The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

by John Edward Huth
The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

by John Edward Huth

eBook

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Overview

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fog bank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena—the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and “read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way.

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth’s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674074835
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 05/15/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 544
Sales rank: 721,719
File size: 30 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

John Edward Huth is Donner Professor of Science in the Physics Department at Harvard University.

Author's home: Cambridge, MA

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Four: Dead Reckoning



If you were on a desert island, how could you measure distances and communicate these to others? Readily available measures are on our body and in the environment. In ancient Egypt short measures were based on finger, hand, and arm lengths. The ancient Egyptian cubit is the length of the forearm. Longer units of distance were based on travel. The word mile comes from the Latin phrase mille pacem, which means “a thousand paces”. Roman legionnaires kept track of the distance traveled by counting paces. A pace is the distance you cover when the same foot (left or right) hits the ground. Two steps – left then right - equal one pace.

This practice of counting paces isn’t limited to humans. At least one species of ant navigates by counting paces. Harald Wulf studied ant habits by gluing tiny stilts onto their legs or cutting off sections of their legs to change the length of their paces. In Wulf’s study the distance the desert ants (Cataglyphis) traveled was directly related to how many paces they took. Ants with stilts would walk past a target and ants with shortened legs would come up short in a way that was consistent with pace counting.

Another natural measure is based on travel time. If you were giving directions to a friend driving a car, you might say something like “You stay on the interstate for two hours and take exit twenty-seven.” This assumes that everyone travels at the same speed, but it is usually clear from the context how fast your friend moves. Distance traveled (miles) is speed (miles per hour), times time, (hours).

The hour was and is one of the most widely used units of time. It has its origins in the ancient Egyptian use of rising stars to reckon the time of night. They used 36 bright stars in all, which would rise just before the sun in turn at different times of the year. The passage of one night was associated with the passage of 12 of these bright stars giving rise to the night being divided into 12 hours. The day was likewise divided into 12 units. This scheme, dating from roughly the fifth century BC, became widely adopted, but it was far from universal. Medieval Saxons reckoned the length of day in tides, with eight tides in one day.

Three miles per hour was, and is, a good reference for human-powered travel. This is how fast most people walk on level ground, how fast a person can row a boat, and how fast an old sailboat can move on water. It is far from universal. You could be running or limping, but it is a reliable standard shared among travelers and widely understood. If you convert this speed with an hour into a distance, it is three miles. In ancient Persian and Arab cultures, a parasang or farsakh was a unit based on this same combination of speed and time. The length of a league is close to the farsakh and is also based on the distance covered by a person in an hour. Longer distances can be reckoned in how many days or lunar months elapse over the course of a journey. Native Americans used these lengths of time as standards. A marhalah is a day’s journey in medieval Islamic reckoning and is equal to roughly eight farsakhs (24 miles), or eight hours of travel.

These are still viable measures. If GPS devices and odometers vanished overnight we could fall back on human measures instantly. When I tested a group of 30 students, they took 980 paces per mile, which is very close to the one thousand originating from soldiers in ancient Rome! They also averaged a walking speed of 3 miles per hour, so the concepts of a mile, farsakh, and league are true to their origins.

Table of Contents

Contents 1. Before the Bubble 2. Maps in the Mind 3. On Being Lost 4. Dead Reckoning 5. Urban Myths of Navigation 6. Maps and Compasses 7. Stars 8. The Sun and the Moon 9. Where Heaven Meets Earth 10. Latitude and Longitude 11. Red Sky at Night 12. Reading the Waves 13. Soundings and Tides 14. Currents and Gyres 15. Speed and Stability of Hulls 16. Against the Wind 17. Fellow Wanderers 18. Baintabu’s Story Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 Glossary Notes Acknowledgments Index
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