A few weeks back I was browsing a good sextant website to which TIGHAR has occasionally linked in its articles on sextants. There does not seem much of great interest in the numbering of these sextant boxes (
photo 1, photo 2), since each box has only a single number associated with it.
What is interesting to me are the genuine blind ("drawer style") dovetails on the middle (Ajax Engineering) and bottom (David White) boxes of photo 1. Most of the sextant boxes associated with Brandis (a company of which the box found on Niku has speculatively
been associated) that I've seen are of the
box-comb ("finger") joint variety, not dovetailed. The box on top in photo 1 is a Pioneeer-Bendix box and has box-comb joints. (Pioneer purchased Brandis in 1922.) Patrick Macdonald, British colonial secretary for the Western Pacific High Commission,
said to Colonial Secretary Vaskess that the sextant box found on Nikumaroro had dovetailing on the corners.
The article on these sextants and boxes is
here.
The numbers on the boxes are as follows: The top box, the Brandis Box, has 14170. The Ajax box, the middle box, has written beside Mark II, faintly, 10479, Contract No. 97652 and next to that the numeral 1942 (production year?). The David White box, bottom box, has 3782 stamped on the front. The webmaster of the site, who lives in New Zealand, informed me no other numbers can be detected on the boxes, with the exception of an index number in pencil on the inside back of the lid of the top box, which matches the number on the outside plate.
What's been of long-standing interest to me as well is that
Bendix was a sponsor of world flight, agreeing to provide "such instruments and other equipment as he manufactures and otherwise cooperate technically." Pioneer, which purchased Brandis, sold the firm to Bendix in 1928. The one document or photograph, however, that might tie everything neatly together in a nice package has been elusive.
Joe Cerniglia ~ TIGHAR #3078ECR