20 Historic Travel Skills That Made Long Journeys Possible

Viking sailors may have used the sunstone method to locate the sun when clouds or fog made it impossible to see, helping them determine their direction while sailing. The method works with Iceland spar, a calcite crystal that polarizes skylight, splitting it into two beams. Rotating the crystal until both beams are equally bright reveals the hidden sun’s location. This method is described in 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic sagas as finding the sun on foggy days using a sólarsteinn, or crystal. While researchers accept that this technique is optically sound, they hesitate to conclude that every longship had a sunstone on board, since very few have been found. Pretty impressive for navigation with what basically looks like a rock!

Contrary to popular belief, SOS has nothing to do with the phrase “Save Our Souls.” At the 1906 International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Berlin, SOS—which is actually just three dots, three dashes, three dots—was adopted as the new distress signal, replacing CQD, and took effect in 1908. It was simply the easiest combination of dots and dashes to transmit by hand through static, and the “Save Our Souls” acronym was merely back-fitted.

Sailors over several centuries used a device called a chip log to determine the speed of their ships. They dropped a weighted board attached to a rope over the stern of the ship. The rope had equidistant knots tied into it. As the board stayed relatively stationary, a sailor counted the knots passing through his hands while another sailor timed him with a sandglass. The knots were spaced so that the result gave the ship’s speed in, you guessed it, “knots.” One problem, however, was that the current could influence the ship’s actual speed over the seafloor.

The kamal was a simple navigation tool used to determine latitude using the position of Polaris, or the North Star. To use it, a navigator held a knot in the string between his teeth, held the card out over the sea, and sighted Polaris, aligning the star with the card’s upper edge and the horizon with its lower edge. The altitude of Polaris corresponded with the latitude of one’s port of call. Used by 15th-century Arab pilot Ahmad ibn Mājid, the kamal was a crucial innovation for Arab and Indian Ocean navigators; it performed the functions of more complex instruments with nothing more than a piece of string and a simple card. Pretty impressive for something you could practically fit in your pocket!

A drift meter helped aviators determine how far the wind was pushing their airplane off course. The pilot looked through a sight mounted on the floor and could see the ground traveling sideways beneath the plane. Charles Lindbergh had a drift meter aboard his famous 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, but according to Smithsonian records, he couldn’t actually use it while flying alone since it required him to look down through the floor while someone flew the plane. A little inconvenient on a solo flight! Harold Gatty, however, successfully used one in 1931 while navigating for pilot Wiley Post aboard the Winnie Mae.

Aboriginal Australians could navigate across thousands of miles and find places they had never seen before. Songlines are sung or spoken cycles that tell the stories of ancestral journeys while encoding geographical knowledge about landmarks, routes, and important places along the way. By learning and following these lines in the correct order, travelers could use them to navigate across the landscape. Basically, a map you had to memorize and sing! This geographical knowledge was passed down from generation to generation for tens of thousands of years.

Scurvy killed more sailors on long voyages than battle or bad weather, yet somehow British explorer Captain James Cook’s crews stayed healthy. Rigorous attention to hygiene, along with fresh greens and fermented cabbage, helped save his crews on his 1770s voyages. Cook thought, erroneously, that malt wort was the saving factor. Close, but not quite! Decades earlier, in 1747, Dr. James Lind had run a clinical trial on preventing scurvy. Later, Dr. Gilbert Blane persuaded the Admiralty to make citrus fruit a daily requirement for seamen. That edict was issued in 1795.

The mariner’s astrolabe, designed by Portuguese navigators by the 1480s to compensate for the shortcomings of the land astrolabe aboard moving ships, is a heavy brass ring with wide openings to avoid wind resistance. The navigator suspends it by a thumb ring so that the instrument can swing freely, and then manipulates a swivel arm until the sun shines through the pinhole sights. Midday solar altitude, from which latitude is derived, can then be read off the graduated rim.

By feeling how ocean swells deflected off each other, Pacific navigators could determine the location of islands thousands of miles away. A 2,000-year history of honing this technique allowed navigators in the Marshall Islands to create stick charts to aid the memorization of these movements. The mattang and rebbelib were models built from coconut frond midribs and shells. However, navigators never actually took them out on their canoes.

The diamond hitch is a clever trick of tying a single rope in such a way that it forms a diamond shape on top of a saddle, allowing the animal’s own movement to work the gear tighter instead of looser. This self-tightening knot meant packers didn’t have to retie loads. Popular on the 19th-century frontier, the technique made its way into U.S. Army manuals for hitching freight to horses and pack mules.

