Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass

Harold Gatty

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780486406138
• eBook ISBN: 9780486318936
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

During his remarkable lifetime, Harold Gatty became one of the world's great navigators (in 1931, he and Wiley Post flew around the world in a record-breaking eight days) and, to the benefit of posterity, recorded in this book much of his accumulated knowledge about pathfinding both on land and at sea.
Applying methods used by primitive peoples and early explorers, the author shows how to determine location, study wind directions and reflections in the sky, even how to use the senses of smell and hearing to find your way in the wilderness, in a desert, in snow-covered areas, and on the ocean. By observing birds and other animals, weather patterns, vegetation, shifting sands, patterns of snow fields, and the positions of the sun, moon, and stars, would-be explorers can learn to estimate distances and find their way without having to rely on a map or a compass.
The wealth of valuable data and advice in this volume — much of it unavailable elsewhere — makes it indispensable for hikers, bikers, scouts, sailors, and outdoorsmen — all those who might find themselves stranded or lost in an unfamiliar area. Through careful study of this book and its lessons, pathfinders can learn to interpret signs in the natural world to find their way in almost any kind of terrain.

Chapter 1

Nature Is Your Guide

“HE MUST have a wonderful sense of direction.” I must have heard this expression in everyday use by honest people hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times—used by them, in all innocence and sincerity, to convey the idea of a mysterious ability, somewhat vague and quite indefinable in its nature and operation. Some people, with a knowing nod, will even go further and imply that the sense of direction is a sixth sense, a quite special sense to be added to the five senses with which the ordinary man or woman (and many another animal) is born.

I do not believe that there is any such sixth sense. A man with a good sense of direction is, to me, quite simply an able path-finder—a natural navigator—somebody who can find his way by the use of the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch—the senses he was born with) developed by the blessing of experience and the use of intelligence. All that the pathfinder needs is his senses and knowledge of how to interpret nature’s signs.

There is a whole world of these natural signs and guideposts for us to observe and interpret. By means of them we can find our way in remote and lonely places, on land or sea, if need be without map or compass. Nature always has a reason, and the chief purpose of this book is to help you interpret those reasons and apply them in pathfinding.

A good pathfinder can become so proficient that he can amaze the average person. If he likes to be mysterious he can easily persuade his friends that he has a sixth sense; but if he wants to be honest he must admit that he has nothing of the kind.

Nearly everybody is born with eyes, ears, a nose, taste buds and a sensitive skin. Some, of course, are born with sense organs more sensitive than those of others. All of us use our sense organs instinctively; that is, we do not have to be taught to use them, but inherit the ability to do so along with the organs themselves. But some use them better than others; and all of us are given the power of improving the use of our senses, by experience, by practice. Much of the use that we make of our senses depends on our early environment. Many city dwellers do not seriously have to consider the necessity of pathfinding once they have learned to talk and read, but for their own self-preservation the country dweller, the forester, the fisherman, the sailor and many others of us have to become thoroughly familiar with the natural things around them.

In our increasingly urban civilization the necessity of observing and interpreting nature’s signs is, I suppose, slowly disappearing. By this I mean it is no longer often a matter of life and death: but because it is no longer a vital necessity there is no reason why it should decay, any more than music, painting, bird watching, tobogganing or any other form of pure art, science or sport should decay. I think that the interpretation of the signs of nature can and should be taught to children in schools at the same level as geography, mathematics. I think it is still tremendously important for everybody to be able to find his way by the use of nature’s signs; and I think it is even more important that, trained in the use of nature’s signs, all should be able to gain a wide appreciation of the natural things around them even if they are not likely to have to navigate. The habit of natural observation, of noticing natural details, natural features, is one that can easily be developed with proper training and practice—developed to such a pitch that astonishing feats can be performed without conscious mental effort.

There is something which all the greatest artists and writers, naturalists and scientists, voyagers and explorers, poets and pioneers, share. It is an interest in the external world and the ability to contribute something creative to human life in this world by means of taking parts of the world to pieces and putting them all together again. The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful. Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new.

Many of our greatest naturalists, like Gilbert White and Charles Darwin, spent many years of their youth pottering around, in activities which must have seemed aimless to many of their friends. Darwin’s parents and teachers, indeed, got very anxious because they thought he was lazy, when all the time he was quietly storing up observations which many years later came spinning forth, all welded together as the greatest scientific idea of the nineteenth century. Not all of us can be Darwins, but all of us can be constructive potterers, all of us can go for walks with no purpose in view but that of watching, of observation, of developing the use of the senses we are born with, of arousing thought and stimulating the imagination, of awakening the creative faculties. Everything becomes more meaningful to him who watches and listens without too much thought to the value of his time.

One man, Lord Baden-Powell, the first Chief Scout, built a whole movement on watching and listening. He called it “Scouting” and the movement swept the world. I have met many natural scouts in a life of much travel and in a long search for material for this book. I have rubbed my own theories and knowledge of pathfinding against those of others and often I have come across many surprising examples of people who have developed keen faculties of observation. I have only space to devote to three of them here, three very different people. What they can do shows how striking are the results of training, of natural interest, of long experience and practice.

