back in the day had drawn a perfect circle, I wouldn’t have made the connection. Not once in my long life have I run across the fact that a circle with a dot in it is the symbol for the Sun. Ignorance results in more work. The entity would have saved me a lot of typing.
Am I going to go back and change all those image references to the entity? I think not. But I do have an explanation for the symbol that may be in error. Somewhere I found that it signified that the Lunar reading had been taken from the center of the Moon, rather than the edge. That may still be the case, and the fact that it’s the symbol for the Sun is just a coincidence.
Update: What it actually says is:
“On many of these pages you will see Meridn.Alt.Center. This means the Meridian Altitude taken from the center of the sun’s disk rather than the edge.”
Which is correct and should have given me another clue about the symbol being for the sun, but by the time I had put this bit of info on the Bounty Logbook home page I had forgotten all about finding the entity. But in tracking this down, I discovered that the above statement had been omitted when I overhauled the logbook home page, which I’ve now remedied.
