Revisiting the past is sweet and sad. I had returned but I couldn’t go back; time doesn’t work that way. Maybe it didn’t matter. This place had given me my first ecstatic memories and shaped me like clay. It seemed to me that my responsibility was to re-create those conditions of freedom and belonging for my children, so they would know topophilia and it could guide their way in life. I wanted for them to look around at the immutable topography of the earth or up at the lovely firmament of the sky and recognize their home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the individuals who shared their experience, perspectives, and heritage with me throughout the course of reporting and researching traditional navigation. They offered their insights with immense kindness, and many reviewed key parts of the manuscript for accuracy in representing historical events and individual stories. My gratitude knows no bounds for their generosity of spirit and time.
In the Arctic, I am particularly grateful to Solomon Awa, John MacDonald, Zacharias Kunuk, Daniel Taukie, Sean Noble-Nowdluk, Matty McNair, Ken MacRury, Myna Ishulutak, Ian Mauro, the wonderful staff of the Nunavut Arctic College Library, Jason Carpenter, and Will Hyndman. A big thank-you to Rick Armstrong and Paul Carolan for hosting me in your homes in Iqaluit. In Australia, I’m thankful to Ray Norris, Margaret Katherine, and the eminent Bill Harney. Thanks to Simon and Phoebe Quilty for putting me up in your beautiful home in Katherine. In Fiji, endless gratitude to Alson Kelen, Peter Nuttall, and the whole village of Korova for their hospitality and insights, as well as Tagi Olosara and his fantastic family in Sigatoka for the kava and rugby. In Hawaii, thank you to Kala Baybayan and Timi Gilliom, Nāʻālehu Anthony, as well as Selena Ching and Sonja Swenson Rogers at the Polynesian Voyaging Society.
At every step of my research a number of anthropologists and scholars gave me the benefit of their years of research and scholarship, including Francesca Merlan, Fred Myers, Claudio Aporta, Thomas Widlok, Joe Genz, Vicente Diaz, David Rubin, Kim Shaw-Williams, Dale Kerwin, Bill Gammage, Tim Ingold, and Harry Heft. Similarly, a group of neuroscientists and researchers guided me through the wonders of the human mind and hippocampus: thank you to Kate Jeffery, Hugo Spiers, Véronique Bohbot, Lynn Nadel, Nora Newcombe, Alessio Travaglia, and Arthur Glenberg. I was touched and inspired by my conversations with Howard Eichenbaum, who sadly passed away in 2017. I will always wonder what more incredible research and ideas about the human brain he might have given us. Special thanks to John Huth for our many conversations over the years and allowing me to visit your lectures at Harvard. Thank you to the participants and organizers of the Royal Institute of Navigation’s Animal Navigation conference for allowing me to observe, and in particular Peter Hore and Joe Kirschvink. Also Hugh Dingle for sharing his fascinating insights on animal migration. Kate Compton, thank you for creating Lost Tesla and carefully explaining bots to me.
My research and writing corresponded with a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and I’m indebted to the incredible staff of the program for their vital support and encouragement. Thank you so much, Deborah Blum, Bettina Urcuioli, David Corcoran, Tom Zeller Jr., and Jane Roberts. Likewise, my fellow fellows were an inspiration: Mark Wolverton, Iván Carrillo, Robert McClure, Fabio Turone, Meera Subramanian, Lauren Whaley, Bianca Toness, Chloe Hecketsweiler, and Rosalia Omungo. At MIT, thank you to the fantastic staff at Hayden and Rotch Libraries, Patrick Winston, Matt Wilson, Wolfgang Victor Hayden Yarlott, and Heather Anne Paxson. At Harvard University, my sincere thanks to James Delbourgo, whose teaching and scholarly perspective was the highlight of my year in Cambridge, as well as Naomi Oreskes and John Stilgoe for their wonderful courses. My sincerest gratitude to Paul Kockelmann at Yale University and Brian Schilder for their incredibly thoughtful review and critical perspective that helped elevate the manuscript, as well as the support of Doron Weber and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology & Economics that made their review possible.
