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The year before Heaphy’s expedition, the scientific journal Nature called for submissions on the topic of this mysterious ability, and none other than Charles Darwin wrote to the eminent publication. He cited the case of Ferdinand von Wrangel, a German explorer, who had written about the Cossacks’ ability to stay oriented over great distances, “guided by a kind of unerring instinct.” As Darwin described, “[Von Wrangel], an experienced surveyor, and using a compass, failed to do that which these savages easily effected.” Darwin guessed that “some part of the brain is specialised for the function of direction” and that though all men are able to dead reckon, the natives of Siberia do it to a “wonderful extent, though probably in an unconscious manner.”
For Darwin, this unconscious dead reckoning was evidence that organisms “preserved useful variations of pre-existing instincts” and that the human brain had preserved the same abilities seen in animals (e.g., passenger pigeons) to find their way home over long distances. For those humans to whom this instinct was useful, it was strengthened and improved by habit. Although Darwin conceded that all humans had the ability to dead reckon, he sought to place the skills of “savages” into an evolutionary hierarchy of which white European culture could be the only apex. Therefore, navigational aptitude could only be explained as a result of their proximity to animals on the evolutionary tree, and, like animals, their skills and mastery of the environment were biologically endowed, unconscious, and instinctive. In the early 1900s, the term “sixth sense” was coined to describe how blind people could avoid obstacles, and it was also ascribed to groups who exhibited uncanny navigational skills.
But Darwin appears to have glossed over a key aspect of von Wrangel’s account. While the German explorer did write that his Cossack driver seemed to be guided by instinct, he also described how it was years of practice that gave his companion, Sotnik Tatarinow, the ability to use his memory to maintain a plan for navigating “intricate labyrinths of ice” and making “incessant changes of direction” so that memory and observation compensated each other and he never lost the main direction. “While I was watching the different turns, compass in hand, trying to resume the true route, he had always a perfect knowledge of it empirically,” wrote von Wrangel. Once they reached flatter plains of ice, he described how Tatarinow was able to use ice landmarks in the distance to maintain direction while using sastrugi, the same patterns created by dominant winds blowing the snow that Awa described, to stay oriented. “They know by experience at what angle they must cross the greater and the lesser waves of snow in order to arrive at their destination, and they never fail.” When sastrugi weren’t present, Tatarinow switched to using the sun or the stars. Thus the ability to navigate in a seemingly “blank” landscape was actually based on Tatarinow’s memory of the tundra in concert with environmental cues for orientation. Traveling several hundred miles between settlements without the aid of maps or instruments was not just common practice, it was the only way people who lived there had traveled for generations. Their abilities were based on intimate knowledge gained through direct experience, tradition, and rational calculations. They didn’t need a sixth sense.
The British zoologist Robin Baker points out in his book Human Navigation and the Sixth Sense that one reason the scientific belief in a sixth sense lasted for so long is that by the nineteenth century, people in western Europe had so many aids to navigation, such as maps, compasses, place-names, roads, and road signs, that they themselves had forgotten there were other strategies for navigating. This forgetting is remarkable because, as Baker wrote, these modern inventions had only been available to the masses for three or four generations at most. “Throughout most of human evolution, navigation without instruments had been the rule,” wrote Baker. It took just a couple of centuries for people to forget that environmental cues can be just as accurate as maps and gadgets. This historical amnesia made non-European navigation practices seem that much more supernatural and mysterious. As the accomplished Australian navigator Harold Gatty wrote, “In our Western civilization, pathfinding and natural tracking are so little developed … that notwithstanding all differences of innate ability, the man who has learned the simplest secrets of reading nature’s signs is bound to outstrip the inexperienced observer, however intelligent he may be, and can not only outstrip him, but frequently amaze him. Nature’s signs can be read with a little practice by the average intelligent Western man just as clearly as if they were street signs.”
