99% Invisible - Where the F*** Are We?

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

For centuries, the world's greatest minds were stumped by the deadly mystery of longitude, until an obsessive underdog entered the fray and changed navigation forever. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's an archipelago in the far west of the UK. And I mean far west. Like once you think you're in the west, like around Cornwall, keep going. And then take a ferry, another three hours west. And you'll find yourself in a collection of islands called the Isles of Silly. That's silly spelled S-C-I-L-L-Y, not silly, ha-ha.

That's 99-P-I-I-P-I-P-RUcer, Kelly Prime. In fact, silly. is not ha ha at all. It's a place that's hard to wrap your mind around. The islands sit in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, so you'll find tropical plants like giant palms and birds of paradise, all blooming up against the backdrop of the rugged North Atlantic. It's also historically, one of the deadliest places in the UK to travel by sea. These islands are plopped down in churning waters, with jagged rocks rising all around like the jaws of some sort of mythical sea creature.

In this past October, I found myself on a little boat called the Buccaneer right in the middle of it. It's a crazy, man. It's a crazy place. There's just rocks everywhere. As you're going along, you don't realize we're passing rocks under the water all the time. The Buccaneer belongs to a scuba diver named Todd Stevens. Todd has been diving the shipwrecks around Silly for over two decades. If you're in the shipwrecks, it's really hard not to find one here.

At least 900 shipwrecks litter the coasts of Silly, probably more. Sometimes ships will sink on top of other older shipwrecks, so it's difficult to say for sure. Are there shipwrecks below us right now? Yeah, yeah, we'd ask quite a few. If you'd have been asking me that as we were just coming along Samaria shoreline, there's at least half a dozen along there. Oh, my God. Are there life jackets on this boat?

We were specifically looking for the remains of one particular disaster. We're not one, but four ships were lost on the same night. The HMS Association, Romney, Eagle and Firebrand. We're just coming up on the firebrand now. So we're right over it now. The wreck lays just across here. And her bowels are up that way because her anchors are up that end. And then she lays across here.

The wrecks happened on October 22, 1707. It was quite literally a dark and stormy night, and there was a fleet of British naval ships bravely led by an admiral named Cloudly Shovel. Shovel and his fleet had just fought a battle with the French. They were headed back and, according to their maps, they were about to pass safely into the English Channel. But in reality, they were actually 200 miles off course, exactly where you really do not want to be.

Smack in the middle of the Isles of Silly. The HMS Association crashed into one of the many jagged rocks just beneath the surface of the water. The death toll was somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000. It was, at the time, the deadliest shipwreck in British history. But the important thing about this shipwreck, why it's still remembered today, isn't just the scale of the disaster. It's also why it happened and how it could have been avoided.

Because the navigators of the fleet were missing a vital piece of information. And do we know why they thought they were that far? Yeah, well, they didn't know the longitude. So they're guessing. The reason this fleet was so dangerously off course was because they didn't know their longitude, their east-west coordinates. And this wasn't because they lost their map or their navigator was killed by pirates, or they were just really bad at their jobs.

They didn't know their longitude because at that point, no one knew how to calculate longitude at sea. It was a problem that it plagued navigators and scientists for centuries. The greatest minds of Europe, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and the Haley's Comet guy. They all tried and failed to find a way to calculate longitude at sea. Most people thought it simply wasn't possible. That is until the 18th century, when the disaster in Silly helped inspire Britain to action. What follows is a tale of imperial greed, a lucrative contest, and an obsessive underdog who became his own worst enemy. But before we tell you about all that, we need to explain what Longitude actually is, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

Basically, longitude is the east-west coordinate. So if you think of the earth as an orange, and you peel 24 vertical pieces of that orange, each peel 15 degrees of longitude away from the prime meridian. And that's because longitude is counted off in the same direction as the earth is rotating on its axis. So, you know, I think I'll start over on this description. It's gotten away from me. This is Alexei Baker, manager of the History of Science and Technology Collection at the Peabody Museum. And see? I told you this was hard. Should I use the orange? Should I not use the orange? Okay.

