Chasing the Sun by Richard Cohen

Author:Richard Cohen [Cohen, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-934-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

In Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes makes his feelings plain about people’s general ability to use all this newfangled gadgetry. Quixote (whose surname, in Catalan, translates as “horse’s ass”) is busy expounding to his long-suffering groom how Ptolemy remains the great authority on navigation, and how well he, the Don, might pinpoint their position had he the right equipment at hand. “If only I had an astrolabe here,” he proclaims, “with which I could take the height of the Pole, I could tell you how far we have gone.” Sancho Panza gloomily retorts: “My God, but your worship has got a pretty fellow for a witness of what you say, this same Tolmy or whatever you call him, with his amputation.”10

For once, contemporary readers may well have laughed in sympathy with Quixote, not at him. The new instruments—possibly because, like compasses, they were associated with the black arts—were slow in coming into general use: it has been said that navigators were the only surviving upholders of the Ptolemaic theory, not because they believed the Sun went around the Earth but because it was simpler to consider that it did. And Jonathan Spence makes the point that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, “no benefits from the exploration of the heavens opened up by Copernicus had yet been applied to the art of navigation.”11

Astrolabes passed out of fashion because they were never very precise, to be replaced by orreries, clockwork models of the planetary system. But be it compass, astrolabe, quadrant, sextant, telescope, or orrery, none was perfect, and sailors still needed to know how to use their own firsthand observation of the Sun to calculate their position. Even the advent of the telescope and its sister instruments did not put an immediate end to naked-eye astronomy, since it was not easy to make accurate positional observations until crosshairs were incorporated into telescopes in the 1660s.

Thus a huge weight of responsibility lay on the lonely pilots. Spence goes on: “Armed with whatever experience they had of winds and currents, fish movements and birds’ flight, carrying simple maps and the narratives of previous voyagers when these existed, with compass, astrolabe, and quadrant, the pilots took responsibility for vessels of a thousand tons or more, with more than a thousand passengers and crew jammed aboard.”

As Fernand Braudel describes sixteenth-century voyages, “Navigation in those days was a matter of following the shoreline, just as in the earliest days of water transport, moving crabwise from rock to rock, from promontories to islands and from islands to promontories … as a Portuguese chronicler puts it, ‘of traveling from one seaside inn to another, dining in one and supping in the next.’ ”12 In exceptional circumstances a ship might lose sight of the coast, were she blown off course or set on one of the three or four direct routes long known and used; but rarely did ships take voluntarily to the open sea. The threats to avoid under even greater penalty were storms and piracy (regarded for centuries as a quite honorable profession).

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