37. The coming of GPS

When I set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in late July 1973, to cross the Atlantic, there was only one reliable way to navigate a small boat across an ocean.

You had to use a sextant to measure the heights of the sun and stars above the horizon. You also needed a chronometer to determine the exact time of each sextant sight.  With these two bits of information, a Nautical Almanac and some sight reduction tables, you could plot your position on a chart. If you were skilful and the conditions were favourable, the fix might be accurate to within a few miles.  

Celestial navigation had changed little since the days of the great voyages of scientific discovery in the second half of the 18th century.

By coincidence it was also in 1973 that the US military began developing the satellite navigation system we now know as GPS.  It wasn’t the first such system but it represented a major step forward in terms of accuracy and sophistication.  And it was a really amazing technical achievement.  

At its heart is a network of satellites in precisely determined orbits each carrying their own atomic clocks.  GPS receivers pick up the faint signals from these satellites and use them to fix their positions in three dimensions.

Of course I knew nothing of these developments.  I suppose I may have been dimly aware that the US military were already using some kind of satellite navigation – as indeed they were – but the Cold War was still very much in progress and such technology was highly sensitive.  That was to change when the Iron Curtain was lifted in 1989 and the Soviet Union fell apart.  

GPS was publicly available in the 1990s and in 2000 some controls were lifted so that the public had access to even better positional information.  Anyone who could buy a GPS receiver could now fix his or her position to within a few meters anyway on the surface of the earth. It was quite incredible at first but it soon became routine and familiar.

Since 2000, as the price (and size) of GPS receivers has dropped, this astonishing navigational technology has swept the board.  It’s everywhere: in our mobile phones, our cars, in planes and of course in boats.  We can even put GPS transponders in our valuables or on our children so that we can keep track of where they are!  

And now there are other satellite navigation systems besides GPS: notably the Russian GLONASS; China’s BEIDOU; and the European Union’s GALILEO. Collectively these are known as Global Navigation Satellite Systems or GNSS.

GNSS has made life much easier and, in many ways, much safer.  But it has its shortcomings.  First of all, it’s very vulnerable to interference and can easily be jammed.  Secondly, it’s quite easy to ‘spoof’ the GNSS signals and persuade a receiver that it’s somewhere where it’s not. For these reasons – and others – robust backup systems are badly needed.  One possibility is LORAN – an old radio-based navigation system developed in World War II.

Of course the most robust alternative to GNSS is the good old sextant.  It doesn’t even need electricity. But while many offshore sailors still study the principles of celestial navigation, very few make regular use of it. For most it is only a back-up system, to be called on in the supposedly unlikely event that GNSS fails.

The trouble is that celestial navigation is a skill, and like all skills it requires practice. I wonder how many offshore sailors could actually fix their position with a sextant if they had to do so in a hurry?

But leaving aside questions of safety, one of the sad consequences of the dominance of GNSS is that few people now learn how rewarding the practice of celestial navigation can be.

As I wrote in my book Sextant:

‘It is time to rediscover the joys of celestial navigation, not merely as a safety net, but because using a sextant to find our way puts us into the closest possible touch with the natural world at its most sublime.’

That’s still true, of course, but I don’t think many people are following my advice. Pushing buttons is just too easy.

31.Joshua Slocum on the joys of celestial navigation

One of the things that bothers me about our ever-increasing reliance on technology is the way it distances us from the natural world.  Yes, yes – it makes life easier in all sorts of ways and it would make no sense to turn our backs on it, but all that convenience does come at a cost.

This is especially true of GPS.  Have you ever had had the slightly weird experience of allowing the in-car ‘satnav’ to lead you astray on a journey to a place you knew perfectly well how to find?  We’re so beguiled by its extraordinary accuracy and reliability that we daren’t challenge its authority.  GPS can be disabling – reducing us to a state of child-like dependence and making us behave like complete idiots.  In fact it actually weakens our ability to navigate naturally, as recent research has confirmed (see earlier post).

