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On 9 Nov 2004 at 22:02, Bill wrote:

> How did Lewis and Clark, French traders etc. when traveling by canoe
> determine their position?  This question is asked with a bias toward speed
> on the water, plus current, plus all the twists and turns a river can make?
>
> Were they doing some form of DR while on the water?

Those who were interested in mapping their journeys did perform ded
reckoning from canoe. They would have a compass in front of them and they
would estimate distance by time and speed (being close to the shore, they
could get a pretty good idea of how fast they were going). If I get a
chance at lunch, I'll copy a series of courses from one of Peter Fidler's
journals to the list. Although these courses contain many entries, when
you travel down the same rivers you can clearly see that they were
estimating average courses and smoothing out the many bends to reduce the
size of their list. After taking a lunar (or arriving at a mapped
location), they would adjust their distances proportionally to match the
distance as determined through celestial sights.

Of course many fur traders simply relied on native knowledge and learned
their routes firsthand from native guides. This navigation relied more on
landmarks than direction and distance (the rivers determine direction
anyway, so the traveller has little choice of which way to go). This was
by far the more common method of navigation for most fur traders. But in
the Northern rivers, the topography is more like an immense labyrinth than
rivers running through channels. The native knowledge of routes was simply
too complicated to learn without serving a long apprenticeship so the
Hudson's Bay Company brought in Philip Turnor to map the routes used by
the native guides. Interestingly, he met Alexander Mackenzie at Lake
Athabasca when Mackenzie was returning from his voyage to the Arctic Ocean
(1789). Mackenzie had been trying to get to the Pacific and was impressed
by Turnor; although he hadn't made it to the Pacific, at least he knew
where he was. Mackenzie then returned to England for a year to learn
celestial navigation before returning to North America to make the first
crossing of the continent in 1793.

Ken Muldrew.

   

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