In the summer of 1949, I was visited in Fiji by Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy, the eminent American ornithologist. He is certainly the world’s greatest authority on sea birds: but my first taste of his ornithological ability came when he and his charming wife motored four miles with me, mainly through the town of Suva, from their ship to my Fiji home. Now Fiji has not got a very large variety of birds. There is no recent published list of the birds of Fiji but if you study Dr. Ernst Mayr’s Birds of the South-West Pacific you will find that you could spend a whole season in the gardens and country around Suva without seeing more than about thirty-three different kinds of birds, although you will pick up a few more if you go farther inland into the dense forests or up to the hills. On our way to my house we talked, quite busily, but when we arrived there Dr. Murphy remarked, “I’ve seen eleven different kinds of birds since we left the ship.” That was about a third of all those he could have seen if he’d stayed there a year. This great scientist had so trained himself that he could observe birds and identify the species all the while talking of other things.

My second example shows what an interest in nature can unveil to the untrained observer. My wife was brought up in Holland and has lived in cities most of her life, and in them has had no very great need to navigate by nature’s ways. She traveled with me all over Europe and North America to further the research for this book, and took such a great interest in the subject I was working on at one time—directions from plants and trees—that when we reached San Francisco after a tour of two months she could tell north, south, east and west just by looking out of her hotel window.

This window looked out onto Union Square. In this square there was a tree surrounded on four sides by a border of pansies. My wife had quickly noticed that the yellow pansies were in bloom on the east, south and west sides, but were not yet out on the north side—which was sheltered from the sun by the tree.

And now for the results of practice. Colonel Richard I. Dodge, the well-known author and authority on the American Indian, wrote a passage in his book Our Wild Indians which well shows the peak of practice that necessity brings to the pathfinder:

Ask an Indian how to go to a point at a distance, one mile or a hundred miles, and he will simply point out the direction. Press him closely and if he has been to that point, he will by his minute description disclose another of his remarkable traits, his wonderful memory of landmarks.

Similar and monotonous as they appear to the uneducated eye, each hill and valley, each rock and clump of bushes, has for him its distinguishing features, which, once seen, he knows forever after, and careless as he appears when traveling, not one of these distinguishing features escapes him. . . . If going on a journey into a country unknown to him, he consults with some warrior who has visited it; and it is simply astonishing how clearly the one describes and the other comprehends all that is necessary to make the journey a success.

I should explain at this early stage of my book that I have had thirty-five years’ experience, first as a marine navigator and later as an air navigator. For many of these years I had my own Navigation School in Los Angeles and later I taught navigation to the United States Air Force. During all my teaching I stressed to my students the importance of natural navigation—the kind of navigation that they did not then, and do not now, find in textbooks. Conventional air navigation is performed, of course, by all kinds of instruments and mechanical devices, and by maps. I tried to show my students that they needed to use their eyes for registering the details of the country below them, in addition to all the modern mechanical aids.

After our world flight in 1931, the late Wiley Post and I spent five months on a good-will tour, during which the Winnie Mae traveled in a crisscross pattern across the United States, averaging almost a town per day. Wiley Post was pilot, I was navigator; and while we were in the air I used to familiarize myself with the country below, especially with those aspects of it that were not marked on any conventional maps or charts. Such things were the type of vegetation, the kinds of crops, the layout of farms and farm buildings, the architecture of the houses and barns, the shape of the haystacks and grain stacks, the type of fencing and field boundaries.

Many things told me which way the wind was blowing on the ground, the smoke of houses, the bending of trees, the silvery undersides of their leaves. I found that it was much easier to tell the wind direction on Mondays than on any other day by watching the clotheslines, for Monday is wash day the world over. And by watching for the odd details I discovered that certain regions had their own peculiarities, almost their signatures. Throughout the farming areas of Ohio, for instance, almost every little barn and building had an elaborate lightning conductor; there was an amazing number of these rods bristling on buildings throughout the state. Now, compared with any of the other neighboring states, Ohio is not more subject to lightning: it seemed to me that the enterprise of some persuasive salesman had left its mark.

Of course, not everybody is lucky enough to be able to see the country from the air and follow its changing personality over a great continent. Certainly my early North American flights taught me much of the value of exercising my awareness. Indeed, after practicing observations such as those I have described, I found that in quite a short time I had become able to recognize a locality almost anywhere in the United States without consulting my map.

To read the personality of a countryside like this, it is not invariably necessary to leave the comfort of one’s own home. If you cannot for the time being study scenery from the air, from a railroad train or car, you must study photographs. It is great fun to observe the details in a scenic illustration whose caption is covered up. After some practice, the careful observer of detail can often tell a great deal from a photograph of an area with which he is personally quite unfamiliar. The amateur indoor nature detective can occupy himself for many profitable hours with a collection of air photographs, such as is published (under the auspices of the British Institute of Sociology) in E. A. Gutkind’s Our World from the Air. The accompanying drawing, based on a photograph, depicts a scene somewhere in the British Isles. Supposing that we know no more than this, what can we further deduce by studying it closely?