The Inuit peoples of Northern Canada worry that young people who have become reliant on GPS can’t safely find their way around in the Arctic wilderness and easily get lost – which is no joke up there.  Their elders, by contrast, just using natural cues like the sun and stars, landmarks of all kinds, the wind, the shapes of snow drifts, and the behaviour of the wildlife, can find their way in almost any weather.  Apparently they never get lost even if they sometimes have sit tight for a while when there’s a complete ‘white out’.

Over the last 20 years GPS has come to dominate marine navigation almost completely.  Integrated electronic navigation systems based on GPS are now installed even on small boats.  Basically they offer a ‘moving map’ display on which the vessel is represented by a little boat-shaped icon.  

Linked to the GPS – and maybe also to radar and other instruments – these ‘Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems’ (ECDIS) have taken all the hard work out of navigation.  With a click of a mouse you can find out how far you have to go to reach your destination, what the best course is, how long it’ll take to get there, how much current is against you and much else besides.  

It’s quite brilliant but it’s also totally infantilising.  You’re turned into a mere consumer of navigational information with no part at all in the complex business of generating it.  A glance at the display tells you exactly where you are – and  you don’t even have to raise your head to look at the world outside.

Maybe that’s fair enough if you’re a professional seaman who just needs to get safely from A to B by the fastest route, but there’s something a bit sad about recreational sailors relying on GPS and ECDIS – as they increasingly do.  After all, what’s the point of going sailing, if not to be experience the wonders of the natural world?   (I leave aside the point that exclusive reliance on electronic navigation aids is actually very risky - a subject I might come back to one of these days.)

The sea is the last great wilderness and there are few things more rewarding than to find your way across it with a sextant in your hand.  To fix your position in mid-ocean by taking sights of unimaginably distant stars is a truly sublime experience.  

As the first single-handed round-the-world yachtsman, Joshua Slocum (1844-1908), said after finding the Marquesa Islands just where he expected (using the old lunar distance method for finding longitude):

To cross the Pacific Ocean … brings you for many days close to nature, and you realize the vastness of the sea. Slowly but surely the mark of my little ship’s course on the track-chart reached out on the ocean and across it, while at her utmost speed she marked with her keel still slowly the sea that carried her. On the forty-third day from land,… the sky being beautifully clear and the moon being ‘in distance’ with the sun, I threw up my sextant for sights. I found from the result of three observations, … that her longitude by observation agreed within five miles of that by dead-reckoning.

30.Darkness matters much more than you might think...

We’re only just starting to realise that our love affair with artificial light at night (ALAN) is bad not just for us, but also for many of the creatures with which we share this planet. Including, for example, the sandhopper.

But before I talk about the problems facing this remarkable crustacean, let me sketch in a bit of background about light pollution.

Paris was the first European city to introduce street lighting. That was in 1667, during the reign of Louis XIV - The Sun King. Very soon other major cities across Europe followed suit. (I’m not sure about Asia - I suspect that Edo was pretty well lit too and maybe even earlier than Paris. Does anyone know?)

Streetlights in those days were pretty dim - just candles or oil lamps. While they made nocturnal city life easier and perhaps a bit safer, they didn’t have much effect on the visibility of the night sky. In the countryside, the nights remained as dark as they had always been.

Things changed with the arrival of gas and electric lights in the 19th century. Cities could now be brilliantly illuminated. More light seemed to be an unqualified good, and few resisted its encroachments. Today of course we have many other kinds of lighting - like LEDs and fluorescent tubes.

ALAN is spreading rapidly across the face of the earth.  Everywhere you go, there are brilliantly lit office buildings, factories, airports, docks, military installations, car parks, apartment blocks and even private houses.

But ALAN is not restricted to built-up areas - it extends outwards along the roads that connect the cities and towns where we live. You can’t even escape it completely on the open ocean, where oil rigs, ships and fishing boats are often lit up like Christmas trees.

The problem is not just the direct glare of the lights themselves.

There is also the phenomenon of ‘skyglow’ caused by the scattering of light from clouds and dust in the atmosphere.