Maybe let's give it a try without any citrus fruits. So longitude are the vertical lines on the globe and latitude are the horizontal lines. And when you move besides beyond vertical and horizontal lines, it does quickly get away from you. I'm going to try to do this as simply as possible. So latitude and longitude came about when some Greek guy from a very long time ago decided to throw some lines on the globe. The idea being that if we put lines on a map, they'll form a grid, and then people can use that grid to navigate the world with more precision. This grid is what gives us GPS coordinates. For example, the Pandora building in beautiful uptown, Oakland, California.

That's around 37.810 North, 122.267 south. The trouble with this imaginary grid system is that it's imaginary. These values were great for understanding the world from a distance, for looking at a map from the comfort of your own home. But if you actually wanted to use the system to navigate, like if you were out in the middle of the ocean, you needed to be able to calculate your latitude and longitude in real time. Which was annoying.

Before the age of GPS, the best navigational tool available was the scumptuble. The sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies were your reference points, no matter where you were in the world. That made latitude pretty simple. It's just based on your distance north or south of the equator. Easy enough to figure out by looking at the sky. Latitude you can determine by just measuring the height of the sun or at the pole star above the horizon you see. If you can see the north star and it's 10 degrees above the horizon, you're at 10 degrees latitude. Using the sun takes a little more calculation, but it's still very doable.

Getting longitude, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Longitude is a lot harder to find than latitude. The reason calculating longitude is so much harder is largely down to the fact that the Earth doesn't stay still. It spins. The Earth rotates west to east, which means even while the north-south values, like the poles, the equator, and lines of latitude, all still. fixed, the sides of the earth, the east-west values, are in constant motion. Calculating longitude is like trying to keep track of all the horses on a carousel. No matter how hard you try, they'll just keep spinning out of sight.

What all this means in practice is that you can't get longitude just by looking at the sky. None of those useful celestial bodies will hold still. And so for many, many years, longitude was just garbage as a real-world value. you. Sailors did manage to get around without knowing their longitude, but not very well. They were forced to make do with depressingly bad methods. One such depressingly bad method was called sailing the parallels, where ships could find one line of latitude and just stick to it until it was time to basically turn north or south off the highway. This was a really popular approach,

enough so that everyone started sailing along the same lines. Which might have been, been a great idea if it weren't for the fact that pirates also knew these roots. And so they could just sit around doing basically no work and pick off whatever ships they wanted. Another less bad way of estimating longitude was called dead reckoning, a way of measuring speed and direction. How it worked is that you'd tie a series of knots in a rope and then throw that rope behind you in the water. How quickly the knots fed out would tell you how fast you were going. This is actually where we get knots as a unit of speed. One One knot equals one nautical mile per hour.

If you remember, nothing else. Remember that. Having a general sense of speed could tell you how far you'd gone east or west. But dead reckoning was notoriously inaccurate, especially on long journeys where even small errors could accumulate. For centuries, everyone from seamen to astronomers struggled to figure out what became known as the problem of longitude. And so much time passed without a solution that people put longitude in the same bucket as finding the philosopher's stone

or turning lead into gold. Basically, you'd go mad before you'd ever figure it out. The idea of discovering a way to determine Longitude at sea at that time was tantamount to attempting Mission Impossible.

This is Deva Sobel, who wrote the best-selling book, Longitude. People just didn't think it could be done. It was one of those things you would talk about, like The Secret of Revenue. perpetual motion, but you didn't really expect it to happen. Still, that didn't stop the big colonial powers of Europe from trying for longitude.

There was just too much riding on a solution. The stakes were high, life and death. Having accurate coordinates at sea could mean the difference between making a swift, safe journey and, say, veering dangerously off course, hitting a rock and drowning with a guy named Cloudsley. In other words, it was just a lot safer to know where you were going. But the search for longitude wasn't only about safety. For Great Britain, it was also very clearly a matter of empire. It was really important to that vision of Britain sort of taking over the world, both commercially and literally.

