[reidacdc]

I recently read what you might call an "apprecation" of the Sextant, the navigational instrument -- it was a mix of a travelogue of the author's trip across the Atlantic, a narrative history of nautical navigation, and a technical exploration of the sextant itself.

The relevance here is the history of navigation -- finding, losing, re-finding, and re-naming islands happened a lot, especially in the south Pacific. Nice reminder that the growth of knowledge isn't always linear.

The book is "Sextant: A Voyage Guided by the Stars and the Men who Mapped the World's Oceans", by David Barrie.