Which navigational error increases consistently on an 18th-century ship relying solely dead reckoning without celestial fixes?

💡 Explanation

When a ship navigates by dead reckoning alone, cumulative errors in estimating speed and course cause a linear accumulation of longitude error because each incorrect distance estimate adds to the previous errors along the east-west axis. Therefore longitude has an increasing error, rather than cubically, latitude which increases with weather dependency, or latitude not being affected at all.

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