In the early 18th century, Britain had colonized parts of North America and the Caribbean, and they were actively growing the transatlantic slave trade. Having longitude would mean shorter, more predictable journeys. In other words, they'd be able to do. do more horrible things more quickly. Global powers of the time knew that there was an ill-gotten fortune to be made if your kingdom ships were the fastest, most efficient, and safest ones on the ocean. So even though everybody considered it Mission Impossible, still there was a sense of, wouldn't it be great if we could do this? So with global domination on the line,

Parliament passed the Longitude Act of 1714, which offered a fantastic monetary prize to solve this problem of finding the longitude at sea. The Longitude Act of 1714 dangled a massive prize in front of anyone who could come up with a workable solution. Parliament was trying to motivate the great scientific minds of the time for the love of God to finally figure out where the fuck they were. The rules of the act were this.

If your idea passed muster with a board of qualified judges, you'd be sent on a trial journey to a place of known longitude. In this case, Britain's colonies in the Caribbean, then known as the West Indies, and there were different prizes depending on how close your ship got to the bullseye. If you pulled into harbor with the greatest level of accuracy, just 30 nautical miles or half a degree of longitude, you get the highest prize. The prize was 20,000 pounds. So you can imagine.

This was really worth extending yourself to try to win this. With the modern equivalent of around $3 million on the line, all sorts of people came out of the woodwork with wacky solutions involving, among other things, cannons, dogs, and magic powder. Most of those proposed ideas weren't given any real consideration. For one, they were stupid. But two, it was believed that if someone could find a solution to the longitude problem, that solution would probably come out of the field of astronomy. You got your latitude from the sky.

So why wouldn't you get your longitude? I mean, it just seemed to make sense. In the world of navigation, astronomy reigned supreme. Astronomers were men of science. And over the many, many years, they had been inching closer to a solution. But for all their high towers and stargazing, no one had managed to bring the issue of longitude within reach. That is, until an unexpected dark horse entered the race. Astronomy had an entire international network of people working on it.

And then this guy from Yorkshire came along with his clock. John Harrison was not an astronomer. He was a self-taught clockmaker and the son of a carpenter. He lived in an unglamorous section of England. He seems to have been entirely self-educated, and he achieved things in precision timekeeping that were highly unusual for the time. Historical records of his early life are scarce,

but we know that he was born in 1693 and generally described as a sort of single-minded, eccentric guy who was a genius when it came to clocks. Harrison was very determined to win this reward. He wanted that top reward, £20,000. This is Emily Ackermans at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Her title is actually the curator of time, which sounds like the name of a Doctor Who episode,

but is actually her job. I met Emily in the observatory, surrounded by mysterious brass instruments, and all the people coming to look at them. He wasn't a member of the Clockmaker's Guild. He didn't follow a traditional apprentice path, So he did design very unique clocks. Harrison, who worked alongside his brother James, took an outsider's approach in his clockmaking.

He invented new features like the gridiron pendulum and grasshopper escapement. These terms might not mean anything to you unless you study clocks, but trust me, the horology crowd is probably freaking out right now. Harrison's timekeepers were some of the best, most accurate clocks in the world, which made him particularly well suited to finally solving the longitude problem. That's because a solution to the problem of longitude at sea actually already existed, at least theoretically. What time is it in two places at once? And that will nail your position. The whole scientific community had known for a long time that it was hypothetically possible to calculate longitude using time differences. You just needed to know your own local time and the time back at your home port.

The best way I've found to imagine this is to think about our time. modern concept of time zones. How many hours away something is can tell you roughly how far away that place is. So I'm in New York and Romans in California. He's three hours behind me. But Hawaii is five hours behind me, which means Hawaii is farther away than California. So time can give a pretty good estimate of distance east and west. And you can get even more precise than that. One hour equals 15 degrees of longitude. It's 1 o'clock here. It's 10 a.m. in California.

Okay. So we know that's a three-hour difference, 45 degrees of longitude. And if you look on the map, I think you'll see that's about right. So if you could get your local time using the sun overhead and you knew what time it was back home, you'd know the distance between those two places.

