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I wrote previously:
"Is it possible that the "dead reckoning" cues in the tropical Pacific, things 
like bio-luminescence, are so much better there than in the Atlantic that 
Polynesian navigators simply never had any practical reason to go beyond the 
tools of dead reckoning (and possibly basic zenith stars)?"

Peter, you replied:
"Seems to me that they weren't mechanically minded; is all."

They built beautiful ocean-going sailing vessels. Why not a cross-staff?

And also you wrote:
"You might as well ask why they didn't invent the wheel.  Which suggests its 
own answer: wasn't much use to them."

Well, yes, that's what I was asking -- were the conditions of Pacific 
navigation such that the moderately greater accuracy provided by a 
cross-staff simply wouldn't have helped enough to make it worth having? Take 
bio-luminescence, for example. This phenomenon comes from certain specific 
species of marine organisms. There's quite a variety, but it's not ubiquitous 
and in latitudes with seasons, it's not a year-round phenomenon (off New 
England, the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi --now the scourge of the Black Sea 
thanks to some bilge water transfers-- glows in vast numbers when oars are 
dragged through the water, but out of season, the waters are dark). So could 
it be that some of the unique conditions of the Pacific, incoluding perhaps 
widespread bio-luminescence, particularly in the heartland of Polynesia, made 
celestial navigation even its most primitive form largely irrelevant.

And you wrote:
"The genius of many indigenous peoples appears to be the practical uses they 
could drive from keen observance of their natural world."

Yes, sure, but frequently it seems that we have a "four legs good, two legs 
bad" thing going on here. Every single one of us alive on Earth today is a 
descendant of some indigenous culture. The western Europeans who invented 
scientific navigation were not androids from an alien planet. They knew many 
of those natural tricks, too, and used them on a regular basis. Read any 
sailing guide to entering the English Channel from the 16th right through the 
early 20th centuries. They're filled with details about "black ooze" under 
this part of the channel or "fine sand" over there or "tiny cockles" near 
some headland. Navigating by the properties of "mud" is about as basic as you 
can get in navigational technique and surely no less "naturalistic" than the 
methods used by the Polynesians. What has happened, of course, is that those 
naturalistic tricks have become less and less important as scientific 
navigation has advanced. This is true in the English Channel as well as among 
the atolls of the Pacific, for the simple reason that the technological 
solutions work much better: you get greater economic efficiency and lower 
risk to lives and property.

Peter, you added:
"I'm not sure Frank is being fair by claiming limitations associated with dead 
reckoning or zenith stars."

Peter, actually I did not suggest any limitations. I have said in a number of 
NavList posts over the years that dead reckoning (not literally DR, but DR 
enhanced by knowledge of currents and other factors) is much under-rated. In 
fact, what I was suggesting is that the semi-dead reckoning techniques which 
work so well in the unique conditions of Polynesia may have simply made 
angle-measuring devices, even as crude as the cross-staff, superfluous there 
compared to the Atlantic. Oceans can be "oceans apart".

And you concluded:
"Amongst other techniques, they knew the navigational stars and observed their 
appearance above the horizon and subsequent setting, although the writings of 
the westerners who have recorded this (we need to remember that they may not 
have been privy to the full story) suggest that these observations were used 
for orientation, ie; they had the same function as a compass."

Well, what we have is the evidence available. Some Micronesian navigators 
definitely used the stars for compass heading. There is good oral history on 
that. There also appears to be ample evidence that some Polynesian navigators 
used zenith stars for a rough estimate of latitude (could you do better than 
+/-3 degrees s.d. with zenith stars? Not likely). Did they do more? What more 
could they have done??

-FER




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