One of the sad consequences of ALAN is that most people on earth can no longer enjoy the wonder of a dark night sky with its thousands of stars - and they will never see the Milky Way.

Big cities generate so much light that the skyglow above them can sometimes be detected a hundred miles away or more. It is the most widespread form of light pollution and apparently now affects 23% of the earth’s surface between the latitudes of 75 degrees North and 60 degrees South. That includes many of the most important areas of biodiversity around the world. And it continues to spread rapidly.

Of all the many serious environmental problems we face, ALAN is actually the easiest to solve.

Better designed lights, properly shielded, pointing in the right direction, and only as bright as they need to be, would make a huge difference. Steps like these would not be expensive to implement. They would also save energy and reduce costs in the long run. (For more information about light pollution and how to combat it, visit the excellent website of the International Dark-Sky Association.)

In recent years scientists have begun to pay attention to the effects of ALAN, both on us humans and on other animals, as well as plants.

ALAN certainly has a disruptive effect on the internal clocks that govern many natural processes - including our own sleeping patterns.

It is a well-known menace to turtle hatchlings, as well as migratory birds. It may also be implicated in the decline of many insect species.

And now it looks as if ALAN is also making life difficult for the poor little sandhopper.

These animals live on sandy beaches and, as I explained in Incredible Journeys (Chapter 10), they are remarkable navigators.

In the evening they make their way to water’s edge to chomp on seaweed. In the morning they retreat up the beach and bury themselves in the damp sand to avoid getting dried out by the sun. Since they can easily get drowned, it’s important that they don’t go the wrong way.

Amazingly, sandhoppers have not one but two celestial compass systems that help them steer in the right direction - whether up or down the beach. One is based on the light of the moon and the other on the sun.

A new study (unfortunately locked behind a paywall) from D. Torres et al. looks at how skyglow affects the navigational ability of sandhoppers on the coast of the island of Anglesea, Wales.

They report that skyglow - though much weaker than direct light pollution - nevertheless disrupts the sandhoppers’ lunar compass system, making it harder for them to navigate safely at night.

Since many other animals use the stars and the moon to help them orient at night, it is a sure bet that ALAN is not just causing trouble for sandhoppers.

Torres et al. conclude that ‘a renewed focus on the ecological impacts of artificial skyglow is urgently needed’ in order to understand how it is affecting the world around us.

Yes indeed.

And in the meantime, please do think about how you can reduce your own light footprint!

29.Bats with maps?

Bats suffer from big PR problems. They are traditionally associated with all kinds of bad things - from vampires and the devil, to rabies and COVID-19. And many people think they’re ugly too, though I think this Egyptian fruit bat is actually very cute.

But one thing is beyond doubt: bats are very clever.

Many of them fly by night and have astonishing powers of echolocation, while others are day-flyers that rely on their excellent eyesight. Some bats migrate over large distances. And they’re all very good at navigation.

A new study from Lee Harten et al. at Tel Aviv University sheds light on the Egyptian fruit bat’s impressive navigational skills - and in particular, whether they make use of a ‘cognitive map’.

As I explain in Incredible Journeys, the cognitive map has been the Holy Grail of animal navigation studies ever since it was first proposed back in the 1940s by the great Berkeley psychologist, Edward Tolman.

Because rats sometimes use shortcuts when searching for food rewards in mazes - entirely novel routes that they have never used before - Tolman thought they might be making use some of some kind of ‘cognitive map’ on which they stored information about the layout of their surroundings.

This was a very controversial idea because rats were then thought capable only of learning fixed routes based on trial-and-error (otherwise known as ‘stimulus-response’ or ‘S-R’ learning). Acquiring map-like knowledge couldn’t easily be explained in S-R terms, so it seemed impossible - according to the prevailing behaviourist orthodoxy.

Tolman was attacked on all sides and his opponents came up with all sorts of alternative explanations for the behaviour of the rats - some of which were pretty bizarre. But when cognitive neuroscience took off in the 1960s, it became possible to monitor what was going on in the brains of living experimental animals. And many discoveries made since the 1970s have born out Tolman’s hypothesis.