You could calculate your longitude. This might sound like a pretty simple solution to the problem of longitude at sea. Just set a clock before leaving and take it on board your ship. But back in the 1700s, that wasn't an option. Clock design at that point was just too unreliable. They're so susceptible to inaccuracy. It's incredible. They work at all. Now I'm joking.

No, sorry. When people say it runs like clockwork, I generally think, oh, not very well then. During this era, all clocks were kind of crappy. But bring one of those crappy clocks on board a ship, and it was useless. These were mostly pendulum clocks, and you can imagine how well a pendulum clock would work on a rocking ship. There was also the issue of lubrication. The oils used in clockmaking had the tendency to get dirty and gunked up, especially in salty ocean air. And if you were traveling between warm and cold climates, the metal in your clockmaking,

pendulum would expand and contract with temperature, making it gain or lose time. And to actually get an exact position, your clock has to be extremely accurate. I mean, within a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second a day. But where others saw problems, John Harrison saw an opportunity. He thought he could solve Longitude not by looking at the stars, but by building a better clock. Harrison came up with some really ingenious and creative solutions in order to make a seaworthy clock. To get around the need for traditional clock oil, he used wood from a type of tree called lignum viti that actually exudes its own lubrication. He also solved the problem of

temperature by combining complementary metals, steel and brass, that expand at different rates and at different temperatures, which stop the metal components from changing shape. So he's already solved two of the three problems, the three main problems that are facing Portable clocks at sea. To deal with the problem of keeping a pendulum clock running on a rocking ship, Harrison made a modified pendulum with two connected bar balances that compensate for each other's motion. A clock with these balances could keep time even when tilted around. Harrison worked for five years straight to solve these three design problems. And what he ended up with was a clock known as Harrison 1, today called H1.

What are we looking at right now? Wow, okay, so what are we looking at? I think it's a very strange contraption. It doesn't really look like a clock, which is why it's so unique. I have to say it looks extremely steam punk, like it could be in the Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West. Emily showed me Harrison's C-clock, which is on display, at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. What I looked at with Emily

was actually the inner workings of the clock because sometime over the years the wooden case around it disappeared. The clock is made of gleaming brass with four small dials arranged on its face and an intricate system of tiny gears, springs, and bars

behind that. It weighs a hefty 75 pounds. It's about the size of, what would you say? I always say it might just, you might get away with it as cabin, luggage. You could, yeah, maybe. Not with some airlines, but with the standard airline, you might get away carrying it. International. After Harrison finished H-1 in 1735, he got it in front of England's Premier Research Institute, the Royal Society. This was a big moment for Harrison. A good review

from the society might put his invention in front of the judges of the Longitude Act. While the Society was impressed with Harrison's clock, they were also pretty hesitant to trust that his idea would work. Because why would they? You know, he's just a guy. He's doing all this in his home. At this point, Harrison was just a clockmaker with no scientific background. So having some skepticism about the whole thing, the society decided to give H1 a preliminary test, a test test, not to the West Indies, but to Lisbon. They agreed to put it on a boat, but they just sent it to Portugal, so not making the huge transatlantic voyage. Harrison apparently got extremely seasick on the trip,

like seasick enough that we are still talking about it 290 years later, but H1 performed marvelously. In fact, when the HMS Orford was on its way back to Britain, the ship's sailing master had them on course to pass a landmark just south of Dartmouth. But Harrison, using H1, sounded the alarm. He was able to pinpoint the ship's location as 60 miles off course to the west.

And then it turned out that he was right. And you can imagine how that affected the captain, everybody on the crew. Harrison's timekeeper was able to correct the ship's longitude. Wow, that was a magic trick. That was just how did you do that? And how he had done it was with that clock. And the whole crew of the ship he was on,

they're all ready to stand up for him. He's not a crank. It's not what everybody was expecting, but he's not a crank. He's got something. So with the blessing of the Royal Society, all eight members of the official Board of Longitude assembled to hear about the successful Portugal trial and to judge Harrison's C-clock. And Harrison is there with his clock. And what does he do?

