At night, early travellers used the stars to steer their journeys. In the Northern Hemisphere, the North Star proved a stable marker since the Earth’s northern axis points to the North Celestial Pole. The North Star, Polaris, is the star currently closest to the North Celestial Pole (due to the fact that the earth wobbles as it rotates on its axis, its axis has pointed to different stars over the centuries - for example, in 3000 BCE, the North Star was Thuban, not Polaris). As the earth rotates on its axis, the stars in the sky appear to move in a circle because their positions are fixed relative to that of the Earth. Conversely, the North Star remains in one spot in the Northern Hemisphere sky at all times with all the other stars seemingly rotating around it. The farther north one travelled in the Northern Hemisphere, the higher the North Star appeared in the sky. The farther south one travelled in the Northern Hemisphere, the lower the star appeared in the sky.
Before the invention of the “sextant” (a navigation instrument that measures the angular distance between two visible objects - an astronomical object, such as a star, and the horizon), early travellers used a hand over hand technique to determine the height of the North Star above the horizon. As the height of the North Star above the horizon was reflection of latitude (ex. 1 fist = approx 10 degrees), travelers could use the star to estimate their location.