Possumblog

Okay, I'm willing to give him his due, but...

...this story irks me for its silliness: Amazing Maps Made by Founder of 1st U.S. Settlement

Heather Whipps
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
2 hours, 20 minutes ago

Maybe Pocahontas had a thing for men with superior mapping skills.

Captain John Smith, the famous founder of America's first settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, traced the Chesapeake Bay river system with remarkable precision from his primitive sailboat, geographers have discovered.

Using a sophisticated "remapping" system that merges old maps with the modern lay of the land, the team from Maryland's Salisbury University found that Smith's 1608 exploratory charting of the Chesapeake was well ahead of its time considering the tools he had to work with.

“It’s amazing, he mapped with a stunning level of accuracy,” said team leader and geoscientist Michael Scott. “He’s out there in this little boat navigating the hazards of uncharted territory and he was able to capture most major bends of the rivers and everything is pretty close to scale. His map was so accurate that it was used as the prototype of the bay for more than 100 years.” [...]

Give it a rest, Bruce.

The principles of surveying are pretty simple, and its all based on relatively simple mathematics, and you can use some pretty basic tools to do just about anything you want.

Including things like building medieval cathedrals.

The fact that John Smith was able to take basic measurements of a river course is unremarkable. The fact that he was in a boat is unremarkable. The fact that his boat happened to be in unmapped land is even more unremarkable. Look, I don't have to have a map of the town in front of me to be able to measure how big a curb is and how far across the street it is to the other one.

And the fact is that although he was pretty close, if you or I did it today, we'd get just about as close. Note the article says that he "capture[d] most major bends of the rivers and everything is pretty close to scale." Despite the gushing, breathless prose of the article, "pretty close to scale" is not a big deal.

What is remarkable?

I thought a couple of things bear remembering:

[...] "Smith had a compass and a chip log (a way to measure a boat's speed through the water). He performed a process similar to dead reckoning. He would take a bearing from a couple of points on shore, thus creating an angle. Then he would sail in a given direction of one of the points, measuring distance," Scott told LiveScience. "Once you've got one length, you take bearings and angles all the way up the river."

The explorer was able to make his drawings so accurate with some old-fashioned, meticulous double-checking, Scott speculated.

"My guess is he was just careful and measured the same area a few times, perhaps up and back. If we had his log/notes, we'd really be able to tell," said Scott, "[but] those are probably buried in some attic in England." [...]

Emphasis mine.

First thing of note? 'Measure twice, cut once.' The idea of checking your work is becoming more and more uncommon in America, the idea being that someone, or more likely, "the computer" will catch errors and it's nothing to worry about.

Doesn't always work like that.

The second thing of note is that although the tools and concepts are simple to employ, he actually did know how to do use them. My kids probably know more higher math than John Smith ever knew, but they have little appreciation of how it can be used. Give them a stick and a string and a compass and tell them to measure something, and they'd more than likely be at a loss. And probably a good many adults nowadays would be, as well.

Practical skills such as this aren't taught much in schools, but it sure would be beneficial, if nothing else than to give people a bit better sense of self-reliance and autonomy.

(And here's a story in a similar(ish) sort of vein from Doc Reynolds and crew.)

Posted by Terry Oglesby at May 31, 2007 12:11 PM