To cut a long and complicated story short, there’s now abundant evidence that various mammals - including rats, mice and human beings - have brain circuitry that allows them to form cognitive maps of their surroundings, though there’s still plenty of room for debate about how these work in practice.

What is less clear is whether any other animals have the same abilities, though there are some scientists who would make that claim - even for insects like honey bees.

Bats of course are mammals and it would be quite surprising if they were any less gifted navigationally than, say, rats or mice. After all, they navigate over much larger distances - and they are obliged to do so in three dimensions!

The new study is interesting because it provides pretty solid evidence for the first time that fruit bats really do use cognitive maps.

Using GPS trackers, Harten et al. mapped every single journey taken by 22 young bats (‘pups’) starting with their first excursion outside the nest and continuing every night thereafter for five months.

The pups gradually extended their home ranges until these reached a mean area of about 60 square km. Sometimes they undertook exploratory flights which took them beyond into unfamiliar territory. When they detected new sources of food, they would return to them later on to feed.

The striking finding was that the pups - like Tolman’s rats - often performed impressive shortcuts. These were defined as routes in which at least 50% of the animal’s journey was novel (i.e. the pup passed no closer th100m to any location it had previously visited).

You may wonder whether these shortcuts were just chance events. Well, they certainly looked intentional.

The paths the pups followed were almost as straight as their regular ‘commuting’ routes to familiar sources of food, and they were much straighter than their exploratory flights. Moreover, the pups headed straight for their targets right from the outset of these flights. Some of the lengthier shortcuts (described by the researchers as ‘long-cuts’) occurred at the end of exploratory flights. These sometimes involved navigating for many kilometers over unfamiliar territory.

And out of the 246 short- and long-cuts that were observed, hardly any was predictable on the basis of a randomised (‘random-walk’) movement strategy.

Could the pups have been following a scent trail?

There is plenty of evidence that homing pigeons make use of olfactory cues to find their way back to their roosts - especially when taken to distant and unfamiliar locations (though this is still the subject of some debate). But Harten et al. found no correlation between wind direction and navigational straightness. On this basis they judged it unlikely that the bats were relying on olfaction, though they could not rule it out completely.

What about echolocation then?

The researchers note that the bats’ echolocation system has quite a limited range - for example, they can detect a large tree only when it is within 50 m.

Harten et al. also found no evidence that the bats were making the kind of errors that would be expected if they were relying on ‘path integration’ or DR to make their shortcuts.

So they concluded that the bats must have been relying primarily on their acute vision to perform these navigational feats.

But of course good eyesight alone isn’t enough.

Harten et al. believe that, before setting off, the bats look around them and use the spatial arrangements of distant landmarks (such as high-rise buildings) to judge where they are and the heading they need to follow to reach their goal.

And since the bats are not following the same routes again and again, they must have some way of storing the different locations of these landmarks (as well as their varied appearances) in a form that doesn’t depend on any fixed point of view.

So, it really does look as if they must have some kind of cognitive map, though it will be interesting to see how other experts react to the new study.

27.Does relying on GPS weaken your ability to navigate?

Lots of people who are interested in traditional methods of navigation - myself included - have long suspected that habitual GPS use weakens our ability to find our way around without the help of those little glowing screens.

As I observe in Incredible Journeys, using GPS relieves us of the need to pay attention to our surroundings and keep track of our position as we travel around. So it’s reasonable to suppose that people who rely most heavily on GPS will have more difficulty navigating without its help than those who keep their wits about them and their eyes open.

Now a new study has confirmed these suspicions.

There are two basic ways of navigating a new environment and they rely on quite different parts of the brain.

One is the ‘spatial memory strategy’. This means learning the relative positions of a series of landmarks and it allows us to form a ‘cognitive map’ of our surroundings. It depends heavily on a region in the middle of the brain called the hippocampus - which is crucial to our ability to recall events.

The other approach is based simply on learning a sequence of manoeuvres - turn left at the end of the street, then go 50 yards and then turn right, and so. Known as ‘stimulus-response learning’, it involves a different part of the brain called the caudate nucleus - which is also the key to learned skills like riding a bicycle.

Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot wanted to find out whether individuals who were dependent on GPS relied more on stimulus-response strategies than on spatial memory when they had to find their way without its help.

So they asked 50 healthy young adults (18 women and 32 men) between the ages of 19 and 35 who lived in Montreal, Canada, to perform a series of navigation tasks in computer-based ‘virtual’ mazes. The subjects also completed questionnaires that explored - among other things - how confident they were in their navigational abilities and the degree to which they relied on GPS in their every day lives. 13 of the original subjects took part in a follow-up study three years later designed to find out what the long-term effects of GPS use might be.

As expected, Dahmani and Bohbot found that the more people relied on GPS to navigate, the less likely they were to deploy a spatial memory-based strategy when they had to navigate without its help.

The follow-up study also suggested that there was a causal relationship between GPS habits and poor spatial memory. And it looks as if this relationship is ‘dose-dependent’ - in other words, the more you use GPS, the weaker your spatial memory is likely to become.

There is of course the possibility that people rely on GPS more and more because their spatial memory is declining. But Dahmani and Bohbot found no relationship between GPS usage and subjective reports of a weakening sense of direction. So this explanation seems implausible.

Higher GPS dependence was specifically associated with a reduced ability to remember and make use of landmarks. This probably explains why the heavy GPS users had more trouble forming cognitive maps than the other subjects.

The authors speculate that increased dependence on stimulus-response learning (based in the caudate nucleus) may actually weaken spatial memory (based in the hippocampus).

Dahmani and Bohbot refer to other studies that compare GPS use with the employment of other, more traditional aids like maps. These plausibly suggest that our level of engagement is an important factor in spatial learning.

GPS of course requires far less mental effort than following a route with the help of landmarks, or navigating with a map and compass.

The authors reach a simple conclusion: ‘the greater the use of GPS, the greater [the] decline in spatial memory over time’.

This has important implications for all of us, but especially for those - like the Inuit hunters of Arctic Canada - who have traditionally relied on their senses and wits to navigate perilous environments. Over-reliance on GPS in places where the direct route between two points may be unsafe (it might for example take you over a precipice!) can cost you your life.

Dahmani and Bohbot end with an interesting suggestion: perhaps GPS manufacturers could include landmarks in the automatic guidance instructions ‘as a way to re-engage users with their surroundings’. That might help, but we also need to put our gadgets aside whenever possible and exercise our little grey cells!

26.New light on whale navigation

Dogs may be interesting, but whales are really fascinating!

In Incredible Journeys I wrote about the mysteries that surround the extraordinary navigational feats of humpback whales.

And I mentioned the possibility that whales might be making use of gravitational information.

How could that possibly work?

Well, roughly speaking, the idea is that these huge beasts may be able to track changes in their buoyancy resulting from alterations in the gravitational forces to which they are subject.

These changes may result from anomalies in the bedrock beneath the ocean, changes in latitude, or astronomical influences - like tidal forces and the varying distance between the earth and moon.

An ability to detect gravitational patterns in the submarine landscape would obviously be navigationally useful. And if the whales are also aware of changes in the earth-moon gravitational system, those could perhaps help them time the start of their migratory journeys.

Now some new research from Travis Horton and his colleagues has shed more light on these intriguing ideas.

Horton and his team have been sifting evidence about the migratory behaviour of humpbacks travelling between their calving grounds on the Abrolhos Bank (in the tropical seas off the coast of Brazil) and their feeding grounds far to the south, in the chilly waters of the South Georgia Basin.

The data come from old Soviet-era records of whale-hunting activities (bizarrely hidden for many years in a potato cellar!), and more recent satellite-based tracking studies.

These records, which stretch back 50 years or more, show that the whales have continued faithfully to follow the same migratory ‘corridor’ - despite the fact that the relevant geomagnetic and oceanographic conditions (eg currents and food availability) have varied greatly over that period.

As Horton et al. put it, ‘humpback whale migrations do not change in a changing ocean’.

