The Instruments of Heaven and Sea - Where History Meets Heartbreak

When I was writing one of the chapters in my book Wizard of Madeira, I knew I wanted to ground my narrator’s emotional storm in something tangible, something real. The antique navigation instruments that appear throughout the chapter aren’t just literary devices; they’re artifacts of human ingenuity, born from our desperate need to know where we are when everything around us seems endless and unknowable.

The Quadrant: Measuring What Cannot Be Held

The brass quadrant in my chapter finds its echo in instruments like the Beringer Solar Quadrant from 1736. Look at this exquisite piece: a cubical sundial mounted on a turned wooden base, its faces covered in intricate engravings, Roman numerals marking time’s passage, and a delicate plumb line hanging like a thread of certainty in an uncertain world.

David Beringer of Hapsburg created this instrument to determine local solar time, but quadrants served a parallel purpose at sea. Maritime quadrants (simpler than Beringer’s ornate solar version) allowed sailors to measure the angle of the sun or North Star above the horizon. With this single measurement, a captain could calculate his latitude, his position north or south on the vast, featureless ocean.

In my chapter, the narrator lifts the quadrant to his eye and finds not just astronomical data but memory: “when I press the instrument to my cheek, I feel her hand instead.” The quadrant gives numbers, cold and precise. It cannot measure loss.

The Compass: The Miracle of Constancy

The magnetic compass was perhaps the most revolutionary navigation tool ever created. A magnetized needle, touched by lodestone, trembling at first, then pointing steadily north. Always north. Unlike the quadrant which required clear skies, the compass worked in fog, in storm, in darkness.

For my narrator, this constancy becomes almost cruel. The compass never wavers, but love did. “The Compass speaks of certainty,” he reflects. “Love never did.” Here was an instrument more faithful than the human heart, an iron needle more reliable than desire.

The compass entered European maritime use around the 12th century, likely borrowed from Chinese innovations. By the Age of Discovery, when Portuguese sailors were mapping the Atlantic around Madeira, the compass had become indispensable. It represented humanity’s first tool for direction-finding that didn’t depend on visible celestial bodies.

The Portolan: Maps of Wind and Memory

Portolan charts were the sailors’ collective memory made visible. These weren’t theoretical maps drawn by scholars; they were practical documents created by seafarers for seafarers. Covered in rhumb lines radiating from compass roses, they showed how winds blew, where currents ran, where safe harbors waited.

The earliest surviving portolan charts date to the late 13th century, but they likely existed earlier. They were drawn on vellum or parchment, painted with incredible detail, names of ports written perpendicular to the coastlines. They were tools of survival.

In my chapter, the narrator traces these lines “in the lantern light, and I remember tracing the line of her shoulder, the curve of her neck.” The portolan shows where you may go, but not why you go there. It cannot tell you if the harbor you seek will welcome or turn you away.

The Astrolabe: Touching the Eternal

“The Astrolabe is the most wondrous of all,” my narrator declares, and history bears this out. These brass instruments, carved with circles and stars, were models of the heavens themselves. A mariner’s astrolabe (simpler than the planispheric astrolabes used by astronomers) allowed sailors to measure a star’s altitude above the horizon with remarkable precision.

The astrolabe combined mathematics, astronomy, and craftsmanship. To use one was to hold a piece of the cosmos in your hands, to bind heaven and earth through geometry. Portuguese navigators particularly favored them during their explorations of the African coast and Atlantic islands like Madeira in the 15th and 16th centuries.

For my heartbroken sailor, the astrolabe becomes almost sacred: “It is both science and prayer, a way to bind heaven and earth.” Yet even this celestial calculator cannot calculate his way out of grief. “The stars are infinite,” he realizes. “My heart is not.”

Why These Instruments Matter to the Story

I chose these four instruments deliberately. Each represents a different kind of knowing:

• The quadrant measures position (where am I?)

• The compass indicates direction (where am I going?)

• The portolan provides accumulated wisdom (what did others learn?)

• The astrolabe connects earth to cosmos (how do I fit into the larger pattern?)

Together, they’re meant to save a sailor’s life. They bring order to chaos, knowledge to ignorance, safety to peril. And yet, as my narrator discovers night after night off the coast of Madeira, they cannot navigate the storms of the heart.

This is the central irony of the chapter: we develop exquisite tools to master the external world (the black Atlantic, the star-scattered sky) while remaining helpless before our internal tempests. The same man who can calculate his latitude to within a few miles cannot find his way through grief.

The Beauty of Obsolescence

These instruments are obsolete now, replaced by GPS satellites and digital charts. But there’s something profound about their physicality, their brass and wood and vellum reality. They required skill, patience, clear skies, and steady hands. They could fail. They demanded that the navigator be present, attentive, engaged with both sky and sea.

When I imagine my narrator alone on deck, surrounded by these tools, I see a man trying to hold onto something solid in a dissolving world. The instruments don’t lie. The sea lies. The heart lies most of all. But brass and iron, parchment and star, they are faithful.

That Beringer quadrant from 1736, with its beautiful engravings and precise gnomon casting shadows to mark time, it’s a perfect metaphor. We create elaborate instruments to measure the immeasurable: time, distance, position, love. And sometimes, the instrument itself becomes the thing we cling to, not for the data it provides, but for the order it represents.

In the end, my narrator continues his voyage, guided by dead hands that drew the portolan lines, by stars that know nothing of human sorrow, by a compass needle that points north with perfect indifference. The instruments show him where he stands, though they cannot tell him who he is without her.

And perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps knowing where you are is the first step to finding your way home, even when home itself has vanished.