A student of navigation who refers to the standard textbooks will be confronted with a multiplicity of sailings which are said to include plane sailing, parallel sailing, middle or mid-latitude sailing, mean latitude sailing, traverse sailing, short distance sailing using rhumb-line formulae, mercator sailing, great-circle sailing, approximate great-circle sailing, composite sailing and composite greatcircle sailing. To the student it may seem a reasonable assumption that so many differently named sailings are based upon as many different ways of taking a ship from one position to another, which is of course a nonsense.