I am constantly reminded how lucky I am to have my agent, Michelle Tessler, in my corner—thank you for your continued enthusiasm and guidance. And I am extremely grateful to my editor, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, for her friendship and unparalleled talents; thank you for your faith in this endeavor and positive encouragement at every challenging juncture. At St. Martin’s Press I’m very fortunate to have Alan Bradshaw and Laura Apperson helping me through the process with kindness and patience. Special thanks to Emma Piper-Burkett for many heartening conversations and Tom Peter for your friendship and getting lost on a bike in London with me, thereby proving the thesis of my book in real time. Kristi Lutz and Pi Waller, thank you for lending me your lovely home in Long Island for much-needed writing time. Also Elliott Prasse-Freeman for help at a crucial moment and the carton of James Scott’s chicken eggs.
Thank you to my family for your cheerleading: Chris Miller, Mark Miller, Ciaran O’Connor, Jane O’Connor George, and Margaret Parker, and the support of my fantastic and loving parents, Rory O’Connor and Katherine Miller. I haven’t got the words to adequately thank my grandparents Bob and Janet Miller for their unceasing support—I love you dearly.
And last, my profound thanks to Bryan Parker for making it all possible. Your infinite equanimity and humor make you the best travel companion anyone could wish for in life.
NOTES
Please note that some of the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.
Prologue
“allow the fact that” Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel, 2009, 264.
“travels today to the Arctic” April White, “The Intrepid ’20s Women Who Formed an All-Female Global Exploration Society,” Atlas Obscura, April 12, 2017, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/society-of-woman-geographers.
“after three thousand years” Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, reprint edition, 1994, 3.
“represent[ed] a substantial narrowing” James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, first edition, 2017, 91.
“For thousands of years” A. Ardila, “Historical Evolution of Spatial Abilities,” Behavioural Neurology 6, no. 2 (1993): 83–87, https://doi.org/10.3233/BEN-1993-6203.
“the old ways” Barbara Moran, “The Joy of Driving without GPS,” Boston Globe, August 8, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/08/08/the-joy-driving-without-gps/W36dJaTGw05YFdzyixhj3M/story.html.
“The idea is that during” Matthew Wilson, presentation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, December 5, 2016.
“the hippocampus is a phylogenetically old” Eleanor A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 8 (April 11, 2000): 4398–403, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.070039597.
“If navigation was the primary purpose” Howard Eichenbaum, Interview with author, October 18, 2016.
“With nature as your” Harold Gatty and J. H. Doolittle, Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land and Sea by Observing Nature, 1979, back flap.
“For Nenets, navigating is” Andrei Golovnev, quoted in Kirill V. Istomin and Mark J. Dwyer, “Finding the Way: A Critical Discussion of Anthropological Theories of Human Spatial Orientation with Reference to Reindeer Herders of Northeastern Europe and Western Siberia,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 29–49, doi.org/10.1086/595624.
“They wouldn’t get lost” Ken MacRury, Interview with author, June 14, 2016.
“You drive out on the weekend” Thomas Widlok, Interview with author, July 26, 2016.
“to see the world” Robyn Davidson, Desert Places, first edition, 1996, 146.
“the ability to determine a route” Reginald Golledge, quoted in Dario Guiducci and Ariane Burke, “Reading the Landscape: Legible Environments and Hominin Dispersals,” Evolutionary Anthropology 25, no. 3 (May 6, 2016): 133–41, doi.org/10.1002/evan.21484.
“We are told that vision” James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition, first edition, 2014, xiii.
“all persons who want” James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, revised edition, 1983, 321.
“It’s only a slight” Harry Heft, Interview with author, March 14, 2017.
“By using a GPS” Tristan Gooley, Email with author, May 11, 2015.
“We want to go faster” Tim Ingold, Interview with author, March 30, 2016.
The Last Roadless Place
“poor disciple” James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer, 2001, 133.
“When adventure does not come” Jean Malaurie, The Last Kings of Thule: A Year Among the Polar Eskimos of Greenland, 1956, 202.
“so-called advanced” Jean Malaurie, Ultima Thulé: Explorers and Natives of the Polar North, 2003, 146.
