Show keeping ke ping up cien e erv v e 0 science service service who first discovered tiny pacific isles worries geographers new york minute pacific islands worthless to any but their inhabitants and a few small scale traders until the advent of the transpacific air service but toda today y essential havens for the giant steel and alloy clippers that roar through the sky from continent to continent across the worlds widest ocean are causing geographers and statesmen sleepless nights while their ownership is being disputed discovered many of them before the invention of the sextant and c chronometer hr no meter so that their exact location was doubtful these small I 1 land and masses in the watery immensity t y have been relocated by modern methods ownership of the islands depends on who first claimed them claims made on the basis of old observations are likely to have wrong locations given because ot of the crudity of the instruments used the problem now becomes one of determining just what islands were claimed tor for what nation studies of old whale ship logbooks log books are supplying geographers with many long wanted clues to the discovery of these pacific outposts dr S wittemore boggs state department geographer writing in the geographical review cites a number of the difficulties encountered in this effort to determine just who discovered and claimed what i early mariners marinero Ma made blade errors bedana Me dana doctor boggs says by dead reckoning underestimated the distance from peru to his western W stern isles solomon islands by 2000 miles errors of 1000 miles in longitude were not uncommon in the sa s1 sixteenth X century today the pilot pix of a china clipper must be able to hit an island only a mile in diameter by use of navigating instruments st log books of whaling and trading ships diaries of captains and seamen small town newspapers and re records e of bonds deposited by miners of guano on the far off pacific e islands are all being searched fo tor r evidence of discoveries and occupations which will make certain some acme of the now nebulous claims to the islands once called american polynesia it if the sources are ever adequately studied and reported on states doctor boggs an interesting and significant chapter in american history will have been illuminated |