Sextant: A
Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who Mapped the World's
Oceans
David
Barrie (2014, William Morrow)
In 1973,
David Barrie sailed from Maine to England aboard the thirty-five foot
sloop Saecwen (Anglo-Saxon for 'sea queen'.) Along the way,
Barrie, then nineteen, learned celestial navigation from the ship's
owner, Colin McMullen, a retired Royal Navy captain. Today's
satellite-aided navigation was a decade and more in the future, so,
for three and a half weeks, the sun, moon, and stars were the only
way they had of knowing where they were.
The story
of the crossing is full of small adventures, like trying not to get
hit by larger vessels, and surfing before gale-force winds that threw
up awe-inspiring waves. Excerpts from Barrie's journal also recall
the small annoyances of life at sea: the tight quarters; the lack of
exercise, fresh food, and sleep; and, sometimes, the boredom. Yet no
two days were exactly alike: "People sometimes complain of the
monotony of the sea, but it is, with the sky, the most changeful of
all natural spectacles. Its surface, brushed by the wind, whether
gently or with violence, presents patterns of of infinite variety,
and its color too undergoes astonishing transformations, depending on
factors like the time of day, the depth of water, and the weather."
The voyage
of the Saecwen is the framework for a longer, larger story, of
how heroic mariners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
explored and mapped the Pacific Ocean. Captain Cook and Captain
Bligh are familiar enough names, but to read about what they actually
did, and lived through, is thrilling. Barrie also piques our interest
in Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who sailed around the world by way
of the Falklands and Tahiti; George Vancouver, who mapped the
northern Pacific areas that bear his name; Robert FitzRoy, who, in
addition to captaining Charles Darwin's voyages on the Beagle,
developed the use of the barometer as a weather prediction device;
and many others.
The tools
and methods these men used were being developed at the same time. The
sextant reached its modern form in 1731, and a timepiece useable at
sea was tested in the 1760s. In the North Atlantic, Barrie learns to
fix the Saecwen's latitude by measuring how high the
sun is at noon; if he also knows that it's half past two at Greenwich
at that moment, he can establish her longitude as well. The
first-generation chronometers were not reliable enough on their own
to assist in mapping the Pacific – some mariners traveled with a
dozen or more. Sextant readings of the angle between the moon and the
sun or certain fixed stars (once predictive tables had been developed
and published) also helped explorers fix crucial longitude readings
for the islands of the Pacific.
Facility
with the sextant has begun to decline in the age of the satellite;
American naval officers don't learn celestial navigation unless they
are specialists. Of course, electronic systems run the risk of all
sorts of failures, from jamming equipment to sunspots, so it is
probably a bad idea to be exclusively dependent on GPS. More than
that, there's the grandeur of the thing: "When I recall learning
how to handle a sextant all those years ago, I see myself, a
transient speck of life, fixing my position on the surface of our
small planet by taking the measure of vast, unimaginably distant suns
whose lives are measured in billions of years. The chastening
contrast between their calm majesty and my fretful pettiness was
overwhelming."
Email publication, September 1 2015
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