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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Wolfgang Köberer
Date: 2022 Jan 18, 10:41 -0800
Frank is to the point (one may say: blunt) - as usual . One may add to the fantastic instruments of the Pacific islanders the "Sacred Calabash" and the "Latitude hook" mentioned by Bruce Bauer in his "Sextant Handbook", They are all fantasies that originate from the Western - post-Renaissance - ideal of position finding by measurement that could not imagine that long range navigation can successfully performed on the basis of a completely different mindset.
Allow me to point out - on the other hand - a book that explains the history of a basic pillar of Western nautical astronomy: Van Brummelen, Glen, Heavenly Mathematics, The Forgotten Art of Spherical Trigonometry, Princeton 2013. In Germany it is available for download on eBookcentral; that may also work elsewhre if you have access to a major library.
Wolfgang