Pemmican was a high-calorie travel food that was half fat, and that was the point. The meat was dehydrated and pounded into a powder, the fat rendered, and both were mixed together in equal amounts along with dehydrated berries, then packed into rawhide containers. This wasn’t jerky. It was serious survival food! Invented by Indigenous North Americans, pemmican was later a source of sustenance for fur traders and polar expeditions. Its calorie density meant that a pound of the stuff packed roughly 3,500 calories and kept for years without refrigeration.

Bedouin guides navigated vast sand seas like the Rub’ al Khali by reading subtle cues in the sand itself. Barchans (crescent-shaped dunes with their horns pointing downwind) served as a compass. Guides learned the angle of the dune crests to keep their heading and noted the direction of the ripples on the dunes’ windward slopes. Even the texture under their feet could tell them something.

The traverse board, in use from the late 1400s to the mid-1800s, consisted of a wooden panel containing a 32-point compass rose surrounded by peg holes. During the ship’s four-hour watches, the helmsman would record the heading of the ship every half-hour with a peg. Additional pegs would mark the speed from the chip log. At the end of the watch, the navigator would enter the record from the traverse board into the ship’s log. This was a tool for keeping track of past data, as opposed to aiding in navigation.

A Roman mile (mille passus) is 1,000 double-steps, roughly 5,000 Roman feet, or approximately 1.48 kilometers. To measure distances, travelers determined the length of their double pace in all sorts of conditions (on a slope, on flat terrain, through brush, etc.), then kept track by using a tally in their hands, moving pebbles from one pocket to the other, or tying knots in a cord every 100 paces. Their legs were basically their measuring tool.

Before today’s vividly painted trail markers, 18th- and 19th-century travelers would remove some of the bark from trees to reveal the lighter-colored wood beneath. The markings (or blazes) were hand-carved: one notch indicated that the trail continued straight ahead; a notch with a slash above it signaled the trail would turn or cross a stream. Above the treeline, travelers sometimes built conical stone cairns, sometimes adding a pointer stone to indicate direction.

Herodotus reported the use of lead line sounding to measure water depth as early as 440 BCE. A leadsman would toss a weight attached to a marked rope into the water. The lead weight had a hollow base that was filled with tallow. The tallow would bring up a sample of the bottom: mud, sand, or shell. Matching the depth reading and bottom composition with a coastal chart, navigators were able to pinpoint their position even in thick fog when land was not visible. Who knew a blob of mud stuck to some tallow could tell you where you were?

The Carta Pisana, the oldest surviving portolan chart, or nautical map, dates from about 1275–1300 CE. With magnetic compass headings, dividers, and a parallel ruler, plotting a point-to-point course across the Mediterranean would have been a breeze using the rhumb lines crisscrossing this map. Medieval Google Maps, if you will! These early charts show rhumb lines emanating from compass roses, but no grid of latitudes and longitudes, and were a navigator’s tool for dead reckoning, estimating distance and direction.

Experienced Inuit travelers also learned to read the sea ice around them. Patches of dark grey sea ice indicate thin ice, whereas paler blue and white ice indicates safer multi-year pack. Upon hitching his sled dogs (qimmiq) either in a fan or in tandem formation, the driver could rely on his dogs’ ability to scent open-water leads (qamaniq) or concealed crevasses, especially in whiteout conditions. When you couldn’t trust your own eyes, you could at least trust the dogs!

Seabirds such as boobies, terns, and frigatebirds must return to land each night to roost, and experienced mariners used their flight path at dusk as a guide. The brown booby, for instance, rarely ranges more than 30 nautical miles from land, so spotting one provided the navigator with both bearing and distance to shore. Other birds, such as petrels, however, live at sea and are of no help in guessing location.

Determining longitude mathematically at sea required knowing the time at a fixed reference point and contrasting this against local time, one hour of discrepancy being equal to 15 degrees of longitude. Local time could be ascertained by taking the altitude of the sun with a sextant at local solar noon, but the ship’s motion at sea prevented accurate timekeeping until clockmaker John Harrison undertook sea trials with his H4 chronometer in 1761-1762, which proved that a clock could remain accurate at sea. Harrison’s chronometer solved the timekeeping half of the longitude problem, while navigators still relied on the sextant to find local time.

This content was created with the help of AI.