Compass Point

One thirty-second of the horizon, used for steering and bearings before degrees.

The compass card was divided not into degrees but into thirty-two points, each of eleven and a quarter degrees. Eight were the cardinals and their halves — north, north-east, east and so on — and the remaining twenty-four filled the gaps by a strict naming rule: between north and north-east sat north-north-east, and between that and north again sat north by east.

That gives every point a name, and reciting all thirty-two in order, clockwise from north, was called boxing the compass. It was the first thing an apprentice seaman learned and the last thing he was allowed to get wrong, because steering orders were given in points and a helmsman who could not name them could not obey them.

Points were further halved and quartered, producing 128 divisions of two degrees, forty-eight minutes and forty-five seconds each. In practice a quarter-point was about the finest a man at a tiller could hold, which is roughly the accuracy the whole system was built around — fine enough to steer by, coarse enough to call out across a deck in weather.

Degrees displaced points through the twentieth century as compasses, charts and gunnery all grew more precise than eleven and a quarter degrees could serve; the Royal Navy is usually said to have moved to the 360-degree notation in the 1920s, though points lingered in wind reporting and in ordinary speech long after. They survive there still: a thing two points off the starboard bow is twenty-two and a half degrees to the right of straight ahead.