“extremely high mobility” Max Friesen, “North America: Paleoeskimo and Inuit Archaeology,” in Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, ed. by Immanuel Ness, 2013, https://www.academia.edu/5314092/North_America_Paleoeskimo_and_Inuit_archaeology_Encyclopedia_of_Global_Human_Migration_.
“Even burial grounds” Leo Ussak, quoted in Milton Freeman Research Limited, Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project: A Report, 1976, 192.
“The land does not change” Scott Brachmayer, Kajutaijuq, film short, 2015, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3826696/.
“I was born in a sod house” Solomon Awa, Interview with author, May 10, 2015.
“They had to” Nancy Wachowich, Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak, Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women, 2001, 106.
“My husband asked” Ibid., 108.
“the color of sky” Alfred K. Siewers, “Colors of the Winds, Landscapes of Creation,” in Strange Beauty, The New Middle Ages, 2009, 97.
Memoryscapes
“astonishing precision” Robert A. Rundstrom, “A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy,” Geographical Review 80, no. 2 (1990): 155–68, //doi.org/10.2307/215479.
“All the places where” Kenn Harper, “Wooden Maps,” Nunatsiaq Online, April 11, 2014, http://www.nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674taissumani_april_11/.
“The historical record” Rundstrom, “A Cultural Interpretation of Inuit Map Accuracy.”
“these people sail” Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia, 1994, 11.
“a non-literate man” Margarette Lincoln, ed., Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voyages to the Southern Oceans in the Eighteenth Century, 1998, 127.
“non-industrialists” R. Robin Baker, Human Navigation and the Sixth Sense, first edition, 1981, 48.
“In the flat country” Harold Gatty and J. H. Doolittle, Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land and Sea by Observing Nature, 1979, 48.
“instinctive sense, beyond our comprehension” Phillip Lionel Barton, “Maori Cartography and the European Encounter,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. by David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis, first edition, vol. 2, book 3, 1998, 496.
“guided by a kind” Baker, Human Navigation and the Sixth Sense, 47.
“preserved useful variations” Charles Darwin, “Origin of Certain Instincts,” Nature 7, no. 179 (April 3, 1873): 007417a0, doi.org/10.1038/007417a0.
“intricate labyrinths of ice” Ferdinand Petrovich Baron Wrangel, Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822 & 1823 Commanded by Lieutenant, Now Admiral Ferdinand Von Wrangel, ed. by Edward Sabine, 1841, 40.
“Throughout most of human evolution” Baker, Human Navigation and the Sixth Sense, 8.
“In our Western civilization” Harold Gatty, Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass, reprint edition, 1999, 30.
“Eskimo is a scientist” Richard K. Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Ice, 1972, xxii.
“There is no” Ibid., xxiii.
“shallow stream valleys” Ibid., 102.
“How is it that” Claudio Aporta, “Inuit Orienting: Traveling along Familiar Horizons,” Sensory Studies, n.d., http://www.sensorystudies.org/inuit-orienting-traveling-along-familiar-horizons/, accessed February 27, 2015.
“One of the main differences” Claudio Aporta, “Old Routes, New Trails: Contemporary Inuit Travel and Orienting in Igloolik, Nunavut,” thesis, 2003, 82.
“through named features” Ibid., 3.
“The relationships between” J. M. Fladmark and Thor Heyerdahl, Heritage and Identity: Shaping the Nations of the North, 2015, 231.
“Thinking at the highest level” Charles O. Frake, “Cognitive Maps of Time and Tide among Medieval Seafarers,” Man 20, no. 2 (1985): 254–70, doi.org/10.2307/2802384.
“honey-tongued” Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 2014, 27.
“at the great nerve” Ibid., 127.
“particulars out of the mass” Ibid., 372.
“For this invention will produce” Ibid., 38.
“superior memorizers” Eleanor A. Maguire, Elizabeth R. Valentine, John M. Wilding, and Narinder Kapur, “Routes to Remembering: The Brains behind Superior Memory,” Nature Neuroscience 6, no. 1 (January 2003): 90–95, doi.org/10.1038/nn988.
“journey” Gordon H. Bower, “Analysis of a Mnemonic Device: Modern Psychology Uncovers the Powerful Components of an Ancient System for Improving Memory,” American Scientist 58, no. 5 (1970): 496–510.
