How did the Ships use to Navigate in the Olden days?

Nowadays we have many types of equipment like Inmarsat, GPS, AIS and GPS have further 3 types. Having this equipment we can easily navigate and find out our location in the vast ocean also, we can easily detect different types of storms and weather with the help of these devices. We can find the location of our ship anywhere anytime and at any time of the day.

But in the past, these equipment and gadgets didn't exist and it was not easy for sea sailors and mariners to find the location of their ships and also detect different types of weather. Yeah, they wouldn't find their location instantly and they also wouldn’t know about their ship speed. So now the question here is how those people were able to travel and navigate in ships and reach their destination. How did they know their direction and how to travel to a specific country without any equipment? There were no maps in the olden days and took centuries to make these maps. But despite this those were the people who find and discovered different countries, those were the people whose ships drowned due to storms and bad weather. Now coming to the point how did they navigate?

Humans have always been drawn to astronomy. They were always curious about it. There are many books written about stars and astronomy. Mankind studies these stars for centuries and finds out that when all the stars are moving one star remains in a static position. That one star was stationary. People start calling it the North Star. This star is simply pointed to the north pole. Now how will you identify that star So, it is easy and simple to look from your rooftop to the sky at night you will see a group of 7 stars, the group makes a shape like a spoon and you will see 2 groups like this one small and one big. People call the big group a Big Beer and the small one a small bear. If you look at the small group or the tip of the spoon in the small group you will see a bright star at the end which is always in a stationary position. You can only see this star if you are in the northern hemisphere. If you are in the southern hemisphere you cannot see this star. As we know that the Earth is in a spheroid shape so, it has 2 components i.e. latitude and altitude. If you find one of these then you easily find the other one. The north star does exactly the same thing, we can easily find altitude through the north star. If your latitude increases you will see that the altitude of this star also increases. So now if you know your location from the north pole then, you will easily know whether you are going south, east, or west.

Now the question that will come to your mind is how they used to navigate in the daytime.

With time man discovered the use of magnets. Magnets have north and south poles. The north pole points to the north and the south pole points to the south. So now man also knows the south pole due to magnet due to this it is easy to find the West and east. Then with time following this idea of a magnet compass was made. Which was then widely used all over the world for navigation Nowadays due to advanced technology, as mentioned earlier, GPS, AIS Inmarsat, etc are used for navigation.

In short people in the olden days faced hardships and invented these different methods of navigation. While now in the modern era everything is advanced.

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