On Thu 2020-11-12T14:48:13-0800 Paul Eggert hath writ:
According to Google Books (which will not give me more than barely-readable snippets), page 56 of Volume 55 of the Boston Journal of Commerce and Textile Industries (1899) says "At Belize, British Honduras, the clock over the ??? ????? which furnishes the time for the town, is usually regulated by the time kept by the ships in the harbor." This matches our guess earlier.
That makes me want to find the navigational charts for the British Honduras harbors which were then in use. Whatever time was being reported by the ships should correspond to whatever longitude in on the charts. Whether or not charts were right, any other value would risk shipwreck. Even when longitudes were obviously wrong, changing to a different set of charts with a different longitude was done with great caution and much prior warning. Further, for Belize the charts were secondary because navigation required visual confirmation, so they may have preserved wrong values of longitude longer than other harbors. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m