In the days of cannon, it took as long as twenty minutes to load and fire a gun. When a ship fired her guns in salute, she rendered herself powerless for the duration. By emptying their guns, the ship's crew showed shore batteries and forts that they were no threat. Over time, this gesture became a show of respect, with both shore and ship gun batteries firing volleys.
The habit of firing salutes became wasteful, with ships and shore batteries firing shots for hours on end. This was particularly expensive for ships, which had a limited space to store powder (which went bad quickly in the salt air). The British admiralty first dictated the policies now in place as a practical matter to save gunpowder. The rule was simple, for every volley fired by a ship in salute, a shore battery could return up to three shots. The regulations limited ships to a total of seven shots in salute, so the 21 gun-salute became the salute used to honour the only the most important dignitaries.
When president is honoured with 21 gun salute, most Navies provide gun salutes for naval officers on significant occasions, using the following protocol:
Admiral-17 guns
Vice Admiral-15 guns
Rear Admiral-13 guns
Rear Admiral-11 guns
All gun salutes are fired at five second intervals. Gun salutes will always total an odd number.
An instrument containing a graduated 60° arc and a movable pivoted arm corresponding to the radius of the arc's circle, used in celestial navigation to measure the altitude of a celestial body in order to determine the observer's latitude and longitude. A horizontally mounted telescope and two small mirrors are arranged so that the observer can, by moving the pivoted arm, sight the horizon and the reflected image of the celestial body in the same line, giving a reading along the arc that is used to look up the observer's position in a published table.
How a Sextant Works
There's nothing mystical or complicated about a sextant. All it is is a device that measures the angle between two objects.
The sextant makes use of two mirrors. With this sextant, one of the mirrors ( mirror A in the diagram) is half-silvered, which allows some light to pass through. In navigating, you look at the horizon through this mirror.
The other mirror (mirror B in the diagram) is attached to a movable arm. Light from an object, let's say the sun, reflects off this mirror. The arm can be moved to a position where the sun's reflection off the mirror also reflects off mirror A and through the eyepiece. What you see when this happens is one object (the sun) superimposed on the other (the horizon). The angle between the two objects is then read off the scale.
What makes a sextant so useful in navigation is its accuracy. It can measure an angle with precision to the nearest ten seconds. (A degree is divided into 60 minutes; a minute is divided into 60 seconds.).
Navigation by Sextant
There's no way around it: Celestial navigation using a sextant is a complex and involved process that involves a fair amount of calculating, correcting, referring to tables, knowledge of the heavens and the Earth, as well as a lot of common sense. (No wonder it's been so quickly replaced by the satellite-dependent Global Positioning System, or GPS!) But the basic principles behind celestial navigation are fairly straightforward. Here are a few examples that show how a sextant can be used to find location...
Finding latitude is easy enough. The first thing you need to do is measure the angle between the horizon and the sun when the sun is at its highest point, which is right around noontime on your watch. A quick look at your trusty tables tells you which line of latitude the sun should be above on that particular day. For example, let's say it's noon on December 21, and the sun is directly overhead. Well, on that day the sun is above the Tropic of Capricorn, so your latitude would have to be 23.5 degrees S.
If you're a navigator, that the Earth spins around at such an even pace. Every hour it moves 15 degrees. This means that if the sun is above the longitude of 0 degrees at noon, one hour later it will be above 15 degrees West. Now if you have a chronometer (this is just a fancy name meaning "extremely accurate clock"), you can find your longitude. Let's say that the sun is directly overhead and your chronometer, which was set to noon when you were at 0 degrees, says it's 3 o'clock. This means that three hours ago the sun was overhead at this latitude at 0 degrees longitude. In those three hours, the sun moved 15 degrees 3 times, or 45 degrees. So you're at 45 degrees West. Of course, the fact that the sun was directly overhead (which very rarely happens) made it especially convenient for finding your longitude, but you could have found your longitude anyway, with the help of your tables.
That the captain should be the last man to leave a sinking ship is probably the strongest and most honourable tradition of the sea, and every maritime nation can tell of captains, both naval and mercantile, who stayed with their ships until the last moment, and very often beyond. While a final salute is not necessarily part of the abandon ship drill, it would hardly be an inappropriate gesture and doubtless many captains bade a last farewell in this way.
In 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, Indian navy lost only one ship INS Khukri.. Captain Mahendranath Mulla was in command of INS Khukri.
Captain Mulla decided to ask the crew to abandon the ship and without regard to his personal safety he supervised the arrangements for rescue of his shipmates in a very cool, calm and methodical manner.
According to the survivors, he was last seen on the bridge and went down with his ship on the old tradition, "captains don't abandon their ships.". He was awarded Maha Vir Chakra posthumously for displaying conspicuous gallantry and dedication to duty.
