The Lost Art of Finding Our Way. By John Edward Huth

THE LOST ART OF FINDING OUR WAY. By John Edward Huth. 558 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2013. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780674072824. Written as a compendium of all aspects of terrestrial and aquatic navigation, John Edward Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way reads like a kind of Dangerous Book for Boys, full of both wisdom and technique for the outdoors-person and a sincere exhortation to get outside, literally and metaphorically, to find one's way. Huth teaches in the Physics Department at Harvard, and no doubt much of the material for the book comes from his freshman seminar "Primitive Navigation" and a general-education course he later taught. Weighing in at eighteen chapters and over 500 pages, including four appendices and an ample glossary, the book is like a well-stocked smorgasbord, either sampled in small bites or devoured in a series of sittings. Readers will learn how compasses work and how to use them; how to navigate by the sun, moon, planets, and stars in different seasons of the year and at different latitudes; why mirages occur; how the "longitude problem" was solved; how to obtain a sounding; how to read waves and clouds; and how to sail into the wind. Indeed, this compendium might well provide all one would need to traverse the Pacific (hint: avoid the Southern Ocean at 40 degrees south latitude with its 10,000 mile "fetch"--uninterrupted expanse for winds to build intensity). Huth begins intriguingly by comparing a modern-day smartphone-enabled commuter ("His whole world was a bubble two feet around his head." p. 1) with an ancient fisherman three thousand years back in time, asking rhetorically who is the primitive one. The fisherman knows why different seasons occur and can navigate expertly using only environmental clues, while the modern commuter is a slave to his device. Huth is convinced that everyone can learn to tap hard-wired skills to learn to navigate across terrain and water bodies without so much reliance on global-positioning systems and other handheld devices. Three recurring case studies illustrate many basic principles of navigation: the Norse seafarers who plied the waters around Iceland, Greenland, and very likely North America from the 9th century onward; medieval dhow-based Arab traders who traded long distance from the Sinai to the Spice Islands; and the incomparable Pacific Islanders who began colonizing islands to the east of present-day New Guinea more than thirty-five centuries ago. Huth returns to these examples throughout the text and also references many other historical accounts of expeditions both successful and unsuccessful, gleaning lessons for today's voyager. The second chapter "Maps in the Mind" includes an explanation of proprioception, a "sense of the body itself' that guides organisms including humans in developing a sense of the passage of time in way finding. Specific cells in the brain are associated with our ability to make mental maps and account for our location and direction of movement. Huth dedicates the book to the memory of Sarah Aronoff and Mary Jagoda, two young kayakers who perished at sea not far, coincidentally, from where Huth himself was kayaking near Cape Cod. He devotes a chilling chapter ("On Being Lost") to psychological profiles of people lost in the woods without landmarks to guide them. Increasingly confused, then panicked, hikers often walk in circles, displaying patterns that can be predicted with computer models. In his chapter "Dead Reckoning," a once-commonplace term with which most today would be unfamiliar, Huth effectively describes the techniques of this most-common form of navigation. Here he charmingly serves up the origins of many commonplace units such as miles, knots, leagues, and furlongs. His section on practices of dead reckoning illustrate the difference between a bearing--the direction from an observer to an object--and a heading: the direction of travel. …