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Of the hundreds of accounts by outsiders exploring the Arctic and of the thousands of anthropological studies of the Inuit, few spend much effort on understanding their methods of navigation. It confounded me that even Rasmussen, whose travels and encyclopedic recordings of Inuit life took place over tens of thousands of miles and three decades, never wrote about wayfinding explicitly or in very much detail—though he himself must have employed some of the same skills during his travels.
The first significant account of Inuit navigation that I could find was published in 1969 and was written by a young geographer by the name of Richard Nelson, who lived in an Alaskan Eskimo village called Wainwright. Nelson was under contract with the U.S. Air Force to write a practical guide for servicemen about how to survive in the Arctic based on indigenous knowledge. He ended up producing a detailed book, Hunters of the Northern Ice, describing the prodigious skills he witnessed, from how the Eskimo hunted at floe edges to their observations of astronomical phenomena. The appendix includes ninety-five words to describe sea ice alone, and around twenty pages of the book are dedicated to navigation.
One of Nelson’s earliest experiences in Wainwright was watching his companion patiently seduce a seal to come to the surface of the water by rhythmically scratching the ice with a knife, exploiting its curiosity, until he shot it with his rifle and pulled it onto the ice. “You see,” he said to Nelson after, “Eskimo is a scientist.” Over the coming year Nelson learned firsthand what he meant. Arctic hunters studied every aspect of the environment—how animals behaved and ecology worked, and all of the interlinking causative connections between the phenomena they observed. Nelson saw hunters use color to study sea ice, the feel of paw imprints in snow to hunt polar bear, or the constellation Ursa Major to tell time and orient. He was unequivocal about the fact that these skills could be explained by intelligence alone. “There is no mystical inherited ‘germ’ in the Eskimo’s mind that allows him to sense the mood of an animal, to anticipate the fickle movements of the ocean ice, or to sense a change in the weather,” he wrote. “What may seem unfathomable to us at first is often so only because we lack knowledge and experience.”
Among the other skills Nelson witnessed were hunters’ abilities to observe and memorize landmarks and analyze their spatial relationships to one another, much like Awa had described to me in our conversation at the Navigator Inn. Nelson described a forty-mile trip by dogsled during which his companion was able to keep a true line of travel through what, to Nelson, was featureless landscape. His friend found “shallow stream valleys infallibly when there seemed to be no indication whatever where they should be” and “knew the location of fox holes completely in ‘the middle of nowhere,’ in spite of the fact that they were not visible from over a hundred yards away.”
When I read Nelson’s account of this journey, I was struck by its similarity to another anthropologist working thirty years later at the other end of the Arctic. Claudio Aporta, an Argentinian academic with a fascination for maps, geography, and the north, was writing a doctoral dissertation on Inuit traveling in the community of Igloolik, an island in the Foxe Basin. The area around Igloolik is the definition of a polar desert; it gets about as much precipitation as the Sahara, but it’s so cold that it is covered by snow and ice for much of the year. It is also extraordinarily flat; Igloolik’s single hill measures less than two hundred feet high.
During his time there, Aporta became interested in how southerners visiting the Arctic always tend to describe it as
featureless and see the landscape as absent of life, a sort of blank space. “It is to a degree featureless,” Aporta told me, “but what is interesting is how people who live there have to develop ways to wayfind. People need environmental clues and to find concrete places within those environments.” Over the spring of 2000 and 2001, Aporta went on dozens of trips with hunters to understand how they did this. One of these trips was with a hunter who had laid some fox traps over twelve square miles with his uncle and wanted to retrieve them. To Aporta, the land looked completely barren. But somehow the hunter found all of the fox traps hidden under the snow. Aporta was extremely impressed. Then the hunter mentioned that he had laid the traps with his uncle twenty-five years earlier and hadn’t visited them since. Now Aporta was astonished. “How is it that precise locations can be identified, remembered, and communicated without the use of maps?” he wondered.