He says, I don't think it's really good enough yet. He didn't want that big trial? No, not yet. Harrison could have asked for his H1C clock to go on a trial to the West Indies, and it's likely the board would have given it to him. He could have tried for the prize, but he didn't do that. What he did do was solidify his place as the absolute worst venture capitalist in the history of the world. Harrison was so obsessed with getting his invention precisely, exactly, perfectly right, that he showed up in a room full of people practically begging to give him a big pile of money,

and he pointed out the problems with his own design. He was apparently the only person in the room to say anything negative about his work. And so, like the terrible entrepreneur he was, Harrison went back to the drawing board. So H1, maybe we'd call that beta, it proves the principle. A clock on a boat will work. It will tell you the time better than the ship's navigator. That's what you need. What followed were over 20 years of working and reworking and reworking and reworking designs for various Harrison C clocks.

All this time, John Harrison had been tinkering and tinkering, making prototypes with changes big and small to the same basic formula as H-1. But then, in the mid-1750s, Harrison just happened to get a new pocket watch. The watch was for his personal use made by another clockmaker. At the time, watches were extremely unreliable, even more so than regular clocks, which, as we've established, were very crappy. You know, a gentleman might have a pocket watch, but it was just for vanity. It didn't really keep good time.

But this watch, which used some of Harrison's improvements, was extremely accurate. Harrison looked down at his shiny new pocket watch and he realized that the key to a perfect sea clock was that he needed to think smaller. His other clocks were massive. And wouldn't it be so much better to have something small and practical that a captain out at sea could keep on him at all times and carry in his hand? It took him four years to complete his C-watch, H-4. H4 was 5 inches in diameter and it weighed just 3 pounds. So compared to the carry-on luggage of H-1, it could fit in a free personal item. Except on Spirit Airlines, then it would probably cost 50 bucks.

Looking at H4 in the Royal Observatory, I was struck by just how different it looks from any of Harrison's earlier C-clocks. If the other ones look pretty steampunk, this looks just like so ornate and beautiful and delicate. Like, how would you describe that? There's all this like curving filigree, these blue iridescent dots. There's like rubies and diamonds in there, right? Yes, yes. So diamond palettes, we're still not entirely sure how we made them. I was going to say, are the, are the gems just gratuitous? Are they flare? Do they have a purpose? They have a purpose, they do, yes. And it's all anti-friction or minimizing friction. When Harrison finished H-4, he didn't do what he'd done with his other inventions. He didn't insist that this one wasn't right,

or ask for more time. He was finally, finally ready to have his work tested and collect the Longitude Prize. Perfectionist, do you think? Yeah. So that's what was one of the most interesting things to me, that when he made H-4, he knew he'd really done it. And he had this wonderful saying, I think I remember it. I think it is fair to say that there is no other mechanical thing that is as beautiful or as curious in texture as this my watch or timekeeper for the longitude. Satisfied finally with his invention, Harrison presented H4 to the Board of Longitude. The board agreed to send the timepiece on its official trial to Jamaica, with that big,

fat pile of quid resting on the results. To take top prize, Harrison would need to bring H4 by C to Jamaica and then on arrival take longitude calculations. If the difference between Harrison's number and the real longitude of Jamaica was within 30 nautical miles or half a degree of longitude, he would at long last take home the prize. Harrison himself was getting up in age. He was almost 70. So when classic dad fashion. He made his kid do it. In 1761, Harrison's son William traveled with H4 all the way across the Atlantic Ocean on a two-month journey through icy cold, humid heat, and rolling seas.

He collected his data, which was accurate to about a single nautical mile, way closer than the 30-mile cutoff. But when William returned home expecting to claim the reward, the Board of Longitude said that, sorry, actually, the trial was void. partly because they thought the result might be a fluke, and partly because they didn't actually know the Longitude of Jamaica. They sent him to Jamaica even though they weren't sure where Jamaica was. This was insane behavior, a huge waste of time.

