Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
navigating in channels. The Greeks and Phoenicians learned to sail at night
and passed on this wisdom. The night sky was hitched to navigation,
providing an ever more intricate tool to help a knowledgeable mariner
estimate his latitude quite accurately. Such a mariner knew that the Pole
Star was not exactly north; it circled the night sky with an angular radius of
a couple of degrees, which must be compensated for to achieve accurate
navigation. He could say that he was further south than previously because
of the height of the noonday sun, or because of the appearance of new star
constellations and the disappearance of others. He knew that the sun was
lowest in the sky at winter solstice, when it rises and sets further south than
at other times of the year. He knew that during equinoxes the sun rose
precisely in the east and set precisely in the west.
But from classical antiquity to medieval times, European navigators did
not enhance their skills very much. Individually, of course, they learned
their craft and improved—or not.
12
New ships were developed, trade fell
and recovered following the Dark Ages, but for all the passing centuries,
there was little sense of progress in Europe. A maritime navigator from
Roman times would still have recognized the techniques used by his coun-
terpart a thousand years later. He might not have recognized the ship on
which he stood (an important point, one I will expand upon later), and he
certainly would not have recognized the society in which he found himself,
but the techniques of navigation were no more advanced than his own—
and the world maps he looked at may have been worse than his own, as we
have seen.
Ships hugged the shoreline, generally speaking, with a few interesting
exceptions. The transition from inshore to open ocean was made boldly by
a few people. We have seen that the Minoans mastered the route from
Crete to Egypt. Their successors, the Greeks, may have followed: in the
Odyssey
we read how Odysseus was at sea running before a north wind for
five days. We have seen that Phoenicians and Greeks imported tin from
Cornwall. It is possible to ply this route without leaving sight of land, but it
is a much shorter journey to cut across the Bay of Biscay, though land
would fall below the horizon. In the Dark Ages and early medieval times,
Vikings took their magnificent open boats across the rough North Sea and
across the Norwegian Sea to Iceland (fig. 5.4). Irish seafarers also reached
Iceland. Thus, open ocean sailing happened in a few instances, but it was
12. As one writer has said, ''The better navigators became expert. . . . The poorer
navigators just disappeared'' (Knights 2001).
