Discourse of the Winds

JOHN K. FORD

REFLECTIONS ON NAUTICAL HISTORY, NAVIGATION,

MAPPING THE EARTH, AND MY SEAFARING LIFE

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Discourse of the WindsREFLECTIONS ON NAUTICAL HISTORY, NAVIGATION,

MAPPING THE EARTH, AND MY SEAFARING LIFE

JOHN K. FORD

DISCOURSE OF THE WINDS

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last fifty years have no such capacity, nor do they have the huge graving docks and heavy-lift cranes to build large hulls, and because of environmental considerations, no new steel yards are in the works at present. The days when fleets of ships were owned by families such as the Holts or the Houlders, or by the Lykes family in New Orleans, was an age when they were part of a family business and tradition, dating back into the last century. The vessels were named after members of the owning families, so that Mrs. Nancy Lykes might take an interest in the S.S. Nancy Lykes, but not when they’re swapped out every few years for a new depreciation cycle. The great seagoing fleets of Cunard and P&O were changing irrevocably, we sensed, and not to our advan-tage. The supertanker I was looking at that afternoon was the replacement for a whole fleet of fifty thousand ton-ners, and her value lay in the tax credits she could spin off as much as her hull integrity. I was on the edge of a new age of fast-turnaround ships, where seaports were no lon-ger seaports but tank farms and dusty wastelands, the intermodal container terminals.

Of Clocks and Tides and Curvature

PHENOMENON of great importance to sailors are the tides, and while tidal flood was seen as con-

nected with the moon’s meridianal passage, this isn’t exactly so, and no one knew why. Francis Bacon thought that the moon’s rays might draw up the waters as vapor as it passed overhead, causing the ocean to swell, and at the same time he was aware of and apologetic of the inade-quacy of his occult explanation. The moon was a feminine figure, freighted with mysteries, and drawing up vapors has a pleasantly Midsummer’s Night Dream wistfulness to it. It’s not that the explanation wasn’t right, as Wolf-gang Pauli famously observed, it wasn’t even wrong. The more interesting question is not just that it’s wrong, but why it’s wrong, and coiled up in that question is the whole mystery of human perception, and our wishes and needs. Perhaps we want a gentle moon to draw us up, to see us through the night.

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DISCOURSE OF THE WINDS Of Clocks and Tides and Curvature

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schooners, the most weatherly and most expertly handled sailing vessels on the seas, could claw up 55° to windward. The speeds that a laden sailing vessel could make good were minute compared to the distances involved; they had to work their way across the wind in order to make good on a course; weed accumulated underwater on the hull, reducing their speed, and inshore, approaching port, these vessels were dangerous to all aboard. Few merchants risked their goods to an ocean crossing during winter months, so that vessels became idle from October to March, and for good reason. The performances of all sail-ing craft fell off when it was needed most; which was when the wind came in off the sea, raising short, steep waves in the shallow waters that drastically reduced their ability to fight their way upwind and stay off the lee shore. These vessels were not only difficult to handle, they were impossible to navigate on the high seas. The sailors of the Mediterranean navigated by way of charts and com-pass bearings, clear-weather piloting in other words, mostly in sight of land, while the northern Europeans, who had no charts, were able to find their way around only in the shallow continental shelf. With their lead-lines they had developed a comprehensive knowledge of the sea bot-tom, or “grounds” as it was known. Tallow was stuck onto the bottom of the lead, so that when the depth was taken traces of sand or shells were brought up were examined on deck. This type of navigation had the advantage that it

could be done in the dark or in fog, and the traces of sand brought up were compared against their sailing directions. The sailing directions, (called “rutters”, a corruption of routier) were not much bothered with distances run on any particular leg; a straight run, unless directly downwind, wasn’t doable, so a vessel was instructed to “run south a glass or two”, referring to turns of its hour-glass, and the rutter seemed more concerned with keeping mariners off the shoals than anything else. Because of its impractical-ity, the use of stars to keep the ship out of trouble is never mentioned in these accounts. For centuries sailors did not venture into the Atlantic, for very good reason, for none of the known navigation of the time was of any use to them there. According to an Arab writer:

The Sea of Darkness is boundless, so that ships dared not venture out of sight of land: for even if the sailors knew the direction of the winds, they would not know whither those winds would carry them, and as there is no inhabited country beyond, they would risk being lost in mists and fogs.

The merchant traders saw no percentage in it anyway. The Norse spirit of exploration was over, it seems, and the sailor went about his business of earning freights, port to port. The investigation into longitude suffered from the lack