Aporta came to the conclusion that the Inuit didn’t travel across the land randomly—they followed known routes. In most places around the world, routes have been indicated with roads and human-made landmarks, and these paths and locations are then laid out symbolically on maps. The geographer Reginald Golledge argued that some environments are more legible than others because they have spatial coherence or an availability of landmarks that make navigation easier. The Arctic environment has ephemeral qualities that prohibit permanence—ice melts, snow is blown by changing winds, rivers flow and then turn to frozen ground come winter. Landmarks are either few and far between or difficult to distinguish and impermeable, so legibility depends on sociocultural dimensions, the symbolic significance and meaning imparted to the landscape by the people who traverse it. What Aporta found is that certain routes for traveling across the land become favored over generations, and knowledge of these unmarked trails is passed down from person to person, family to family, community to community, not in the form of maps but as oral descriptions that are memorized.
“One of the main differences between routes used by Inuit in the Arctic and those used by most cultures in other geographies,” wrote Aporta, “is that in the Arctic, routes remain and evolve in the social and individual memory of the people, become visible only in certain periods as tracks on the snow, and disappear from the landscape as the seasons progress.” In the course of around two thousand miles that Aporta traveled on snowmobile around Igloolik, he mapped thirty-seven known trails, fifteen of which had been used by multiple generations of travelers. Over that same distance, he recorded over four hundred Inuktitut names for places. There was no point at which his companions didn’t know where they were. Inuit routes don’t go through a no-man’s-land. Routes go “through named features, across patterned snow, and along familiar horizons, all of which constitute the territory in which a good traveller always knows where he/she is,” he later wrote.
Aporta thinks that travel for the Inuit is rarely transactional or driven by survival, or even the need to get from A to B. Travel is a way of being. Babies were conceived and born along routes, people convened to share resources and news. Aporta now sees the Arctic landscape as an example of a “memoryscape,” the mental images of the environment and places, remembered by individuals and shared among people. The term was invented by social anthropologist Mark Nuttall in reference to the Greenland Inuit in the early 1990s: “The relationships between a hunter or fisher and the environment are constituted in part by personal and collective memories that invest the landscape with personal, family and local significance, but also by ideas of rootedness and fixed attachment,” Nuttall has written. Traveling along these routes was the way the Inuit engaged with the environment and maintained, nourished, and expanded their memoryscape.
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Spatial orientation researchers generally break human navigation strategies into two sorts. The first is route knowledge, an ability to construct a sequence of points, landmarks, and perspectives that make up a path from one place to another. The traveler uses a string of memories of landmarks or viewpoints to recognize the correct sequence for getting from one place to another. Initially, the Inuit use of memoryscapes would seem to be a clear-cut example of route knowledge. The second strategy is called survey knowledge: the traveler organizes space into a stable, maplike framework, in which every point or landmark has a two-dimensional relationship to every other point. While route knowledge is the verbal description you might give when telling a friend how to get to the post office, survey knowledge is the “bird’s-eye” map of the walk you might draw for that friend on a piece of paper.
Route knowledge relies on the traveler’s point of view and relationship to objects around them, what’s called egocentric perspective. The individual sees everything in relationship to themselves and their body’s axes—in front, behind, up, down, left, and right. Survey knowledge depends on what is called an allocentric perspective, a point of view that is objective, maplike, and nonindexical in its representation of spatial locations of objects and landmarks.
Throughout the twentieth century, psychologists thought that the egocentric perspective was the most intuitive, simplistic, and primitive kind of spatial reasoning. Researchers like the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget argued that young children possess an egocentric perspective first; only as they matured around age twelve did children develop the capacity for the objective vantage point of allocentric or Euclidean coordinate space—what he called the formal operational stage. But Piaget, who was sometimes called a “cartographer of the mind” by his peers, mainly studied small groups of European children, and his findings have since been criticized for being unrepresentative. Indeed, they may be a classic example of a long-standing problem in psychological literature: making broad claims about human psychology based on narrow samples taken from what are now called Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or WEIRD, societies. Since Piaget’s era, the simplistic progression from egocentric to allocentric knowledge in individuals has been disproved by psychologists like Charles Gallistel of Rutgers University, who has shown that individuals—even children—are often capable of utilizing both strategies: apprehending the environment from the visual flow of locomotion or using spatial cues such as those that come from surveying an environment from an elevated position.
