The history of navigation, or the history of seafaring, is the art of directing vessels upon the open sea through the establishment of its position and course by means of traditional practice, geometry, astronomy, or special instruments. Many peoples have excelled as seafarers, prominent among them the Austronesians (Islander Southeast Asians, Malagasy, Islander Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians), the Harappans, the Phoenicians, the Iranians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the ancient Indians, the Norse, the Chinese, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Hanseatic Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Danes.
Antiquity
Indo-Pacific
Navigation in the Indo-Pacific began with the maritime migrations of the Austronesians from Taiwan who spread southwards into Island Southeast Asia and Island Melanesia during a period between 3000 and 1000 BC. Their first long-distance voyaging was the colonization of Micronesia from the Philippines at around 1500 BC. By about 900 BC their descendants had spread more than 6,000 kilometers across the Pacific, reaching Tonga and Samoa. In this region, a distinctive Polynesian culture developed. Within the next few centuries Polynesians reached Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island and possibly South America. Polynesian navigators used a range of tools and methods, including observation of birds, star navigation, and use of waves and swells to detect nearby land. Songs, mythological stories, and star charts were used to help people remember important navigational information. Meanwhile, Austronesians in Island Southeast Asia began the first true maritime trade networks by about 1000 BC, linking China, southern India, the Middle East, and coastal eastern Africa. Settlers from Borneo reached Madagascar by the early 1st millennium AD and colonized it by AD 500.The precise time of Austronesians reaching Madagascar is unknown, at the earliest is the earliest centuries BCE (Blench, “The Ethnographic Evidence for Long-distance Contacts”, p. 432.), the latest is no earlier than 7th century CE (Adelaar, “The Indonesian Migrations to Madagascar”, p. 15.).
Mediterranean
Sailors navigating in the Mediterranean made use of several techniques to determine their location, including staying in sight of land and understanding the winds and their tendencies. Minoans of Crete are an example of an early Western civilization that used celestial navigation. Their palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries exhibit architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes, as well as the rising and setting of particular stars.Bloomberg, 1678:793 The Minoans made sea voyages to the island of Thera and to Egypt.Bloomberg, 1997:77 Both of these trips would have taken more than a day's sail for the Minoans and would have left them traveling by night across open water. Here the sailors would use the locations of particular stars, especially those of the constellation Ursa Major, to orient the ship in the correct direction.
Written records of navigation using stars, or celestial navigation, go back to Homer's Odyssey where Calypso tells Odysseus to keep the Bear (Ursa Major) on his left hand side and at the same time to observe the position of the Pleiades, the late-setting Boötes and the Orion as he sailed eastward from her island Ogygia traversing the Ocean.Homer, Odyssey, 273-276 The Greek poet Aratus wrote in his Phainomena in the third century BC detailed positions of the constellations as written by Eudoxos.Bloomberg, 1997:72 The positions described do not match the locations of the stars during Aratus' or Eudoxos' time for the Greek mainland, but some argue that they match the sky from Crete during the Bronze Age. This change in the position of the stars is due to the wobble of the Earth on its axis which affects primarily the pole stars.Taylor, 1971:12 Around 1000 BC the constellation Draco would have been closer to the North Pole than Polaris.Taylor, 1971:10 The pole stars were used to navigate because they did not disappear below the horizon and could be seen consistently throughout the night.
By the third century BC the Greeks had begun to use the Little Bear, Ursa Minor, to navigate.Taylor, 1971:43 In the mid-1st century AD Lucan writes of Pompey who questions a sailor about the use of stars in navigation. The sailor replies with his description of the use of circumpolar stars to navigate by.Taylor, 1971:46–47 To navigate along a degree of latitude a sailor would have needed to find a circumpolar star above that degree in the sky.Bilic, 2009:126 For example, Apollonius would have used β Draconis to navigate as he traveled west from the mouth of the Alpheus River to Syracuse.
The voyage of the Greek navigator Pytheas of Massalia is a particularly notable example of a very long, early voyage.. A competent astronomer and geographer, Pytheas ventured from Greece through the strait of Gibraltar to Western Europe and the British Isles. Pytheas is the first known person to describe the Midnight Sun,The theoretical existence of a Frigid Zone where the nights are very short in summer and the Sun does not set at the summer solstice was already known. Similarly reports of a country of perpetual snows and darkness (the country of the Hyperboreans) had been reaching the Mediterranean for some centuries. Pytheas is the first known scientific visitor and reporter of the arctic. polar ice, Germanic tribes and possibly Stonehenge. Pytheas also introduced the idea of distant "Thule" to the geographic imagination and his account is the earliest to state that the Moon is the cause of the tides.