From the general nature of the hillside country it is clear that the picture cannot have been taken anywhere in central, southern or eastern England.

An analysis of this picture can indicate the general region, the time of the year, the time of the day, and the direction in which the house is facing. (After a photograph from Coming Events in Britain, courtesy British Travel & Holidays Association)

From the architecture of the building it seems very likely that the place is in northern England.

From the state of the vegetation, the season appears to be early spring.

The main part of the house probably faces south to get the greatest warmth in the living rooms; from this we can make a first deduction of the orientation of the picture.

From the length and direction of the shadows, we can further deduce that the picture was taken around noon and that the shadows point towards the north. Thus the road must run roughly east and west with its eastern end in the foreground.

The shape of the trees confirms the north-south direction of the shadows and of the south-facing building, for the southern branches of trees tend to be more horizontal because they secure full sunlight, whereas the northern branches tend to be more vertical as they reach up to obtain more light. There is also a greater branch foliage on the southern side.

Needless to say, the presence of Shetland ponies is no indicator of place. There are far more Shetland ponies outside Shetland than in it, and the picture could not possibly have been made in Shetland, where few trees grow and those seldom more than twenty or thirty feet high, and where the architecture and general physiognomy of the countryside are quite different.

I often play the photograph analysis game. It is amazing how much the problem of identifying a photograph without captions adds to its interest and improves one’s own powers of perception and deduction. The photograph ceases to be a photograph and becomes, instead, a story.

We may play this photo-navigation game in fun and may make a sport out of pathfinding. Sometimes we may forget that to our own ancestors these affairs were no game but a dire necessity. Actually, the primitive ancestors of most humans in our western civilization, though pretty good navigators, were by no means the best of all the primitives. Undoubtedly those primitives who have made history as pathfinders, by living with and by nature, were the Polynesians, the Australian aborgines and the American Indians. More often than others, these races have been accredited with the mysterious “sixth sense” I wrote of earlier in this chapter, with a mysterious “bump of locality,” with a magical “sense of direction.” At the risk of making a point more than once (and I shall make it again) I must repeat that these primitives, or indeed any human navigators, and as far as we know any animal navigators, have used and use no more than the five senses of conventional literature and philosophy, namely, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. If they use a sixth sense, which may be different from or at least partly independent of any of the conventional five, then that sense is a time sense, an ability to perceive accurately the passage of time which may be dependent on “internal rhythm” and at least partly independent of the observation of the movement of the sun. I shall have more to say of time sense later.

The great primitive navigators, then, simply used nature as their guide, and no better example of their keenly developed powers of observation can be given than that of their ancient art of tracking. Of course tracking does not consist of navigation and orienting of oneself. It consists of the reconstruction of a journey made by man or beast from the marks and signs left behind on that journey’s path. It is universally acknowledged that of all the primitives the most skilled native trackers are Australian aborigines. An “abo” tracker’s ability is not simply due to his great personal acuity of vision and other senses. Undoubtedly the instinctive senses of the aborigine are very highly developed, but his incredible skill lies as much in his training and in his intelligence and reasoning capacity. A good aboriginal tracker has a thorough knowledge of bush craft, animal lore and the habits of human beings; and a brilliant faculty of putting a mosaic of observations together and making deductions there from. He can locate his quarry with the least possible effort and with an almost unerring success.

The following account of the remarkable training process of the aborigines was given in a paper by A. T. Magarey in 1897:

No sooner does the dusky child of the sparse wilds of Australia begin to leave his mother’s head-borne cradle, than he is set to chase and capture some living thing. Step by step the youngster rises in proficiency until beetles, spiders, ants and such like fairy track-makers are followed over the telltale ground. Such training is continued until manhood is reached; until of gliding snake, bounding wallaby or the crafty dangerous lurking foeman, all the earth signs are seen, noted, interpreted, followed or avoided as the circumstances may demand. To his vigilant eye the fresh sharp-cut imprint,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Nature Is Your Guide
• 2 How Early Man Found His Way
• 3 Is There a Sixth Sense?
• 4 Walking in Circles
• 5 Walking in a Straight Line
• 6 Use of the Ears
• 7 Using Your Sense of Smell
• 8 Reflections in the Sky (with Some Notes on Standing Clouds)
• 9 Directions from the Wind
• 10 Some Special Effects of Sun and Wind
• 11 Directions from Trees and Other Plants
• 12 Anthill Signposts
• 13 Finding Your Way in the Desert
• 14 Finding Your Way in the Polar Regions
• 15 Directions from Hills and Rivers
• 16 Estimation of Distance
• 17 Finding Your Way in Towns
• 18 Ordsnting as a Sport
• 19 Directions from Waves and Swells
• 20 The Color of the Sea
• 21 The Habits of Sea Birds
• 22 What the Moon Can Tell You
• 23 Directions from the Sun
• 24 Directions from the Stars
• 25 Telling the Time by the Stars
• Selective Bibliography
• Simple Tables of Directions of the Sun
• Index