I have just finished M. R. O’Connor’s interesting, but
somehow also disappointing Wayfinding:
The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s,
2019). O’Connor is impressed with the
navigating skills of indigenous peoples in the Arctic, the Australian outback,
and the waters of Pacific island groups such as the Marshalls. She writes about
them after going there and seeing it done. She has many questions about the
prodigious memory feats and the lifetime experience behind navigation across
miles of barren tundra, desert wastelands, or apparently featureless ocean,
without benefit of map, compass, or GPS. None of these questions gets a
satisfactory answer.
One
question has to do with the way these wayfinding marvels are performed in the
minds of the navigators. Is information about the effects of wind on snow and
ice, for example, stored like a mental map, or is the journey accomplished by
recognizing landmarks and making successive decisions about which way to turn
at each one, without the navigator’s seeing himself in a mental landscape like
a map? Though she speaks to many anthropologists who have studied the question,
she finds that they disagree “on the theoretical explanation of how humans
engage in day-to-day wayfinding.” Is it “survey knowledge,” in which points and
landmarks are organized into a two-dimensional relation—like a map—with an “allocentric”
viewpoint or perspective, as if one were looking down on oneself while navigating?
Or is it “route knowledge,” a sequence of points, landmarks, and natural signs
that make a path from one place to another, with an “egocentric” viewpoint,
always form the point of view of the wayfarer on the ground?
Another
question she investigates is what researchers know about how and where the
brain assembles the knowledge of the expert wayfinder. She discovers that the
hippocampus seems to be where memories and a sense of place come together. London
taxi drivers, required to learn “the knowledge” of London’s ten thousand
streets, have enlarged hippocampi with more gray matter, and damage to the
hippocampus impairs memory. Does the hippocampus help us create internal maps,
or is our place knowledge organized and used sequentially, like a musical
composition? This is another of O’Connor’s unanswered questions.
She
speculates a good deal. Animal research may indicate in migrating animals an
internal compass in the form either of a mineral like magnetite or in radical pairs
of molecules that respond to geomagnetism, though the former has not been
demonstrated beyond a case or two and the latter hasn’t been tested at all.
Does language develop at first in order to explain to other member of the
community how to navigate to some desirable place—another form of bee dance?
Are navigation and storytelling connected?
Of one
thing she is convinced: the erosion of wayfinding skills by the use of compass,
map, and GPS is a loss for human beings, whose culture and brains seem to be
adapted to assimilate and remember a myriad of clues in the environment to help
us find our way to food and back to each other.
Because
O’Connor refers more than once to Harold Gatty’s book on finding your way, I
went back to look at Gatty, who is a more satisfying read in several ways.
Gatty’s book was titled Nature Is Your
Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land or Sea by Observing Nature when it was
first published in 1958. Dover retitled
it when they published it as Finding Your
Way without Map or Compass. Neither title does justice to what Gatty gives
us in this delightful little book. He describes navigation by the Polynesians,
the Arabs, and the Scandinavians using migratory routes of birds as guides—and
sometimes the birds themselves, as in the land-finding bird releases described
in Gilgamesh and Genesis—as well as observations of stars, the use of sea
movements such as swells, and the construction of a pre-compass directional
device called the pelorus, like a
compass card without the needle, that could be oriented by the stars and used
to steer a very accurate course over long distances.
Gatty
emphasizes observation more than its practical use in navigation. He praises
the lifetime habit of seemingly aimless poking around and looking that turned
Gilbert White into the prototype of the naturalist and Charles Darwin into the
preeminent biological thinker of the nineteenth century. Baden-Powell and the
whole scouting movement also come in for admiring notice. This section reminded
me of Russell Hoban’s character Tom, who just looks around and messes around
and eventually beats the professionals in Hoban’s delightful children’s
classic, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and
His Hired Sportsmen (1974).
When
Gatty is describing all of the methods one can use to keep from traveling in
circles when in the wild, he mentions a navigational trick long-distance flyers
can use when their destination is on a natural line such as a river or
coastline. The method is one of intentional error: purposely steering to one or
the other side of the target far enough to overcome an error that might occur
through wind, for example. Then, when the river or coast is reached, the flyer
turns the other way along it and soon encounters the target. This reminded me
of a harrowing experience Ernest Gann describes in Fate Is the Hunter (1961): he and a copilot were flying toward
Corumbá in Brazil using a map with few details over jungle that had no
landmarks anyway. They headed straight for the city, which is on the River
Paraguay, knowing that winds could push them off course one way or the other.
Short of fuel, they come upon the river, but see no town or airfield. Which way
to turn? They have fuel enough to explore only one direction. They choose, for
no particular reason, south, and they land safely at Corumbá. The episode
illustrates Gann’s thesis, expressed in the book’s title, that only fate kept
him from joining the 400 dead flyer friends to whom he dedicates the book;
listing their names takes four pages at the beginning.
Why
didn’t Gann use the intentional error technique Gatty describes? Gatty was
Wiley Post’s navigator in their 1931 round-the-world flight and used the
technique to find an airfield on the Amur River in Siberia, where they needed
to refuel. Gann’s flight was some years later. Wouldn’t he have known about the
method? Or perhaps he did know about
and used it, but thought the “which way?” narrative had more suspense and more
of the fateful in it.
Gatty’s
book will tell you about the orienting power of shrubs and trees, hills and
rivers in ordinary terrain, as well as how to read ocean swells and the color
of the sea, finding direction from sand dunes in deserts, and a good deal more
particular information. He has a detailed section on sea birds, especially the
pelagic ones, complete with pictures. My favorite part of the book is its last
chapters, devoted to what can be learned from the moon and the sun, as well as
how to find your way around the night sky.
So if
you are a speculative person who asks many questions and doesn’t need them all
to be answered, read O’Connor’s book. If you want more certainty about getting
there, less asking about the theoretical basis of what you’re doing, read Gatty’s.
Or read them both.
