The traverse board looks a lot to me like a pachinko game, or maybe even Chinese checkers. I can also imagine Lilly Tomlin sitting at the telephone switchboard doling out little ditties.
The traverse board is used to keep track of changes in a vessel's speed
or course over the period of a four-hour watch. At the end of each
watch, the courses and speeds are added together, with the help of
traverse tables, or by estimation, and marked in the logbook or on a
chalkboard. A peg is put into a hole every half hour for the course
steered, and another is inserted to reflect the approximate speed
sailed. The traverse board, though used some in the sixteenth century,
was more common in the seventeenth century.
Source
Lilly Tomlin image source
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