Outback2003

The Unholy Spies of Captain Beadell

I endured a dreadful ecommerce experience today to order an (admittedly cheap-cheap-cheapo) sextant and bubble level.

The idea was that we could try our hand at the sort of Outback navigation science that Len Beadell used back in the 1950's and 1960's as he built most of the major roads in the Outback.

Due to a ridiculous heap of crap superstition and a Chinese wife who believes this garbage, I've been forebidden to mountain bike in the jungle this and the following weekend. (And there is no symmetry to this lunacy, either...)

So I'm sitting here this evening and in between bouts of brooding and grumbling I thought about other things to keep me busy. It seems like a good time to bring up an old project that I had sort of started, but never completed. The idea becomes quite apropos considering our Outback trip.

Several years ago I read Trespassers on the Roof of the World, by Peter Hopkirk. It details the astonishing 19th century secret survey of Tibet by Indians trained by their British spymasters. The entire book is astonishing -- these guys were as hard-core as any modern day Navy SEAL. What is most germane to our trip is the methods they employed to surreptitiously survey Tibet.

First they were trained by endless practice to take a pace which, whether they walked uphill, downhill or on the level, always remained the same - thirty-three inches in the case of Nain Singh. Next they learned how to keep an exact count of the number of such paces they took in a day, or between any two landmarks. This was done with the aid of a Buddhist rosary, which as we have noted normally comprises one hundred and eight beads. Eight of these were removed, leaving a mathematically convenient one hundred, but not a sufficient reduction to be noticeable. At every hundredth pace a bead was slipped. Each complete circuit of the rosary, therefore, represented ten thousand paces - five miles in the case of Nain Singh, who covered a mile in two thousand paces. Because the Buddhist rosary has attached to it two short secondary strings, each of ten smaller beads, these were used for recording every completed circuit of the rosary.

When I was in China early this year, I bought a set of prayer beads expressly for the purpose of making a "secret" pacing counter. I never got around to amputating eight beads, or to ever even measuring my paces.

However, the Outback seems like a great place to play at this -- figuring out pace settings, practice of dead reckoning, etc. And, like our Len Beadell play, we can use the GPS to determine how accurate (or fucked up) we are.

This weekend I'll cut up the prayer beads into a proper 100-bead chain. Does someone want to bring a thermometer to we can make guesses of the altitude? (Hmmm. maybe this is hard...most thermometers do not get up to boiling-water temperature. The idea is to calculate altitude from boiling water, where boiling_point = f(altitude).)

Posted by Nils Blutig at July 26, 2003 09:59 PM | TrackBack