Point to Point Navigation

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“Point to Point Navigation”: In World War Two I served as first mate of an army freight-supply ship based in the Aleutian Islands, where the weather was so bad that we seldom saw the sun much less moon and stars; this made it nearly impossible to use the compass to chart a course. Instead, we relied on maps where we had memorized various points or landmarks as guides, a process known as “point to point navigation,” a process with obvious dangers (we had no radar). As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.