Although "The Lost Art of Finding Our Way" would be a great title for a wonderful piece of fiction by the likes of Annie Proulx or Michael Ondaatje, this is a brand new nonfiction book by Harvard Physics Professor John Edward Huth. John Huth teaches a popular freshman course at Harvard called "Primitive Navigation" where he teaches students to understand and appreciate the environment around them outside of their digital GPS-enabled bubble, and how to find your way in the natural world using your knowledge and observations of the natural world. The word Primitive in "Primitive Navigation" should probably be in quotation marks, because many of the navigation techniques discussed by Dr. Huth are anything but primitive, like the famous Polynesian explorers who sailed their outrigger canoes from Tahiti to Hawaii using only the stars and sun, winds and ocean currents to navigate the enormous Pacific distances from one small group of islands to another.
To continue with my review of this fascinating new book, follow me below the orange croissant.
"The Lost Art of Finding Our Way" (also available on Amazon) was written by John Huth based on his Harvard course. It's not a textbook, but contains the ideas, insights, and research he did for the course presented in a very readable and interesting way for the general reader. He talks about the navigational techniques of the Vikings, the ancient Arab traders, and of course the long distance Polynesian explorers who relied on their specially trained navigators to not get lost in the vast Pacific, along with many other fascinating topics related to "finding our way"—like how mirages, such as the fata morganas, can lead to navigational disasters if you're not careful.
John Huth's impetus for the course and book was from an experience he had while kayaking in Nantucket Sound off the coast of Cape Cod. A heavy fog descended obscuring all sight of the coast or the sky. Now he had familiarized himself with the prevailing wind, swells, and bell buoys before setting out in his kayak, so he had a mental map of his surroundings that he used to safely paddle back to land. However unbeknownst to him, at the same time, two young women were kayaking in the same fog bank less than a half mile away from him and they became lost, and perished. The next day the Coast Guard found the two empty kayaks, the day after that one of the young women's bodies was found while the other was never recovered. So Huth started wondering how come he easily made it to shore, while at the same time and the same place these young women apparently paddled out to sea instead of to land and were tragically lost. That feeling of "why them, and not me" led to his course and this book.
The book is very thorough in describing the various techniques (all non-electronic) to navigate on land or sea, using only nature, the sky, the stars, the sun, the wind, the currents and swells, and occasionally simple instruments to guide you while you become more comfortable and at one with nature. The last chapter "Baintabu's Story" was my favorite where he made all this information personal. Baintuba was the first great female navigator from the Gilbert Islands in the 1400's who was trained for over seven years in the art and method of long distance Pacific Ocean navigation and long distance outrigger canoe building by her father and grandfather, who were royal navigators to the king of their island group, a position that Baintabu would also come to hold. But with the island social structure being largely patriarchal, this posed some difficulties for Baintabu as the first female royal navigator. The last part of the chapter tells the story of a war party raid to another distant island, and the consequences of mistreating and ignoring your female royal navigator while far at sea. It's a very interesting story about Gilbert Island native society and history in the 1400's, the extensive training required of a long distance navigator concerning the stars, the sun, the wind, the ocean, and the effect that nearby atolls have on ocean swells, as well as being a very good sea story besides.
This book grabbed my attention, because I was in the U.S. Navy in the early 1970s when ocean navigation was becoming more electronically based, at that time LORAN (no GPS yet!) So as part of our training in navigation (as required of all U.S. Navy officers), besides learning how to use LORAN, we also learned how to use non-electronic methods in case the LORAN was knocked out. This included learning how to use a sextant to shoot the sun, moon, and stars which also meant learning how to calculate your actual position using information from the Nautical Almanac tables along with your sextant measurements and times. I don't know what they do nowadays with the ubiquity of GPS, but I still have a sextant on our sofa table to remind me of those days (with many guests, especially younger ones, asking "What is that?")
So this is a book I recommend to those who might be interested in this subject, and those looking for "The Lost Art of Finding Our Way". It's also a very practical book if you're an exploring outdoors type. Like I said at the beginning, I wouldn't be surprised if someday this book helps partially inspire a work of fiction—like Clifford W. Ashley's "The Ashley Book of Knots" (about knots obviously) did for E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News", and Lyall Watson's "Heaven's Breath" (about the wind) did for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient". The title of this book alone, "The Lost Art of Finding Our Way", excites my imagination.