Which navigational error contributed most to shipwrecks before widespread adoption of Harrison's chronometer?

💡 Explanation

Before chronometers, longitude was chiefly estimated via dead reckoning: incremental calculations of distance and direction from a known point. Errors accumulated due to imprecise speed/direction estimates leading to large positional inaccuracies contributing to shipwrecks . Therefore cumulative dead reckoning error is the primary challenge, rather than altitude, deviation or tidal errors manageable using concurrent methods.

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