By Aleta T. Boudreaux

Author of Song of the White Swan

One of the basic characteristics of human beings is the need to challenge the unknown, to explore.

While writing my novel, Song of the White Swan, I began to explore the world of writing, of creating. And in the development of my characters I began to research human behavior and study what makes people reach for goals.

I asked myself, what makes people take risks to discover the unknown? What makes the shaman or religious mystics or men like Timothy Leary delve into the unknown worlds of the mind? What drove Marco Polo to travel to China? What force led Sir Edmond Hillary up Mt Everest? What idea, or ideal, made David Livingstone travel to Africa? What compelled Neil Armstrong to take that first step for mankind and walk upon the moon? Or John Glenn to return to outer space at the age of 74?

Was it faith, the need for self-discovery, the struggle for power, for knowledge, fame, or simply humanitarianism?

For the men and women who left the Marshall Islands on their reed rafts, it was the search for a new home, or in Fletcher Christian’s case, a search for freedom.

Sometimes risking the dangers of exploration is as simple as being just a job. For the Sherpas who crossed the Himalayan passes and the fisherman who set our across the uncharted Atlantic, exploring and discovery was their livelihood. For men like Columbus it was an obsession.

One must then ask, how do we get where we want to go? If we know how to read the stars and planets in sky, you can probably tell East from West, North from South. But what if it is raining or foggy or an overcast day.

No one knows when men first decided to venture across the open waters, Homer tells how Odysseus "spread his sail to catch the wind and never closed his eyes in sleep, but kept them on the Pleiades or watched the late setting Bootes and the Great Bear."

Taught by the Phonecians, the Greeks sailed by the Lesser Bear, measuring star altitude against the rigging or by the width of the hand. The Arab mariners used a kamal to determine the altitude of the stars, and hence the latitude of which they were sailing. A simple piece of wood with knots tied at varying spaces on a string. They would hold the string in their mouths, hold the board aligned with the horizon. As the board was drawn back so that the upper edge touched the required star, the knots showed the stars altitude and the users latitude.

The early European navigators were called "coasters" for they would travel along the coastlines, never losing site of land, always using familiar landmarks for deduced reckoning. Most navigators would head east or West, hit the coastline, then move North or South to their destination.

When the brave navigators ventured across a wide body of water, they would measure the altitude of the sun above the horizon at noon or the pole star with an astrolabe, a disk of copper or tin, five to seven inches in diameter, fitted with a sighting arm.

This astrolabe along with a compass (which was introduced in the 13^th Century) helped Columbus who was a latitude sailor. He knew where he was going in a North-South direction but not his longitude how far he had gone East or west.

Columbus’ mistake were compounded by the maps of the day did not accurately reflect the size of the earth and only showed one body of water, The Atlantic Ocean.

This combined with the inaccuracy of his compass readings (he did not know about the deviation of the magnetic pole) landed him far south of his destination.

There were many other instruments of navigation, a cross staff developed in the century after Columbus, was an adaptation of the kamal. It took several men, a clear day and a calm sea to get an accurate reading. The reason the ocean navigators couldn’t determine longitude was because there was no way of telling accurate time at sea.

As the earth moves, the stars move across the sky at a rate of 15 degrees per hour. This means that if you know the time, and if you have the charts, the sky will tell you where you are. On land, time was read by pendulum clocks, the rolling of the sea wrecks the pendulum motion.

It was not until the mid 1700’s that an accurate marine clock was developed that could tell time at sea. The British Board of Longitude offered a prize of 20,000 pounds for anyone who could device a practicable method of determining longitude on a transatlantic crossing to within one-half degree.

John Harrison, a carpenter /clockmaker devised an accurate marine chronometer. Unfortunately, he was never able to collect all of his prize money from the Board of Longitude. It was not until the 1800’s that the prime meridian was established in Greenwich England.

Over the centuries the technology progressed to the quadrant, then in 1730 two men, an English mathematician and an American inventor developed the sextant. It measures the angular elevation of the sun and other celestial bodies.

Now we have satellites hovering above us, and hand held electronic devices called GPS that can pin point location within 3 meters.

What about maps and charts?

The earliest maps were on clay tablets, made around 2300 BC by the Babalonians. They were used for land surveys for tax purposes. In 2nd century BC silk maps from China, showed trade routes. There were cane charts of the Marshall islanders, a grid work of bamboo cane to show location of the islands.

