Monday Ship Mysteries: Figuring out just where the hell you are on the seas (aka the longitude problem)

Thanks to advances in technology, notably the global positioning system (GPS) of satellite navigation, we take it for granted that one can determine - to a reasonable degree - just where in the world you are at any given time, be it on the seas or on land. The GPS system was initially put in place beginning in 1978, though it only became available to non-military users around 1984. It was the brainchild of two American scientists, Ivan Getting and Bradford Parkinson, who came up with the idea of allowing US naval vessels to communicate with a series of satellites orbiting above the earth in order to pinpoint positions more effectively than had previously been available. (The Russians also developed a similar system, called Glonass.)

The advent of GPS was as important as the internet in making truly universal information available to one and all. In the century prior to GPS, radio beacons and other electronic aids helped navigators in direction finding, but these were crude in comparison to today's tools. One could always use a sextant for celestial navigation, though this piece of equipment is useless if the skies are overcast.

But all of these tools to mariners - as well as other predecessors like the astrolab - have focused on the issue of determining one's longitude on the face of the globe. It’s always been fairly easy to determine latitude, how far north or south you are on the planet: at noon, local time, on any given day of the year, the Sun above Anchorage, Alaska is in a different position than if viewed in Mexico City. The real problem was always figuring out where the hell you were in terms of longitude: at noon in Philadelphia the Sun is in about the same position as if viewed at noon in Denver.

For mariners, this came to a head in 1707 when four Royal Navy ships floundered on the Gilstone Ledges off the Isles of Scilly, killing almost 2000 men. The cause was discovered to be bad navigation techniques, so a few years later a reward of £20,000 was offered to the first person to come up with a dependable means of plotting longitude (the sum was equivalent to £2 million today, or about $3.8 million American).And everyone knew that the only way to ascertain longitude was by standardizing the measurement of time from a fixed point on the planet.Being a British competition, the point decided upon was the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.Quite simply, someone had to come up with a dependable clock, which had not existed until this time.

This led to a flurry of activity as individuals came forth with various solutions to the problem, some more bizarre than others. One of my favorites was a macabre operation utilizing a mystical element called the “powder of sympathy”.The theory went something like this: you first convince someone to let themselves be stabbed with a knife. Removing the knife from the wounded victim, you then sprinkled the powder of sympathy on the blade.This would cause the unfortunate subject to feel pain again, in a voodoo-like manner. The proponent of this theory suggested gathering a bunch of dogs, stabbing them with the same knife and placing the animals on British ships. At noon each day in Greenwich, the knife would be plunged into a bowl filled with the powder and the dogs would all yelp in pain, no matter where in the world they were. Thankfully, this idea was rejected by the Board of Longitude (and one can only imagine the reaction of animal lovers were this bizarre idea have proven effective).

As the top minds in Britain and Europe struggled to come up with a solution to finding longitude at sea, it was a lowly carpenter from Yorkshire who would best them all. John Harrison began to tinker with clocks in his spare time and then became obsessed with developing the perfect timepiece for mariners. His eventual result was known as the H4, a silver timepiece the size of a pocket watch that in 1761 became the first dependable chronometer and solved the longitudinal problem once and for all. To this day it still keeps time in a display case at the Royal Observatory. And, at 1300 hours (1:00pm) in Greenwich, an aluminum time ball still drops from the tower above Harrison’s clock, so that any ships moored on the nearby Thames River can set their chronometers.

Thanks to a carpenter from Yorkshire who doggedly set out to solve this mystery - and eventually claim the Board's prize - maritime navigation became easier to do, and the fruits of his work have been passed down to landlubbers poking at their handheld GPS units. It was a clock that solved the problem, a "chronometer" to professional mariners, and every merchant vessel sailing the seas to this day still carries one in the wheelhouse, as well as at least one sextant (just to be safe).

The bulk of this post comes from my first book, "Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of A Ship". For more on John Harrison, visit the National Maritime Museum's site (see here).

Monday Ship Mysteries: Tamils and Tigers and Migrants, oh my

Maritime mysteries: They're not just for Halloween anymore, and hopefully you'll find somethings of interest here to start your week.

I begin with the case of the MV Ocean Lady, a freighter that arrived off Canada's west coast last October (the 17th, to be exact), with a group of Tamils aboard her. In the last month we've seen some incidents in which people fleeing Sri Lanka's troubles by sea, on vessels, have ended up trying to get into Canada and Australia, provoking some worry about the real identities of those aboard. Are they legitimate refugees or, more ominously, are there remnants of the infamous Tamil Tigers, the militant group seeking a separate homeland for their people?

When the Ocean Lady was apprehended by Canadian authorities, the vessel was found to have 76 men on board, all Tamil, who were seeking refugee status from the troubles in their island homeland. But how - and why - did these men come to decide on Canada as a place to seek out, having endured what must have been a horrible trip across the Pacific on a small ship?

According to some reports, the ship left India at the beginning of September, departing Mundra as the Princess Easwary around September 8. Mundra is in the northwest corner of India, on the Gulf of Kachchh, not far from the border with Pakistan. That's a long way from Sri Lanka, though it appears to be the last port of call reported for the vessel. Sometime thereafter - if reports are correct - the ship was renamed the Ocean Lady and headed t0 Canada.

Some believe that the Ocean Lady was part of the small fleet of merchant vessels controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the mostly Hindu population who have been fighting for a separate homeland from the Buddhist, Sinhalese majority on Sri Lanka for decades.

Canada has both a positive attitude towards refugees and a strong Tamil community, which would be the most obvious reasons for these individuals to come here. But some believe that Canada may be becoming the last redoubt of those seeking a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka.

Regarding the individuals who arrived on the Ocean Lady, it must be said that it seems odd that 76 able-bodied men would show up on Canada's shore, with no women or children accompanying them (as happened when Tamils arrived in Australian waters recently). Certainly they have legitimate issues about what is going on back in Sri Lanka, but their unexpected arrival off the West Coast does little to help their brethren, as it appears to many like a case of a few fleeing while the most deal with the worst. Which leads to the idea that these men are LTTE foot soldiers trying to get out of the country and help rebuild LTTE operations in Canada.

On the other hand why would the LTTE give up a valuable naval asset (the Ocean Lady) for just 76 guys? You could fly these individuals to Canada on a commercial flight for cheaper than the cost of shipping them. With the same end result. Kind of odd, eh?

So that's the first installment of Monday Maritime Mysteries.