Re: [Paddlewise] stupid natives

  First off, I'm not a sailor at all so you can take what I write about navigation for what it's worth.  Anyway..
and it probably came from the TV series on longitude, It wan't just that we were pretty good at determining latitude, but specifically Northern latitudes.  That was why Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa was considered so perilous.  Once we went past the Ivory Coast or thereabouts, the North Star vanished from view. He was also seeing constellations and stars completely unfamiliar to european navigators.  And he had to figure out where he was using them.  Surely he had a compass so knew where north might be, but they already knew about the complications of magnetic declination but had no knowledge of its effect so far south. We certainly had more objective instruments to use, such as quarterstaffs and astrolables.  So, doing that navigation in european terms involved use of such instruments and the accumulation of data, and learning to interpret its meaning.  
   That's not too different from the Pacific navigators who used different cues, perhaps, but over the generations had reached conclusions about their reliability and how to interpret them...  

Joe P. 


>The hotshot Europeans at the time could not
>tell how far around the globe they were. At a time when the Europeans  
>had no
>answer, the Pacific navigators new latitude by the north star and by the
>position of other stars at their zenith.
>
>Those two sentences serve to imply that the Europeans could not tell  
>latitude from the stars which is incorrect and it implies that the  
>natives could tell longitude which is incorrect.
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