Obviously, the Harrisons were exasperated. From this point on, the Board of Longitude kept holding the prize just out of reach. In 1764, Harrison got a new trial, this time. to Barbados. He aces it again, but the board equivocates. They kept moving the goalpost. Harrison may have finally perfected his watch, but his timing was horrible. It took him so long that by this point, most of his friends and allies on the board had retired or just straight up died. And the new commissioners of Longitude were unfortunately the worst thing an eccentric creative type could encounter.

They were pragmatists. Here's Alexi Baker again. The big problem, the reason he was conflicting with the commissioners, is they thought it wouldn't help the nation if they couldn't also replicate his watches. The Board of Longitude was looking at Harrison and saying, this is a guy who's over 70 years old. He'd taken decades to build one watch, and they weren't even sure he could make a second one,

let alone put them in the hands of every captain trying to make their way across the open seas. So they could be amazing one-offs, but would it be affordable and possible for other people because he was getting on an age for other people to make a lot more watches? Not to mention that Harrison had in fact been so slow that the astronomers who had taken centuries to find a solution to longitude had basically caught up. They actually had found an okay way of calculating longitude

called the lunar distance method. And it worked. As long as you had a highly educated person on board, a set of tables and several hours of calculation time to spare. The Board of Longitude kept setting up new hoops for Harrison to jump through. Harrison lost his patience, and he and his son Williams started publishing attacks against the board. I honestly, even though it's silly to feel sorry for people in the 1700s, I feel sorry for both the Harrisons and the commissioners because they both had very valid points.

And also, you can definitely understand John Harrison was old by the standards of the time. He was tired. He had more medical ailments. He wanted this solved and to get his reward, you know. He just wants to be done with this clock. Yes, it had been his whole life since 1730s. In the end, Harrison and his son decided to pull the boldest, most daring card they had up their sleeve. They tattled. William Harrison personally appealed to famous clock enthusiast and America loser King George III to step in. There were many reasons to cry.

This is unfair. And the king agreed that it was unfair and tested the fifth one in his private observatory and was convinced that Harrison had been very, very badly treated. Speaking to William at Windsor Castle, the king supposedly said that they had been cruelly treated and exclaimed, by God, Harrison, I will see you write it. In 1772, King George tested a copy of H4 called, you guessed it, H5, and was thoroughly impressed by its accuracy. At the instruction of the king, Parliament awarded John Harrison the rest of the money he was owed as a thank you for his decades of work. Crucially, though, the money was only a thank you. It was not the Longitude Prize, which the board maintained he had not earned. Of course, he felt hard done by. he was probably never fully happy even after he got that recognition.

Harrison died in 1776 just a few years later. And it did take a minute, or more like a few decades, for manufacturers to even come close to replicating the near perfection of H4. But by the early 19th century, variations of Harrison's Sea Watch were everywhere. These instruments became generically known as marine chronometers. Unfortunately, the marine chronometer did exactly. what Parliament had hoped when they first set up the Longitude Act over a century earlier. It threw gasoline on the fire of British imperialism.

The Royal Navy made marine chronometers standard issue, and captains of merchant vessels, like those sailing with the British East India Company, got their own chronometers too. Here's Deva Sobel again. Once they really knew where they were going and where they were, that was a powerful aid to many things they did. for good and ill. By the time marine chronometers were widespread, Britain had abolished slavery and left the transatlantic slave trade.

But it was colonizing faster than ever, spreading beyond North America and the Caribbean and into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. And since any tool that helped navigation helped imperialism, the marine chronometer was a key part of the evil doings. In the end, the marine chronometer ended up being just one tool in a time. toolbox full of tools that the British used for world domination. But actually, one of the chronometer's most lasting impacts came indirectly from its role in mapmaking. James Cook used his Harrison-style chronometer on his second voyage. He took it south of the Antarctic Circle, where he surveyed parts of the world never before represented on European maps. And the logbooks on a ship, the HMS resolution, called the chronometer, our trusty friend, the watch.