“The results from the present study” Eleanor A. Maguire, Katherine Woollett, and Hugo J. Spiers, “London Taxi Drivers and Bus Drivers: A Structural MRI and Neuropsychological Analysis,” Hippocampus 16, no. 12 (December 1, 2006): 1091–101, doi.org/10.1002/hipo.20233.
“evolution of our civilisation” Gatty, Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass, 53.
“trail-blazing pioneer” Tristan Gooley, “The Navigator That Time Lost,” The Natural Navigator, 2009, https://www.naturalnavigator.com/the-library/the-navigator-that-time-lost.
“natural navigators” Gatty and Doolittle, Nature Is Your Guide, 219.
“[Scientists] build a wall” Ibid., 27.
Why Children Are Amnesiacs
“Why would nature” Elizabeth Marozzi and Kathryn J. Jeffery, “Place, Space and Memory Cells,” Current Biology 22, no. 22 (2012): R939–42.
“I think the field” Kate Jeffery, Interview with author, April 14, 2016.
“Hitherto it has not” Sigmund Freud, Freud on Women: A Reader, 1992, 106.
“[They believed] that the advent” Nora Newcombe, Interview with author, July 29, 2016.
“This emergence of” Moshe Bar, ed., Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future, revised edition, 2011, 351.
“like waking from a dream” Larry R. Squire, “The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience,” Neuron 61, no. 1 (January 15, 2009): 6–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2008.12.023.
“The biggest surge in synaptic” John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, 1978, 114.
“does not have a representation” Ibid., 241.
“This pattern suggests” Lynn Nadel and Stuart Zola-Morgan, “Infantile Amnesia: A Neurobiological Perspective,” in Infant Memory: Its Relation to Normal and Pathological Memory in Humans and Other Animals, vol. 9, ed. by Morris Moscovitch, 2012, 145.
“The hippocampus, it’s not” Lynn Nadel, Interview with author, July 29, 2016.
“Critical periods are when” Alessio Travaglia, Interview with author, August 2, 2016.
“All living beings” Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, 2009, 26.
Birds, Bees, Wolves, and Whales
“Inuit are pragmatists” Ken MacRury, Interview with author, June 14, 2016.
“The faster you traverse” John MacDonald, Interview with author, January 14, 2016.
“The term can be translated as” John MacDonald, Email
with author, November 16, 2017.
“one who moves away” William A. Lovis and Robert Whallon, Marking the Land: Hunter-Gatherer Creation of Meaning in Their Environment, 2016, 85.
“Men and wolves” Roger Peters, “Cognitive Maps in Wolves and Men,” Environmental Design Research 2 (1973): 247–53.
“For wolves, the reality” Ibid.
“spatial primitives” Kate J. Jeffery et al., “Animal Navigation—A Synthesis,” in Animal Thinking: Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition, ed. by Julia Fischer and Randolf Menzel, 2011, 59.
“eerily consistent” James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Nature’s Compass: The Mystery of Animal Navigation, 2012, 38.
“preprogrammed” Hugh Dingle, Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move, first edition, 1996, 214.
“as straight as an arrow” Travis W. Horton et al., “Straight as an Arrow: Humpback Whales Swim Constant Course Tracks during Long-Distance Migration,” Biology Letter (April 20, 2011): rsbl20110279, doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2011.0279.
“maddeningly difficult” “The Magnetic Sense Is More Complex Than Iron Bits,” Evolution News, April 29, 2016, https://evolutionnews.org/2016/04/the_magnetic_se/.
“the deep substrate” Matthew Cobb, “Are We Ready for Quantum Biology?” New Scientist, November 12, 2014, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429950-700-are-we-ready-for-quantum-biology/.
“chemical compass” Klaus Schulten, Charles E. Swenberg, and Albert Weller, “A Biomagnetic Sensory Mechanism Based on Magnetic Field Modulated Coherent Electron Spin Motion,” Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie 111, no. 1 (1978): 1–5, doi.org/10.1524/zpch.1978.111.1.001.
“migratory syndromes” Dingle, Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move, 33.
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