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In the tradition of Dava Sobel's Longitude comes this dramatic tale of invention and discovery—an eloquent elegy to one of the most important navigational instruments ever created, and to the daring mariners who used it to explore, conquer, and map the world.
Barrie takes readers straight to the helm of some of history's most important expeditions, interweaving these heroic tales with the account of his own transatlantic passage as a young man. A heady mix of adventure, science, mathematics, and derring-do, Sextant is infused with a sense of wonder and discovery. At once a dramatic history of maritime endeavor and a love letter to the sea and sky, it is timeless storytelling at its best.
- Sales Rank: #556009 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-05
- Released on: 2015-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.31" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
“As lovingly and painstakingly constructed as the navigators’ one irreplaceable talisman, David Barrie’s exquisite book is a hymn to a now-vanishing feature of maritime life, a finely-chased reminder of just how much we all owe to that one small piece of apparatus” (SIMON WINCHESTER, author of the New York Times bestselling The Men Who United the States and The Professor and the Madman)
“Beneath the book’s calm surface churns a melancholic message about how the comfort of technology — symbolized by the sextant’s almighty antagonist, GPS — has turned our gaze away from the stars.” (Entertainment Weekly)
“Even for armchair adventurers with no sea legs to speak of, Barrie’s Sextant is a compelling read.” (Shelf Awareness)
From the Back Cover
In the tradition of Dava Sobel's Longitude comes sailing expert David Barrie's compelling and dramatic tale of invention and discovery—an eloquent elegy to one of the most important navigational instruments ever created, and to the daring mariners who used it to explore, conquer, and map the world.
Barrie takes readers straight to the helm of some of history's most important expeditions, interweaving these heroic tales with the account of his own transatlantic passage as a young man. Among the many inspiring stories are those of the legendary Captain Cook and the great French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, whose disappearance has long remained a mystery. Other intrepid navigators include George Vancouver, the indefatigable surveyor of the American northwest; Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate Australia; and Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle. And, along with Joshua Slocum's single-handed yacht voyage around the world, we are told of two almost unbelievable open-boat voyages, undertaken in desperate circumstances by Captain William Bligh and Sir Ernest Shackleton.
A heady mix of adventure, science, mathematics, and derring-do, Sextant is infused with a sense of wonder and discovery. At once a dramatic history of maritime endeavor and a love letter to the sea and sky, it is timeless storytelling at its best.
About the Author
David Barrie has sailed in many different parts of the world and made many long passages. After serving in the British Diplomatic Service, Barrie worked in the arts and as a law reform campaigner. The great-great-nephew of J. M. Barrie, he is married with two daughters.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The Gadget to Guide Us, Before GPS
By Rob Hardy
When I was at the Naval Academy nearly a half century ago, one of the courses, and it was a hard one, was Celestial Navigation, the use of a sextant, star almanacs, and charts to find out where a ship was located. From what I hear, midshipmen no longer study such things; it is easier, faster, and less liable to error to ask GPS where the ship is, and it is better to have the middies studying things they will actually use. David Barrie, a British sailor of yachts, probably knows about this curriculum change, and would not be happy about it. Sextants and celestial navigation are too important historically and philosophically and practically to let go. In the informative _Sextant: A Young Man’s Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who Mapped the World’s Oceans_ (William Morrow), Barrie lets us know just how valuable sextants and star almanacs have been to him, and to humanity as it attempted the still-incomplete task of mapping our world.
There were primitive devices like the astrolabe or the cross staff by which the mariner might measure an angle toward a star, but the Scientific Revolution brought forth improved instruments in many fields. The genius of the design of the sextant is that looking through the eyepiece, the mariner can spy, because of a system of mirrors, both the horizon and the star in the sky whose height (altitude) is being measured. Once the index arm of the sextant is adjusted so that the star just touches the horizon, it is clamped in position, the sextant is removed from the eye, and the angle is read from the protractor-style arc at the sextant’s bottom. Throughout his book, Barrie quotes from his own sea adventure, sailing with a couple of pals across the Atlantic in 1973, when he learned many of the arts (and terrors and boredoms and deprivations) of seamanship including the use of the sextant. He also fills his book with the stories of far more famous sailors who set out to describe accurately the uncharted lands and waters. It is a surprise to find there are still uncharted regions; more than once Barrie tells us the charting is incomplete, as in reviewing the survey Captain FitzRoy attempted of Tierra del Fuego with only partial success: “Parts of the exposed southwestern coast of Tierra del Fuego remain uncharted to this day.” Some of the often grueling stories are about surveying voyages captained by sailors whose names we know, like Bligh and Shackleford; one captain we know mainly because the horticulturalist who travelled with him used his name for a flower discovered on the voyage, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, but his exploits deserve their own fame. Others were new to me, but all endured extremes of cold, heat, exhaustion, shipwreck, disease, cannibals, or scurvy just to make the world better known to its inhabitants. Lieutenant Pringle Stokes in 1827 was surveying the most dangerous parts of the Strait of Magellan, and made note of dangerous rocks, breakers, and reefs. He wrote, “The number and contiguity of the rocks, below as well as above water, render it a most hazardous place for any square-rigged vessel: nothing but the particular duty on which I was ordered would have induced me to venture among them.”
