Didn't early sea farers notice a change in their days when compared to their time pieces?

Question

In this day and age of high speed transportation we take it for granted we'll suffer from jet lag if we travel extensively east or west. What I've not seen in the years I've studied history, is a lack of comment on how early explorers dealt with the time changes. Did they notice it or were they keeping to the time as set at home? Ie. It's noon on the time peace but it's midnight where the Captain has sailed his ship.

Answer 1

The speed of transportation in the early days was not sufficient for a noticeable change in the time as the travellers moved east or west.

Until clocks became cheap enough and accurate enough to take on a sea voyage, the travellers would have used the sun and the stars to measure their "time", so they would always be on "local time" as it were and would not have noticed a change in time zones. Even into the 17th century the most reliable clocks could lose or gain 10 minutes a day, so were not commonly used on sea voyages.

It wasn't until the clocks became very accurate that they could be used in conjunction with a standard time frame (GMT) for the purposes of navigation and, at this point, the travellers would certainly have been aware of changes in time zones.

The attached extract from Wikipedia describes the GMT situation well,

"As the United Kingdom grew into an advanced maritime nation, British mariners kept their timepieces on GMT in order to calculate their longitude "from the Greenwich meridian", which was by convention considered to have longitude zero degrees. This did not affect shipboard time itself, which was still solar time. This combined with mariners from other nations drawing from Nevil Maskelyne's method of lunar distances based on observations at Greenwich, eventually led to GMT being used world-wide as a reference time independent of location. Most time zones were based upon this reference as a number of hours and half-hours "ahead of GMT" or "behind GMT"."

Answer 2

Accurate timepieces were not developed until the early 19th century. By then, the precedent of "ship's time" had been well established.
Under ship's time, the day is divided into watches, stretching forward from the one, unarguably accurate, time measure they had ... solar apogee (noon). Each day, their "time" was reset to an accurate noon ... at least on military ships.
On civilian ships, time was not kept much at all, besides "day" and "night" and "noon" and "git yer lazy carcase up on deck, yer swab, and releive Bob - 'e's fallen asleep agin."
So, prior to "timepieces," time didn't matter, and after timepieces ... well, time didn't matter much, except for navigation.