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The book is divided into four parts. The first discusses the navigational achievements of the ancient seafarers, including the Pacific islanders, the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Arabs and the Chinese. Many of these peoples made extraordinary voyages at times in history when navigation as we know it hadn't even been dreamed of. The ancient Polynesians, for example, populated the Pacific Islands, reaching as far as New Zealand on wooden canoes without any of the tools that the Europeans had when they ventured into that part of the world. They simply memorized the layout of the stars and the ways the sky related to the ocean, and harbored instinct that may have been better than any navigational software on the market today.

The second part, "Practical No-Tech Navigation," tells the reader how to use the wind, swell, sun and stars to estimate position and hold a course, and discusses how sea breezes, clouds and certain seabirds can signify landfall and give the sailor some idea of how to approach. For example, did you know that a low cumulus cloud over the water can often be a sign that land is just over the horizon? Or that homing pigeons have magnetic elements in the areas above their beaks, and were used by some seafarers in the Indian Ocean as aids to land-finding? Lagan is a bit skeptical about the usefulness of homing pigeons for navigators, but he does mention that local knowledge of what birds inhabit what islands can be useful in helping local boaters find their way back into port. A frigate bird has a range of 70+ nautical miles offshore, while a white tern only has a range of about 30, so you'd be more likely to look to the tern as an indicator of nearby land. From a discussion of seabirds, the author jumps into a short section on airplanes, embracing the modern as well as the archaic. A plan losing altitude would indicate nearby land, right? Swells, sea breezes, wind patterns and the color of the water can all be used as navigational markers. And, of course, floating garbage (as repulsive as it sounds) will almost always indicate nearby land!

In the third part of the book, Lagan gets a little more technical with a discussion of dead reckoning, hand-made compasses (bringing to mind the boy scout survival skills that we should probably all know), improvised speed logs, and more. Then he tells us how to determine latitude without a GPS, by using a quadrant and the sun, and longitude using the sun, stars and planets. The final part is a brief section about survival navigation, outlining what you should have in a ditch bag if the worst happened and one had to abandon ship. Even though he doesn't say it, I think a copy of The Barefoot Navigator should be item #1 in the bag!

The Adlard Coles Book of Electronic Navigation, by Tim Bartlett, is the polar opposite of Lagan's book. It was published in 2005, and gives a broad overview of navigation using radar, char plotters, GPS, computers and autopilots (all of which are interfaced on many of today's yachts). The author is a former naval officer and Yachtmaster who worked as a yachting journalist through the nineties and was one of the first people to introduce small craft navigators to the capabilities of electronic navigation equipment. He currently runs instructor training courses in radar and electronic navigation.

In the first few pages, Bartlett dispels the notion that pure latitude and longitude are the end-all answer to finding one's position on the globe, which, it turns out, isn't round at all. Horizontal datums such as the standard WGS84 were created to compensate for the uneven surface of the earth, and all positions taken by a GPS are adjusted to fit the proper datum. Bartlett also gives a list of reasons why a GPS may give us a less-than-prefect reading, and discusses the new set of problems that arises with the new type of navigation.

One thing that I like about this book is that Bartlett doesn't assume that his reader is already an electronics genius. The third section is a basic overview on hardware, software and data, explaining terms and abbreviations from the simple like what an LCD screen is to the complex, such as a definition of the NMEA 0183 code—the standard code of electrical pulses that is used by marine instruments to communicate with each other. The next two chapters explain the GPS system and how to use a standard GPS. A chapter on chart plotters defines the terms ECDIS and ECS, and explains the differences between raster and vector charts in plain language with useful graphics. It also gives a basic tutorial on how to navigate using most chart plotters. Information on PC-based navigation systems is interspersed throughout the chapter on plotters, making the following chapter on PCs aboard easy to read. Echo sounders, logs, and radar are discussed in great detail, including how to navigate using radar bearings, something that is not discussed in many contemporary books on navigation.

The ultimate self-taught course in navigation, I think, would consist of these two books read back-to-back. Lagan's book gives the reader the common sense approach and a perspective that I think tends to be lost in modern navigation, while Bartlett's book is the perfect way to catch up with the times.