After carefully analysing the tracking data, the team conclude that the whales follow ‘richly patterned and highly reproducible trajectories’. Moreover, these trajectories do indeed appear to reflect the varying gravitational forces to which the animals are subject.

They also found that the tracked whales fell roughly into two groups: those that tended to travel relatively fast and those that travelled at a more sedate pace.

Interestingly, eight of the nine ‘slow’ whales started their southbound migrations just before or during the first or last quarter of the moon. By contrast, eleven ‘fast’ whales head south near the full or new moon. Curiously, the whales that ‘sang’ swam more slowly than the non-singing ones. I wonder why?

While lending weight to the theory that the whales make use of gravitational information, this research certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility that the whales also make use of geomagnetic information - as several earlier studies have proposed. It does however suggest that they don’t rely exclusively on magnetic cues. And this would certainly make good sense if, as in this case, those cues are constantly changing.

19.Young cuckoos are even cleverer than we thought…

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the amazing journeys undertaken by adult Mongolian cuckoos - like Onon in this picture.

Here I talk very briefly about a fascinating new study, just published in the journal Nature. It reveals that young cuckoos - making their very first migratory journey all the way from Russia to Southern Africa - can somehow tell when they have been moved 1800 km to the east of their proper route. And, just like experienced adult birds, they can change course to compensate for this displacement.

It’s the first time such an ability has been clearly demonstrated in young birds and it leaves us wondering how they solve a problem that we humans only cracked a few hundred years ago.

18.My interview for the Stratford Literary Festival

I was lucky to be interviewed by the novelist Clare Clark who asked extremely good questions. I hope my answers measured up to them!

8. a video introducing ‘Incredible Journeys’ (‘Supernavigators’ in North America)

This is a 15-minute version of a video I made recently as an introduction to some of the main themes of the book. I hope you enjoy it!

7.Celestial navigators - human and non-human

People have been using the sun, moon and stars to help them find their way for a very, very long time.  

And not just people but other animals too – like birds, moths and beetles – to name but a few.  This is a really exciting area of research and new discoveries keep piling in, many of which are described in Incredible Journeys.

Eric Warrant and Marie Dacke, for example, have shown that nocturnal dung beetles roll their carefully sculpted dung balls back to their nests using the light of the moon or the Milky Way as a guide.  

And recently Eric Warrant and David Dreyer have shown that the Australian Bogong moth also makes use of the Milky Way to maintain a steady course on its 1000 km migratory journeys (as well as a magnetic compass).

Bogong moth

We know that many birds that migrate by night orient themselves by paying attention to the rotational pattern of stars around Polaris, which marks the direction of true north.

My guess is that our prehistoric human ancestors would also have been pretty good at this kind of celestial navigation - tens of thousands of years ago.

What we know for sure is that the builders of Stonehenge and many other ancient monuments around the world are carefully aligned so as to highlight key celestial events like the summer and winter solstices – that mark the longest and shortest days of the year.  

And the amazing Nebra Sky Disc – discovered in Germany in 1999 – suggests that our Bronze Age forebears understood the very complicated relationship between the solar and lunar years.  It was made about 3,500 years ago. http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/nebra_disk.htm

And the Greeks knew a thing or two.  The amazing Antikythera Mechanism – discovered by sponge divers over a hundred years ago – dates from around the end of the 2nd century B.C.  It’s by far the most sophisticated mechanical device yet discovered from the ancient world. The Antikythera Mechanism seems to be a complex mechanical “computer” which tracks the cycles of the Solar System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

We know frustratingly little about how the Greeks and Romans navigated at sea, though they travelled widely - and not just in the Mediterranean.  It’s always assumed that they didn’t use any specialised equipment.  But the Antikythera mechanism makes you wonder…if they knew that much about the behaviour of the heavens, would they not have put their expertise to navigational use?

On the other side of the world the islanders of the Pacific were already starting to venture out across the Pacific at least two thousand years ago. In their ocean-going sailing canoes they could make accurate landfalls on small islands after travelling as much as two thousand nautical miles across the open ocean.  