In 1831, the surveying vessel, the HMS Beagle, carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos. It also carried 22 marine chronometers. You know, just in case. Bare minimum, you'd have a few because you would use them all and then compare them. You want to have backup. You always want to have backup. The widespread use of marine chronometers meant that by the late 19th century, most Western trading vessels were using British maritime charts.

So when a global conference was held to pick one standard line of zero degrees longitude for the international community, the choice was obvious. Greenwich, England was chosen as Longitude Zero, the Prime Meridian. And with that, England, with the help of John Harrison, became, cartographically speaking, the center of the world. I wonder how having longitude changed navigation. People stopped dying so much. Back on the Buccaneer with Todd, as he was steering us through jagged rocks and hundreds of shipwrecks, I didn't take for granted that I could just look at the dashboard and get information that a few hundred years ago would have seemed like a miracle.

You're looking at the screen right now. What is that? That's a GPS that shows you where all the rocks are and where all the wrecks are. I put them on there. And what's our longitude right now? Our longitude. We're North 4953-3-340, Weth006213-368. Good to know. Good.

After the break, we talk about a method for long-distance sea travel that existed millennia before Europeans cracked longitude. So I'm back with Kelly Prime. I hear you have some more for me. I do. So as I was reporting this story, one element kept coming up for me, which is that the story we're telling about longitude and the longitude problem and the act is a very Eurocentric one. Like, yeah, I can't, like, actually picture any of these characters not wearing powdered blades, you know? Totally. That's totally true. And since the problem of finding longitude was essentially the problem of figuring out a way to safely travel long distances at sea, I was really curious about how other cultures managed to do that. And the most extraordinary version that I found comes from the Pacific Islands, where navigators have been traveling between these, like, teen,

tiny islands separated by thousands of miles of ocean for millennia, like centuries and centuries before the Longitude Act. So to find out more, I called up probably like one of the coolest people I've ever met. My name is Lehuahua Kamalu, and I am a captain and navigator and sometimes crew member of traditional Polynesian voyaging canoes. Lehuahua Kamalu is based in Honolulu and works on the canoes, Hokulea and Hiki Analia. And she's one of the few people on Earth using traditional skills to navigate vast distances at sea, which means no GPS and definitely no marine chronometer. There is no timepiece involved in the wayfinding in this way.

And so I'll probably call it non-instrument navigation. That's probably the simplest way to describe it. I mean, to me, there's nothing simple about navigating thousands of miles between tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So how does she do it? Yeah, well, I'll say first that a lot of the original techniques for this kind of navigation have been lost over the years because of colonization. But Lehuah and her colleagues use their own interpretation of the methods that Pacific

Islanders used thousands of years ago. Back then, navigators in the Pacific Islands had a lot of the same challenges as Europeans. Basically, there's only so much information you can easily get from the sun and the stars. And so it kind of makes sense that the starting point for Polynesian wayfinding is actually pretty similar to the European concept of dead reckoning. You need to constantly watch, like, are we making good progress? Are we still doing the same speed? Are we a little slower? Are we a little faster? You know, are these conditions, the standard conditions that we expect? Or are we experiencing something that is out of the norm? And how do we account for that? Ultimately, though, this approach isn't enough. LaHua says it gets you in the right direction. But the longer the journey, the more errors can add up. So you need a way to get more confident in where you are and where you're going at sea.

And so instead of using something like latitude and longitude, Polynesian wayfinders take a more holistic approach. Let's just imagine the world, not so much with an imaginary grid on it, and rather just see it in the natural way that it is. and I think what it forces you to do is to allow nature to tell you where you are and not you to tell nature where you are. And what does that mean exactly, letting nature tell you where you are? Okay, so what Lahua told me is that even when you're out at sea,

way out of sight of land, that doesn't mean you don't have information. In fact, your natural surroundings provide a lot of data that can be used to figure out where you are and where you're going? It's not that you are traveling from point A to point B with absolutely nothing in the middle. There's an ocean that is pointing you in the right direction. There are wave patterns. There are animals. There are wind directions.

