NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Traditional Chinese navigation
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2002 Dec 21, 11:57 +1100
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2002 Dec 21, 11:57 +1100
Not that I've found much yet, but thought I'd share these few scraps .. The story goes that the Chinese were bluewater sailing for maybe 6 centuries before their famous admiral of the 1420s. Seems likely: they had good boats and were living through a period of rapid technical advances. AS the whole world and all the peoples it contained had as its centre the emperor so, they observed, did the heavens revolve about Polaris. And as the emperor, in his wisdom, did regulate and guide the affairs of men then so too did this centre of the universe. In a practical sense it gave them their latitude. We would call it their co-latitude, but its effectively the same thing. I don't know what units they measured in. I do know that a printed guide (illustration provided with the text) gave captains navigational data to follow - 4 stars (Orion was one) with their distance from the horizon measured in 'digits', presumably finger widths. This page came from what we would consider as a pilot guide, or cruising guide, advice along the lines of: 'When you get here then these stars will look like this'. Somewhere else I found mention of a 'sextant'. This is more than intriguing, but I don't know any more. It seems unlikely that any machine that did this job would use such crude notation as finger widths. I'm not saying that all or any of this is fact. I'm not a historian, I'm just groping towards what appears to be the possiblilty of a whole way of navigating that we are largely unaware of. In the unknown lies always the possibility that they may have had something we could usefully learn.