One If By Land, Two If By Marine Gps

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When I lived in Hawaii, I got to study a bit about Hawaiian and Polynesian history. These people traveled all over the Pacific ocean using nothing more than the stars to chart their course. It really is amazing, because they had no known cartography; just the memory of the skies above, transmitted from voyager to voyager through experience, oral tradition, and song. They survived and flourished with no knowledge of longitude or latitude.

They just knew what the stars was supposed to look like in the sky above as their outriggers glided across the surface of the sea. To this day, there are sailors in the South Seas that are keeping that tradition alive.

The history of the European sailors is no less miraculous. Moving in much the same way as their Polynesian counterparts, they eventually developed tools like the sextant and came to a knowledge of the imaginary lines that crisscross the globe. They developed charts and using the same stars were able to plot coordinates to travel farther and farther, until they had circumnavigated to globe and spread European culture to every continent on the planet. The joined skills of astronomy and astrology not only showed the sailors the directions their ships should go, but also provided them with the auspicious dates and times necessary to create the history of our world.

Pilots of all types of craft rely on the stars to this very day, and to help them out, mankind has put some new stars into orbit. The use of global positioning satellites has made navigation by land, sea, and air much easier, and now even novices can plot intricate courses with hand held, automotive, and marine GPS systems. Whole hobbies have developed around the science, from geocaching to deep sea treasure hunting. I myself plan to use such a system later this summer to help find a real cache of buried gold coins, and I have used similar technology while conducting tours and plotting courses.

So yes, we have it much easier than those ancient seafarers, but that only means we have that much more opportunity for higher thought, for nobler deeds, and for greater achievements. Whether you are a wayfaring man with a hand held global positioning unit or a seafarer with a marine GPS system, there are always new worlds to discover and treasures, both natural and man made, just waiting to be found.


About the Author:
Epal Inc. (http://www.shopepal.com/)
is a small company that takes pride in selling customers the best consumer electronics online like marine gps system. Art Gib is a freelance writer.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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