They didn’t use any instruments or even charts.  They relied only on their wits and finely-tuned senses – and a lengthy apprenticeship that started when they were children.  When western sailors like Bougainville and Cook first encountered these navigational prodigies in the mid-18th century they were astonished.  

Luckily we know a lot about how the Pacific Islanders navigated because, back in the 1960s, researchers started asking the right questions - before their extraordinary skills had completely died out.  

At the heart of traditional Micronesian and Polynesian navigation was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sky.  The master navigators knew exactly where on the horizon 32 bright stars rose and set, and they could steer a steady course by reference to them.  They also understood that Polaris indicated where true north lay and during the day they could steer by the light of the sun by accurately allowing for the its gradual movement across the sky. They had many other remarkable skills and happily these are now being widely practised once more: http://hokulea.org

Before electronic aids like GPS arrived on the scene, navigators everywhere learned to observe the world around them very closely.  The colour of the water and its depth, the composition of the seafloor (tested with a lead-line), the behaviour of birds, the shape and colour of clouds – these and many other signs could give early warning of the presence of land, often long before it could be seen.

In former times, sailors everywhere paid the closest attention to the world around them - as well as the skies above them. Safe navigation depended on complete immersion in the natural world. It may not always have been as safe or reliable as navigating by GPS, but it was a far richer and much more rewarding experience. And it was also a great deal more robust: no problems like flat batteries, solar storms, spoofing or jamming!

6.The author of the ‘The Call of the Wild’ on celestial navigation…and the dangers of pride!

Jack London

https://www.falseart.com/jack-london-the-snark/

As readers of my first book, Sextant, will know, I’m not only interested in how non-human animals navigate. I’m a navigator myself and a devotee of celestial navigation - a skill seriously threatened by our increasing (and by now almost exclusive) reliance on electronic navigation aids, notably GPS.

So here’s an entertaining anecdote drawn from the author and adventurer Jack London’s account of his long trans-Pacific cruise in his yacht the Snark.

London and his friend, Roscoe, sailed from San Francisco in 1908 – heading first for Honolulu – without yet knowing how to use a sextant, which was a problem because they had no other way of determining their position!  So they simply taught themselves.

Roscoe was the first to try his hand:

‘…when we got out to sea and he began to practise the holy rite, while I looked on admiringly, a change, subtle and distinctive, marked his bearing.  When he shot the sun at noon, the glow of achievement wrapped him in lambent flame.  When he went below, figured out his observation, and then…announced our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his voice that was new to all of us.  But that was not the worst of it.  He became filled with incommunicable information.

‘By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and experienced the possession of power that was like unto a god…The act of finding himself on the face of the waters became a rite, and he felt himself a superior being to the rest of us who knew not this rite and were dependent on him for being shepherded across the heaving and limitless waste, the briny highroad that connects the continents and whereon are no milestones. So, with the sextant he made obeisance to the sun-god…’

At first London deferred to Roscoe, but quite soon he rebelled.  Roscoe, he reflected, is a man like myself.  ‘What he has done, I can do.’  So he decided to learn for himself how to handle a sextant – a task that he found not too difficult.

‘The mystery was mystery no longer. …and yet, such was the miracle of it, I was conscious of new power in me, and I felt the thrill and tickle of pride… I was not as other men – most other men: I knew what they did not know, – the mystery of the heavens, that pointed out the way across the deep….No medicine man nor high priest was ever prouder…I was a worker of miracles. I forgot how easily I had taught myself from the printed page. I forgot that all the work (and a tremendous work, too) had been done by the masterminds before me, the astronomers and mathematicians, who had discovered and elaborated the whole science of navigation…’

Eventually the Snark made her first landfall, just as planned:

‘ “That island is Maui”, we said, verifying by the chart. “…We’ll be in Honolulu tomorrow. Our navigation is all right.” ‘

[Quotes from The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London]

5.The night and stars: Henry Beston on Cape Cod in the 1920s

‘With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night?  Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?…Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.’

from ‘The Outermost House’, Chapter 8: ‘Night on the Great Beach’