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Subject: Traditional Chinese navigation
From: Peter Fogg (ffive@XXX.XXX)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 19:57:52 EST
Not that I've found much yet, but thought I'd share these few scraps ..
The story goes that the Chinese were bluewater sailing for maybe 6
centuries before their famous admiral of the 1420s. Seems likely: they
had good boats and were living through a period of rapid technical
advances.
AS the whole world and all the peoples it contained had as its centre
the emperor so, they observed, did the heavens revolve about Polaris.
And as the emperor, in his wisdom, did regulate and guide the affairs of
men then so too did this centre of the universe. In a practical sense it
gave them their latitude. We would call it their co-latitude, but its
effectively the same thing. I don't know what units they measured in.
I do know that a printed guide (illustration provided with the text)
gave captains navigational data to follow - 4 stars (Orion was one) with
their distance from the horizon measured in 'digits', presumably finger
widths. This page came from what we would consider as a pilot guide, or
cruising guide, advice along the lines of: 'When you get here then these
stars will look like this'.
Somewhere else I found mention of a 'sextant'. This is more than
intriguing, but I don't know any more. It seems unlikely that any
machine that did this job would use such crude notation as finger
widths.
I'm not saying that all or any of this is fact. I'm not a historian, I'm
just groping towards what appears to be the possiblilty of a whole way
of navigating that we are largely unaware of. In the unknown lies always
the possibility that they may have had something we could usefully
learn.
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