Multimedia Gallery
- Topic: Navigating At Sea
Jan van Leyden, Dutch vessels destroying the English fleet near Chatham, England, painted 1670.
Over thousands of years, Polynesians migrated across vast distances and spread their culture across the Pacific.
This painting by Ludolf Backhuysen depicts three Dutch cargo ships.
Sailing without a chronometer, the Arniston crashed into reefs along the coast of South Africa and sank on May 30, 1815, killing about 340 people. Heading for the Horn of Africa, the ship’s captain headed north before he should have and slammed into the Lagullos Reef. The crew tried to save the ship, but it broke up in the sea, killing all the passengers and all but six of the crew.
Bats, Samoa (Pteropus samoensis)
Black-faced Coucal and Long-tailed Cuckoo, Pacific Islands (Centropus melanops, Eudynamys tahitus)
To locate themselves on the open ocean, navigators can determine their position by observing the Sun, Moon, stars, or planets. Some of these techniques involved using the North Star, the Lunar Distance Method, and finding local noon with a sextant.
The U.S. Exploring Expedition included a formidable group of botanists, naturalists, artists, taxidermists, and other scientists.
