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From: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Newsgroups: net.astro
Subject: Re: StarDate: December 5 Navigation by the Stars
Message-ID: <1291@eosp1.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Dec-84 09:43:08 EST
Article-I.D.: eosp1.1291
Posted: Fri Dec 14 09:43:08 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Dec-84 02:22:39 EST
References: <874@utastro.UUCP>
Reply-To: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Organization: Exxon Office Systems, Princeton
Lines: 41
Summary: 

On primitive pacific navigation:

Much more about star navigation can be found in "East is a big bird"
by Thomas .  He studied pacific navigators with great care.
(Unfortunately the point of the book is to harness his findings to
support a pernicious sociological conclusion, but nonetheless...)

Navigators in the Carolina Islands have a "universe" that is much
longer in the E-W direction than N-S.  Stars in the southern skies have
many more useful navigational guides in the E-W direction than N-S.
Consequently, N-S trips are relatively short, often done in the day,
and rely heavily upon recognition of currents, reefs, fish species,
and other landmarks.  The penalty for missing landmarks in the N-S
direction is to fall out of the carolinas, into open pacific sea.

E-W trips, some of several days duration, are guided heavily by the
stars.  In some very tricky cases where it is necessary to point the
canoe towards open, unlandmarked sky at night, the navigator imagines
a non-existent island, and guides the boat according to how it lines
up with stars in the E or W sky on the "opposite side" of the
non-existent island.  This is an elegant logical construction for
concentrating all of the navigator's intuitive knowledge.

Navigational information for each possible trip is memorized by the
navigators.  Some trips consist of many legs, and thus require chains
of memorized steps.  The Carolinians never ventured out of their
general piece of the Pacific in the first 40 years of this century,
but it was nonetheless required for all navigators to learn the
memorized steps to get to:

	- several mythical homes of deities
	- Austrailia and a few other remote places

Carolinian navigators who entered the Australian navy in WW II were
fascinated to discover that the memorized (and essentially unused)
routes to get to Australia and several other remote places were
essentially correct.


  - Toby Robison (not Robinson!)
  {allegra, decvax!ittvax, fisher, princeton}!eosp1!robison