As the psycholinguist Stephen Levinson has written, there is a similarly flawed tradition in linguistics of assuming that the language used to describe space is a reflection of universal egocentric spatial concepts. Immanuel Kant thought as much and argued that our intuitions about space are based on the planes of the body: “up” and “down,” “left” and “right,” “back” and “front.” Presumably, some cultures then built on these innate, biologically endowed concepts through sociocultural inventions like charts, compasses, and clocks, the tools needed to organize space allocentrically.
Yet this version of cultural categorization has also been disproved. A huge variety of people and languages use an allocentric perspective and strategy, including those that produce no material navigation technologies. Clearly, the Inuit use memoryscapes but are more than able to accumulate and import survey knowledge of the land. So, just as individuals can use an amalgam of strategies to navigate, it’s virtually impossible to assign universality to cultural spatial navigation strategies or language, let alone organize cultures into pure hierarchies and call them Eastern or Western, primitive or modern, scientific or preindustrial, egocentric or allocentric. “Thinking at the highest level, at Piaget’s stage of formal operations,” writes anthropologist Charles Frake, “is not, as many have claimed, the hallmark of the modern, literate, scientific mind, but is, rather the hallmark of the human mind when confronted with a task sufficiently necessary, sufficiently challenging, and sufficiently clear in outcome.” Indeed, some so-called innate differences may have a lot to do with the topographies we inhabit. As the Colombian scholar Alfredo Ardila has posited, contemporary city life calls for the logical application of mathematical coordinates, whereas for much of human history people oriented themselves in natur
e by interpreting spatial signals and memory and calculating distances from environmental cues. Depending on where we are born, the languages we speak, and the topography we dwell in, it seems we are all capable of utilizing different cognitive strategies to greater or lesser flexibility and mastery in the task of navigating.
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At the restaurant in Iqaluit, Awa told me he believes that the Inuit can navigate the Arctic because they have bigger memories than qallunaat, though he pointed out that he had no scientific proof of it. His insight strikes at the heart of the intriguing relationship between human navigation and memory. While neuroscience has only recently begun to reveal its physiological basis, this relationship fascinated even the ancient Greeks, who afforded great respect to individuals who could memorize vast amounts of information. In the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, for instance, he recalls that Mithridates of Pontus knew twenty-two languages, and Cyrus knew all the men in his army by name. In the Ad Herennium, a Latin book from around 80 BCE, the unknown author (once thought to be Cicero) tells how Seneca could listen to two hundred students each recite a line of poetry and then recite all the lines perfectly—starting with the the last line and ending at the first. He could also supposedly repeat some two thousand names in perfect order after hearing them once. Another rhetoric teacher, Simplicius, could recite Virgil’s Aeneid backward.
To aid memorization, the Greeks invented an art dedicated to it, the method of loci, a system that appears to have taken advantage of the human brain’s proclivity for spatial memory to create an ingenious mnemonic device. In her 1966 book The Art of Memory, the English historian Frances Yates describes how it was Simonides of Ceos, the “honey-tongued” lyric poet, who invented this art of memory some twenty-five hundred years ago. Most of what we know about his system comes from just three texts in Latin, the Ad Herennium, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, and Cicero’s De oratore. It is Cicero who recounts how Simonides attended a massive banquet in Thessaly and, after reciting a lyric poem he had composed in honor of the host, was told by a messenger of the gods Castor and Pollux to go outside and meet them. But when he left, the roof of the hall collapsed and killed all the guests. The bodies were so badly injured that no one could identify them—except for Simonides. He remembered where each person had been sitting at the table.