The Beaufort scale of winds - its relevance, and its use by sailors

摘要

Mariners have always recognized qualitative gradations in wind; for centuries, in accounts of their voyages, they have used such words in common usage as air, breeze and gale with various adjectival qualifications, but without any agreed definitions.An early suggestion for creating a standard scale of winds was made by Daniel Defoe (1704) after he had witnessed and described the Great Storm of 1703. Even as late as the early nineteenth century, however, there was still no common standard - nationally or internationally - for ship captains to enter wind conditions in their logbooks. British seamen were converging on a scale of 12 or 13 points although European sailors used a variety of scales ranging from as few as 4 up to 10 points (Kinsman, 1969).