‘Skill’d in the globe and sphere, he gravely stands,
And, with his compass, measures seas and lands.’

John Dryden; Sixth Satire of Juvenal; 1689

Things we take for granted these days become almost hidden, their importance to our daily lives so commonplace that we forget just how vital they are. Given that sailing and cruising is what we at Waterfront Charters do, let’s focus on an aspect to our craft (that is not an intentional pun, but it works perfectly: craft as in vessels, craft as in skills) that we utilise on a daily basis that is absolutely vital to navigation and safety but is as noteworthy in our day’s activities as switching on a light in a kitchen.

It’s the compass. When man first started travelling, before the notion of a round earth was even vaguely contemplated, the only way to get from point A to point B, and more importantly, back again, was by taking note of surrounding features and memorising the terrain. This was all well and good, but as humans became more numerous, they needed to spread out, and this meant taken the road less travelled, if travelled at all. Going around in circles was not an option, assuming you were trying to evade the new noisy, club wielding neighbours on a permanent basis, so new skills and reference points were needed: the sun, moon and stars. And it worked; the little points of light overhead were as predictable as the sunrise and could be relied on to point out required the directions.

This also translated into travelling new terrains: the lakes and oceans of the world, although we are getting ahead of ourselves a little here. The Chinese were the first to navigate oceans, and they not only stuck close to land, but utilised the flight paths of birds and analysis of the ocean bed to make reasonable assumptions of their passage. The Polynesians, located in the midst of innumerable islands, studied wind patterns, ocean debris and the direction of the ocean swells. There was no concept of north and south; just sunrise and sunset and that familiar patterns of the stars that remained unchanged from year to year.

Then, around 200 BCE, lodestone, a naturally occurring magnetic magnetite was discovered by the Chinese; these ‘stones’ align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field. So! The compass was discovered? Um, actually, no. The Chinese noticed that when lodestone was suspended, it always pointed in a specific direction, so they had found the perfect material for…feng shui. Carved magnetite was known as the ‘South Pointing Fish’, for reasons one can only guess at They used these fish to align houses and space crops, and utilised the magnetic properties for geomancy and fortune-telling purposes as well as – apparently – searching for rare gems, but the travellers and sailors had to wait another thousand years until the 11^th century CE for lodestones to be used for navigation purposes. Given that humans had been using stones as tools for around 2.6 million years before noticing metals, we guess that taking only ten centuries to figure out that these magic stones could take you to Beijing and back can be regarded as a great advance.

The first recorded appearance of a compass in European history dates back to 1190, pre-dating the Muslim world’s 1232. Sailors had learnt to magnetise needles by then, and the ‘floating compass’ was beginning to be a staple requirement for travellers: a needle on a piece of cork, floating in a bowl of water. As simple and as effective a method as can be imagined, it changed the course of exploration history. As with a lot of history, the compass’s progress across civilisation is murky at this distance, but the general consensus of opinion is that the Europeans discovered the magnetic properties separately from the eastern influence. What is known is that an Italian mariner called Flavio Gioja perfected the compass by enclosing it is a box and creating the ‘compass rose’, a circular card marked with the points of the compass that had a magnetic element which kept it aligned to earth’s field as it rotated on a point.

These days there are a plethora of compasses and ways to navigate our planet. The liquid compass was developed in 1690, and these became standard on the decks of ships, fixed in a binnacle. (As ships developed and switched from wood to metal, these became less reliable for obvious reasons. Pictures of old-world  binnacles will show that two iron balls were mounted on each side of the gimbal-mounted compass to compensate for the metal in the hull. One painted red, one painted green, and we aren’t going to insult you by telling you which side each colour was based.) Gyrocompasses became standard for ships and aircraft in the 20^th century, as they were electrically driven and unaffected by magnetic fields.

But it’s the 21^st century, and things that used to take centuries to change now seem to take hours; trying to keep up with change is an all-consuming and fruitless endeavour. The world of navigation is in your hands, literally: with GPS satellites beaming down inch-perfect triangulation signals to your smart-phone, there is very little chance of you getting lost when heading to the V&A Waterfront for a Waterfront Charters cruise, and certainly no chance of our skippers heading to Venezuela by mistake.

But we still love the old-fashioned navigational methods; a magnetised needle will never let you down by going offline, running out of battery or losing a satellite signal. Join us as we cruise serenely off the coastline in a luxurious catamaran under the familiar gaze of Table Mountain: it’s the best possible way to shrug off the pressures of modern day life.