Mapmaking advanced in Incan and Mayans in 12^th Cent AD make charts to show who they conquered.

The first map to represent the known world was made by the Greek philospoher Anaximander and showed the lands of the known world grouped around the Agean sea and surrounded by water.

In about 150 AD Egyptian scholar Ptolomey published his maps of the world. These were the earliest maps using a mathematically correct form of conical projection but highly inaccurate description of the Eurasian landmass.

After the fall of the Roman Empire European mapmaking ceased and such charts that were made were done by monks, who often portrayed the earth inaccurately.

However the Arabian seaman made highly accurate charts during this time.

Around 13^th century Meditarianean navigators made charts of that sea. They were called portolan charts and showed the bearings from one port to another.

In the 15^th century, editions of Ptolomey’s charts were printed and for the next hundred years these maps exerted a great influence on the European cartographers.

In my research I found one chart that was very important to the discovery of North America.

It was made by two Italian cartographers, the Zeno brothers in 1380.

It showed the way to a place they had traveled with a navigator named Prince Henry St. Clair. St Clair was a member of an order called the Knights of Christ, a reorganized branch of the Knights Templar who were disbanded in 1307 by the French King Philip de Bel.

Another key figure in the Knight of Christ’s order was the King John of Portugal and his own son Prince Henry, the grand master of the order who founded a school of navigation in 1433 on Cape St. Vincent. The navigator’s school was located between Lagos and Sagres, Portugal. Sagre was a place where the captains of King Henry’s expeditions came to share what they learned about the sea.

In 1476, a 25 year old Columbus washed up on the shores of Lagos after his Genoese merchant ship sank following an attack by French and Portuguse ships. It is quite possible that Columbus heard of St. Clair’s voyages and the Zeno brother’s charts and that led more credence to his search for lands to the west.

A chart made by the grandson of Carlos Zeno in the mid 1500’s, reconstructed from bits and pieces of his grandfathers charts and information from his letters, shows islands to the west of Europe. The islands of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Greenland.

Of course, we now know have evidence that the Vikings traveled to North America long before St. Clair, or Champlain or John Cabot. That the North American Indians may have come by way of the land mass from South America and that the Inuit came across the Bering Straight from Russia into Canada. These people navigated by the stars, by the seasons and by following the animal herd migrations and pathways of their ancestors.

Today, for those of us who are using computers, we even have things like network navigators to show us where we are going or where our files are stored. We have to navigate through a mysterious maze of electronic impulses to find where we need to be.

What about tools for navigating to other worlds, worlds of a spiritual or inspirational nature.

Art is sometimes used as a stepstone into other worlds. The mandala for example is a map that allows the contemplative to free the mind, to think of nothing, to enter a conscious state that will lead to the discovery of the inner-Self.

Physical objects such as the rosary and rudraksha beads serve much the same purpose. They are in navigational tools used to clear and settle the mind, to focus thoughts.

The Buddhist dorgi and trilba are used to focus the mind. The double dorgi spins, the bell rings. The sound of the bell breaks the normal vibration of the energy field. The Tibetan prayer wheel, filled with written prayers sends good blessings into the cosmos.

Prayer, ceremony, psychoactive drugs and ritual are also tools to navigate to other worlds as are smudge sticks, incense and body paint. All these are tools to navigate to new worlds.

In my novel SONG OF THE WHITE SWAN, the characters use various techniques for navigation.

Antoinette Charboneau, the Druid Priestess is on a spiritual quest, a hero’s journey. She uses the tools of ceremony and ritual, scrying and visions and her own inner intuition to seek unity with the Goddess.

Ann de Bretagne, the young duchess of Brittany uses the political tools of diplomacy and her own integrity to navigate through the thick plots of the French Monarchy and the Catholic Church.

Jacques du Prey, the Knights Templar navigator uses honor as his beacon in his quest for love and also respect from his peers. He uses the map made from Prince Henry St. Clair’s voyage as a guide to the New World.

Bear, the Micmac Shaman uses ceremony, meditation, fasting, and vision questing to search for a path’s to Great Spirit.

Gaston, the warrior monk, the Knights Templar with a large chip on his shoulder is the only character who is truly lost.

Unlike fiction, true life gives us a chance to find our way. The path is out there for each of us. It may be a physical path or a path of self discovery or spiritual awakening.

There are many tools available to guide us along these pathways.

We only have to reach out and explore. We must investigate what feels true, and right for us individually.

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