There are clouds in the sky. There is a never-ending display of celestial bodies of planets and stars and the sun and the moon and all these features that are continuously telling you what direction you're going in if you're paying attention. So I think I understand that there are these natural features in the environment that you can use to navigate. But how does she apply what she's seeing and hearing? Like how does she make practical sense of it all in terms of setting a specific course for her canoe? Great question. And one example that Lahua gave me was birds, specifically land. birds. So you might be trying to locate one little island in the Pacific and you could be out of

sight of land. But if you look up and see a land bird flying overhead, like a type of bird that you know doesn't like to go very far from home, that tells you something. And it means you're in the radius of some kind of land. And suddenly you see that island, if you imagine the island, not just as the land above the water, but also the animals and the birds that live on. that island. They are part of that island as well. So the island becomes much bigger. And soon, you start to say, well, also the waves around that island are affected much further out. So in a way, those waves are also part of that island. And suddenly the island is actually just this massive target. And if you start to see all the signs that say, I'm an island, it's not just land, right? You

don't just have to see a rock or a tree to know an island is there. And I think that suddenly makes you realize how going after one island that might only be 10 miles, you know, around becomes going after an island that's 200 or 300 miles around. And you're trying to expand your perspective to see the ways that you can see an island without actually just seeing the island itself. I love this so much. That's so cool. It really is. So, okay. So, You know, she can see a 10-mile island as a 300-mile island. That's amazing. And but I do wonder, like, as, you know, you are relying on the natural world to be your sort of navigational guide that climate changes and changes in the environment, you know, like could change the way she should read them.

Did she talk about that? She did because, you know, like you're saying, with the entire basis of your navigation system is the natural world, even. even like the tiniest changes to one ocean current or one species of bird can make a massive difference. I think it's really something I think about a lot today is just how much life in the ocean is no longer there. When you think about how critical just that one bird is, you start to connect all of the sensitivities of the system. And it all has to work for it to work for you. So you become quite attentive to what supports the system that allows the navigation, and that is a healthy ecosystem. I mean, you think about one species of bird that lives on an island, and if something happened to that one species, she would know the difference.

Like, it would affect her navigation potentially. It's just sort of an amazing concept to sort of think about. Yeah, she actually talked about feral cat colonies on. islands and how when there's feral cat colonies, those cats will kill the birds. And when you don't have the birds, you don't have the birds at sea. So it's like even one tiny, tiny thing throws off how you can find where you are in the ocean. It's kind of crazy. It's crazy. It's so interesting. So I also want to mention that Lahua and her colleagues at the Polynesian Voyaging Society are currently doing this big project to circumnavigate the Pacific on traditional voyaging canoes.

It's a 43,000 nautical mile voyage, and Lehua is one of 400 crew members taking turns doing different legs of this journey. And the day I talked to Lehua, she was getting ready. It was literally the day before. She was getting ready to fly out to start a 2,000 mile journey from the Cook Islands to New Zealand. And the whole voyage should take about four years. I think they started in 2023. And she was getting on the phone to talk to you the day. before she was leaving on this four-year journey?

Yeah, she was like, I should really, really pack. I should really pack. But this wasn't, you know, she's doing one leg of the journey. She was going to do one leg. Okay, that sounds better. Okay, it sounds good. Yeah, so the whole voyage should take four years. And the goal is to connect communities in the Pacific and also to spread awareness about

the importance of protecting indigenous knowledge and ocean ecosystems. Yeah, yeah. So is there a way to track where she is in the world? There is, yeah. So you can go to the Polynesian Voyaging Society website, and there's a map that lets you track the journey, the various legs of the journey. That is so cool. I'm so glad we talked about this. This is so much fun. Thanks, Roman. It's been really fun. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Kelly Prime and edited by Vivian Lay, mixed by Brendan Burns. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks this week to Richard Dunn, Rebecca Higgott, Trevor Newman, and Terry High.

I mean. Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Kurt Colstead is the digital director. Delany Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barubei, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Lashma Don, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, Tallinn, and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI and 99PI.org.