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Alex wrote:

Dear Geoffrey,
I am not sure that I really understand the details of the method you
describe but it seems to be based on the almanac.
The people you mention just used the almanac BEFORE
their trip to select the stars.

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Geoffrey replies:

Well, yes the voyage was planned using an almanac. But the whole point of
the voyage was that it need not have been. Voyagers like the Polynesians, for
example, who roamed the Pacific seas with "no sextant, no watch, no almanac,
nothing", could have learnt by experience, which was built up and passed on
over successive generations, which stars to use as waypoint markers at
particular times of the year to get them where they were going.

It is easy to get trapped into the culture specific, Western civilization
way of doing things. An almanac just happens to be one of _our_ ways of passing
on this sort of information. Other cultures had other ways of doing it, which
were just as useful and valid as far as they were concerned as an almanac is to
us.

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Alex wrote:

Second, how do you detect without a sextant when a star it in zenith?
I don't think this is easy to do.

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Geoffrey replies:

As for whether it is easy to determine if a star is at the zenith, just by
looking up at it, as I recall it was not easy. It was a matter of facing the
bow and looking up at the star, then facing the stern and looking up at the
star, and making a judgement whether it looked overhead both times. But this
"seat of the pants" sort of navigation does depend heavily on the skill of
the navigator to make objective judgments on matters for which we (in our
particular culture) would automatically reach for some sort of instrument.
Skill, for example, in using the sun and stars as a compass to maintain your
heading, skill in judging your speed so you know when to make the turn North
or South, skill in judging just when the star really was at the zenith. It took
lots of practice....

Geoffrey Kolbe

   

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