Finding your Way

Key Facts about Navigation and Map Making

Knowing where you are, finding somewhere you want to go, being able to go back to the same place whenever you want to are abilities everyone has. They are extremely valuable skills and can be improved on with practice.
Almost all animals, from insects to elephants have a well developed sense of location. Homing pigeons, for example, can be taken from their roost in a closed box, moved thousands of kilometres away and released in an area where they have never been before. Yet they fly into the sky and soon are headed directly back home again. There are many stories of cats and dogs who somehow find their way home after being lost in strange areas far from home. Small birds migrate from Russia to New Zealand and back without getting lost.
We have a sense of location too, and it is even more advanced than that of the animals. Once a person is trained to use this skill, they can go anywhere and know their way home even in completely unfamiliar surroundings. Show them a place once and they will find it again many years later.
Ancient navigators were thought to have superhuman abilities. They did not. They simply had a well developed sense of location. They understood the language of nature and learned how to see cycles and relationships that others did not notice.
The Maori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa which means the land of the long white cloud. Islands have their own clouds that are quite different from sea clouds. They come from the transpiration of plants on the islands and get bigger and bigger as the day goes on, rising thousands of metres above the land. Even in strong winds, the cloud remains right over the island. A navigator on a boat can see an island's cloud from 50 miles at sea or more.
There are many other sights, sounds, smells and natural textures that help us develop a sense of where we are. Our eyesight is especially important in navigation, and we orient to easily identified objects (landmarks).
Landmarks are things like mountains, big buildings, or other features of the land that you can see from a long way away. Whenever you come to a new place, always look for landmarks. You won't be lost if you can see a landmark.
Use big landmarks for a general position and smaller landmarks for more exact positions. A mountain will orient you to a particular neighbourhood and an unusual building or tree or rock formation will orient you to a smaller place.
If you want to return to the same place again, line up two landmarks. That way, when you return, all you need to do is move until the two landmarks are lined up the same way again and move towards or away the landmark until the local landmarks appear.
To return to the same place even more exactly, line up two landmarks in one direction and then two more in another direction. When you move until the same set of landmarks line up the same way you are in exactly the same position.
Navigators use stars, the moon, the sun, and the planets as landmarks. They measure the height of the object from the horizon and calculate a line of position. Normally, they use a sextant to measure the angle from the horizon to the star. A navigator will take sights from three stars and where the line of positions cross, that is where they are at sea.
Ancient navigators made a map out of sticks, which represented wave patterns and shells representing the islands. The Navigator would lie in the bottom of the canoe and "feel" the sea waves. Because islands change the direction of waves, the wave pattern told the navigators where the islands were located.
Modern maps are highly accurate representations of the land and sea. They are made from aerial photographs, ground surveys, and depth transects in the open ocean. Making maps is an essential skill for scientists so they can return to the same place again and so others can find their research stations again in the future.
Scientists use highly exact navigation and survey techniques to find the same research station again and again so they can detect changes. Today, a satellite based Geographic Positioning System (GPS) tells a person's position within about 100 metres on land or sea. With precision instruments, position can be obtained within only a few metres. Then, scientists use local landmarks and survey equipment to return to the exact same location.
Returning to the same place and taking the same measurements again is critical to measuring and understanding long term changes.