Barrie, who writes with clarity and enthusiasm, is a fan of celestial navigation the old way, and he makes a good case. GPS gives us an accurate location, but distances us from knowing where we are in that we don’t have to pay attention to our surroundings, the natural world, and the galaxy we live in. “By contrast,” he writes, “the practice of celestial navigation extends our skills and deepens our relationship with the universe around us.” To get a GPS fix, we have to have electrical power and receiving equipment that can fail. The GPS satellites themselves can be disabled and may be subject to being destroyed as an act of war. The signals can be jammed (and tracking signals are jammed sometimes by truckers who don’t want the company to know where they are), and when there is one-spot jamming, it jams the system for all of those around. Sailors who get a position by pushing a GPS button, Barrie says, are “denying themselves the precious rewards of agency - the use of hand, head, and eye to solve problems and overcome difficulties.” Besides, GPS can break in many different ways; we can count on Sun, Moon and stars to guide us whenever skies are clear.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Tried and true navigation...
By Terry MacDonald
Unlike the good ole days, sailors now rely primarily on GPS to pinpoint their position at sea, as opposed to more traditional methods like star charting and using the sextant. Thankfully there is a revived interest in traditional boat navigation and ... boatbuilding, which you can learn about in SS Rabl's Boatbuilding in Your Own Backyard.
The Sextant reads like an autobiography, novel, and historical account all at once! Dangerous and wonderful adventures of famous sailors and pirates are sprinkled amongst a vivid history of the development and use of the "mariner's most prized possession". Barrie also has a personal story to tell about his experiences with the sextant, which even in our technological age, still has great value!
"What could be more wonderful than to join the line of those who have found their way across the seas by the light of sun, moon, and stars?" he asks. By the end of the book he had me and no doubt many readers asking this rhetorical question. This is an entertaining and enlightening read, which has opened my mind to a very respectable tool.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The sea and the stars
By S. Atwood
This is a delightful book. David Barrie weaves together his own experiences at sea with accounts of some of history’s most fascinating maritime voyages and the development of navigational instruments. Barrie takes us to sea with Captain Cook, George Vancouver, Matthew Flinders, Robert Fitzroy and Sir Earnest Shackleton (among others), bringing their adventures and trials vividly to life. Sextant is a window onto an age of seemingly limitless possibility and exploration, peopled by courageous and innovative figures. While Barrie’s sea stories entertain, they also help to establish his central point, for above all, Sextant is a tribute to the eponymous instrument. For Barrie, the sextant is not merely a quaint nautical artifact, but an eminently useful device that both hones and challenges the sailor’s seamanship. Unlike modern nautical instruments, which reply on GPS and computerized data and can function almost independently, the sextant is useless without the sailor’s knowledge and experience; it requires his understanding of mathematics and astronomy to function successfully. Barrie’s own knowledge of celestial navigation enables him to provide accessible explanations of the often intricate necessary calculations and observations. The reader is left feeling great admiration for those sailors who have mastered this complex yet elegant art. Barrie acknowledges the value of modern navigational systems, yet he also recognizes what has been lost as a result of increased reliance on new technology. Barrie argues that sailors “are not only turning their backs on the very things that make the whole undertaking worthwhile, but they are also denying themselves the precious rewards of agency—the use of hand, head, and eye to solve problems and overcome difficulty.” Sextant is a strong argument for the value and importance, not only of traditional navigational skills, but of the many other traditional skills we are in danger of losing.
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