Hope...

In the 11th century, when Europe began to slowly emerge from its lethargy, the first thing, as always happens, was the revival of trade. But transporting goods by road was expensive and unsafe, so the importance of river transportation increased sharply. The barge has become an ordinary detail of the European landscape. In particularly developed lands, such as Italy, a network of canals began to grow. And at the same time a problem arose: how to mark the fairway? In 1066, an unnamed inventor created an object that, with minimal modifications, has survived to this day - the buoy. The very first rocked on the waves of the Weser River in Germany. But if it was relatively easy to mark the path for a river ship, then with sea vessels the situation was more complicated.

Noah realized in which direction the dry land lay when he released a dove from his ark - and it did not return. For thousands of years, releasing birds remained practically the only way to determine the path of a ship on the high seas. The second important technique was to search the sky for the constellation Ursa Major, which was considered an indicator of the north. The progress of the early Middle Ages consisted only in the fact that Anglo-Saxon captains began to focus on the North Star in the constellation Ursa Minor, which more accurately corresponded to the north. The sailors did not have any measuring instruments. The astrolabe, invented in antiquity, borrowed by the Arabs and returned to Europe from them in the 11th century, was a subject of scientific studies and was not used for navigation. In general, interest in astronomy was the lot of warlocks and soothsayers. When Pope Sylvester II, the famous stargazer, announced around the year 1000 that the North Star was not exactly above the pole, this information did not reach the captains. They lived in their own world, which had no contact with the world of learning. The Vikings made long journeys - to Greenland, to America, guided by centuries of experience in visual observations of the stars. The maximum of scientific generalization is the table of noon altitudes of the Sun for the latitude of the northern coast of Iceland, compiled in the 11th century by the islander Oddi.

Meanwhile, the ideal object for orientation, namely a magnet, has been known to mankind since ancient times. It was invariably endowed with magical properties, say, the ability to detect an unfaithful wife, but until the end of the 11th century, no one thought of using the magnet in practice. In 1086, a high-ranking official of the Chinese naval department, Shen Kua, became interested in it as a means of determining directions, and already around 1101 the Chinese began to equip ships with something like a compass. The Europeans, acting completely independently of them (the usual intermediary, the Arabs, learned the compass much later), created this device almost simultaneously.

A real combination of the achievements of science with the needs of navigation could only happen where serving on a ship was not considered shameful for educated people. Predictably, the Italian trading republics became such a place. The European compass was invented in Amalfi around 1110 by a certain Guiscard. The innovation spread quite quickly. In 1180, the English monk Alexander Necam went to Paris to lecture at the university there. When he sailed across the English Channel, there was thick fog, but this did not bother the captain, since he used a magnetic needle. From Nekam's report it follows that the compass was used only in poor visibility, when it was impossible to see the stars at night and the sun during the day. Nevertheless, by 1225 the new invention had reached the farthest tip of Europe - Iceland. Thus ended the era of shore-based navigation.