Nearchos's celebrated voyage from India to Susa after Alexander's expedition in India is preserved in Arrian's account, the Indica. Greek navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus explored the Arabian Sea for Ptolemy VIII, king of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. According to Poseidonius, later reported in Strabo's Geography, the monsoon wind system of the Indian Ocean was first sailed by Eudoxus of Cyzicus in 118 or 116 BC.Strabo's Geography – Book II, Chapter 3, LacusCurtius.
Nautical charts and textual descriptions known as sailing directions have been in use in one form or another since the sixth century BC.Bowditch, 2003:2. Nautical charts using stereographic and orthographic projections date back to the second century BC.
Phoenicia and Carthage
The Phoenicians and their successors, the Carthaginians, were particularly adept sailors and learned to voyage further and further away from the coast in order to reach destinations faster. One tool that helped them was the sounding weight. This tool was bell shaped, made from stone or lead, with tallow inside attached to a very long rope. When out to sea, sailors could lower the sounding weight in order to determine how deep the waters were, and therefore estimate how far they were from land. Also, the tallow picked up sediments from the bottom which expert sailors could examine to determine exactly where they were. The Carthaginian Hanno the Navigator is known to have sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar c. 500 BC and explored the Atlantic coast of Africa. There is general consensus that the expedition reached at least as far as Senegal.Donald Harden, The Phoenicians, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, p. 168 There is a lack of agreement whether the furthest limit of Hanno's explorations was Mount Cameroon or Guinea's 890-metre (2910-foot) Mount Kakulima.B.H. Warmington, op. cit., p. 79 Nonetheless, Hanno's maritime travels limit may have been further north, as there are well documented difficulties with the return travel from the regions south of cape Chaunar, which, up to the early 15th century, "had hitherto been the non plus ultra or impassable limit of European navigation" John Locke, "The works of John Locke: in nine volumes, Volume 9" The history of navigation, p. 385, Printed for C. and J. Rivington, 1824ROBERT KERR, F.R.S. & F.A.S.- GENERAL HISTORY and COLLECTION of VOYAGES and TRAVELS, ARRANGED in SYSTEMATIC ORDER: Forming a Complete History of the Origin and Progress of Navigation, Discovery, and Commerce, by Sea and Land, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. Edin. (1755–1813)
Asia In the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, a navigator could take advantage of the fairly constant monsoon winds to judge direction.. This made long one-way voyages possible twice a year. A 260 CE book by K'ang T'ai (康泰) described ships with seven sails called po were used by the Indo-Scythian (月支—Yuezhi) traders for transporting horses. He also made reference to monsoon trade between the islands (or archipelago), which took a month and a few days in a large po. About 1000 BC, Nusantaran Austronesian developed tanja sail and junk sail. The invention of these types of sail made sailing around the western coast of Africa possible, because of their ability to sail against the wind. Ca. 200 AD in Han dynasty, Chuan (junk ships) are developed in China. In ca. 50–500 AD Malay and Javanese trading fleets reached Madagascar. Also brought with them was the Ma'anyan dayak people, as labourers and slaves.Kumar, Ann (2012). 'Dominion Over Palm and Pine: Early Indonesia’s Maritime Reach', in Geoff Wade (ed.), Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), 101–122. The Malagasy language originated from Southeast Barito language, and Ma'anyan language is its closest relative, with numerous Malay and Javanese loanwords.Otto Chr. Dahl, Malgache et Maanjan: une comparaison linguistique, Egede-Instituttet Avhandlinger, no. 3 (Oslo: Egede-Instituttet, 1951), p. 13.There are also some Sulawesi loanwords, which Adelaar attributes to contact prior to the migration to Madagascar: See K. Alexander Adelaar, “The Indonesian Migrations to Madagascar: Making Sense of the Multidisciplinary Evidence”, in Truman Simanjuntak, Ingrid Harriet Eileen Pojoh and Muhammad Hisyam (eds.), Austronesian Diaspora and the Ethnogeneses of People in Indonesian Archipelago, (Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 2006), pp. 8–9. By the 8th or 9th century A.D., ancient Indonesian ships may have already reached as far as Ghana, likely using the outrigger Borobudur ship and the K'un-lun po or jong.
Medieval age of navigation