Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction
For anyone who learned navigation before the advent of GPS and the ubiquitous blue line on cell phone maps, the use of map and compass to go from one place to another was as much an art as a science, having its own rules and conditions to use for a successful journey, especially on trans-oceanic distances or for aerial navigation.
In this short volume, the author explores a forgotten aspect of the development of navigation as a dependable tool, the concept and use of direction for travel. Although most modern travelers do not really ponder where the idea of north, south, east, west comes from, the idea of direction came about simultaneously across many different cultures and eventually developed a socio-cultural meaning beyond mere navigation.
From the time humans started to travel long sea journeys, the need to determine how to get from one port to another has evolved. The early mariners developed their first ideas of direction from natural phenomena such as the polar, later called the north star, that seemed immovable over the top of the earth and allowed mariners to use it for simple navigation. Of course, the wind patterns that blew offshore were also studied intently by early seamen since they knew the direction of the winds often changed with the seasons but were also fairly constant during a season.
Nearly all maritime cultures across the globe knew these arts, and many also quickly grasped that a magnetized needle suspended in water or another liquid would always point in one direction—north; however, they also determined, after a great deal of trial and error and mathematics, that magnetic north was not exactly true geographic north—there was always some variation that changed as you moved from east to west across the seas, which had to be accounted for when traveling very long distances.
His dissertation on the development of maps is equally fascinating. The modern standard of most maps and navigational arts being oriented with north at the top was a gradual development as navigation developed as a science. Budding cartographers had to struggle with how to represent the round surface of the earth on a flat projection that was useful to navigators. Gerard Mercator developed the most common map form for centuries during the 1500s when global navigation became more needed for both commerce and colonization. His projection attempted to take into account both the curvature of the earth and the magnetic variation as ships navigated from east to west. Unfortunately, in order to achieve his goal, his projection extremely distorted the relative sizes of landmasses as the map move toward the polar regions, which influenced how maps were viewed for the following centuries.
However, direction, especially as laid out in what were known as the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west have more than just a navigational meaning, as the author describes in several chapters. Each of these directions attained their own cultural and religious significance. Readers are probably familiar with the terms the “western frontier” or the “Oriental East” or even the “southern way of life.” All of these terms are ultimately defined by a direction that has become as much a cultural reference as a direction of travel. As the author notes, direction also continues to play a substantial role in religious observances, where even the early Christians oriented their churches to the east much like Muslims still pray to the east, the direction of sunrise and a new day.
For anyone that grew up in the era before GPS and learned the art of map and compass, this is a fascinating look at something we all take for granted, the ability to get from one place to another in the most efficient manner possible by going a certain direction. It shows that even the most basic ideas can have far reaching impacts on how humans interact with their physical world.