Walking down the steps here in Seattle today with the easterly winds rushing up from the Sound brought to mind thoughts of the roaring forties, furious fifties and the screaming sixties. If you have a sailing tradition in your family then you’ve already identified these as names of the prevailing winds that, in the days when long distance journeys involved masts & canvas, dictated how, when and where trade and travel could happen. For the most part, winds between latitude 40 North (Philadelphia, Athens, Beijing) and 40 South (Wellington, Stanley, Concepcion) blow to the west due to the effects of the polar vortices. Head outside this range and you’ll find the winds blowing primarily to the east, and if you limit your travels to the southern latitudes you’ll find the windspeed increasingly aerobic. The cause of this makes perfect sense if you look at a globe; unlike the northern hemisphere the southern latitudes have less land mass to disrupt the flow, thus the further south the stronger the wind.

There are some mornings where the energy around traveling seems particularly challenging, whether it’s traffic on I-5, congestion on the Burke Gilman or a “crewing issue” on board a ferry boat. Whilst you’re getting frustrated, perhaps there’s a chance that you should be grateful for the size of your obstacles, after all there’s very little probability that you’ll wind up…ahem…dead on your commute. Not so for the folks working the Clipper Route in the 1800s. Their “commute” typically started by heading south out of a port in Western Europe on a voyage of little adventure and great riches, though in retrospect those adjectives were oft swapped. Hearkening back to the meteorological lesson of paragraph one, clippers proceeded west on the prevailing winds into the Atlantic heading generally southwest before making the southern turn at the Saint Peter & Paul Rocks and pursuing a more southerly course down past the eastern “horn” of South America. Depending on the time of year, at about 40 days into the voyage the clipper would hit the roaring forties and start heading east at a rapid clip such that they’d be passing south of the Cape of Good Hope about ten days later.

Cape Hope is, contrary to most expectations, not the southernmost tip of Africa and is marked with a wildlife preserve, really nasty weather and a lot of wrecked ships. Ships passing through latitude 36 S frequently encountered high winds and navigational hazards such as, what’s the technical term, ah yes, big rocks. Controlled by the Portuguese, the Dutch, French and English – much to the dismay of the native Khoikhoi peoples – formal control was ceded to the Union of South Africa in 1910, and has remained with the now Republic of South Africa ever since. Cape Horn is also the home port of the mythical Flying Dutchman, a Dutch man-of-war mythically lost off the cape and with a crew of sinners, now doomed to sail the seven seas forevermore with no hope of making port. This is, though, one tourist attraction best left unseen as the sight of it is considered a portent of doom for all involved. Side note: yes, this is the source of Disney and Spongebob’s Davy Jones pirate attraction, deep sigh.

Having rounded the Cape, yon clipper skipper would proceed Northeast or East depending on the cargo and the port(s) of call. Popular destinations were the East Indies and Australia, with Sydney being a frequent destination. In context, the speeds here can be considered breathtaking for their day: Cutty Sark did the Plymouth-Sydney run of 13,750 miles in 72 days, and Thermopylae made the 13,150 mile run to Melbourne in 61 days. Yes, yes, I know the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, but rumors abound that it was faked on a scale akin to Capricorn One. Time to head home! Set a course due East…err, what?

Yes, Dorothy, the fastest way home is to continue East dipping as far South into the furious fifties as your skipper’s nerve and the iceberg population would allow. Currents and winds strengthened to the South, and as long as your ship didn’t pull a Titanic you could count on seeing your favorite rocking chair in Plymouth some 14,750 miles and 100 days later. The Cutty Sark did it in 84 days and Thermopylae in 77 days, but the greyhound of the group was Lightning that did the slightly longer journey to Liverpool in a scant 65 days. All of these ships did, though, take advantage of the “easy route” by passing Cape Horn at 56 S from West to East.

Cape Horn is still regarded as the test of any sailor’s mettle and features prominently in most modern yachting challenges. And by yachting I’m not referring to the nonsensical legal battles surrounding the now-silly America’s Cup, I’m talking about the handful of intrepid adventurers (aka “the lunatics”) setting sail in carbon fibre and kevlar replicas of a small skiff and channeling their inner Magellan. These adventurers more typically take the more difficult East to West passage, commonly referred to as the “Everest of sailing” and in doing so commonly confront Easterly winds in excess of 75 mph and rogue waves up to 100 ft in height. Yowza. No wonder the phrase “Rounding the Horn and heading for home” has entered our lexicon, once you’ve passed the Horn there’s really nothing else left that’s gonna scare you.

In shorthand, the clipper route is best summarized as: head West to the rocks, turn South until it gets breezy, head East and look for Hope on the port side. Watch out for the guys drinking Fosters and then left at the Horn before the long run home.

Here we go again, a Latin byline for this month’s installment of calendar trivia. And here I left my Second Edition of the Oxford Libro Sermonum at home! As a side note, if you’re doing some post holiday shopping the soon-to-be-issued two-volume hardcover set of the classic Oxford Latin Dictionary weighs in with 40,000 primary words and 100,000 derivations (headwords and senses if you’re a purist) at the bargain-basement price of $300 would make your Sunday school magister very proud.

Moving along, Dennis the Small (or Little or Short, take your pick) was a Scythian monk residing in Tomis, the major city of Scythia Minor located on the coast of the Black Sea in what we would now refer to as part of Romania. Dionysius did not, though, have to suffer through the swarms of overweight Russian beachgoers wearing too little clothing and drinking too much vodka, that memorable vision was saved for our modern era and, for those of us who have seen it, remains as a searing image in some ways formative in our childhoods….alas. Dionysius lived from AD 470 to AD 544 and is most remembered for having invented the AD that notates even his years of existence. Anno Domini, as we’ve covered at great length, translates as “In the Year of the Lord” and was the replacement for the then-conventional anno Diocletiani – yes, another aD – which set its epoch as the year the Roman Emperor Diocletian assumed power. You have to admire the chutzpah, as our Hebrew-speaking friends would say, of restarting the calendar on one’s inauguration date, Holy Roman Emperor indeed! Anno Diocletiani referencing quickly passed into the world of historical archives with the exception of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria who stubbornly stick with its usage even though it means they have very few options for desktop calendars – next year is aD 2296, for example.

If any of this information thus far has struck you as interesting then you’ll be fascinated to learn that there were other year-counting approaches in use. Ab urbe condita (AUC) had its epoch as the year of the founding of Rome, and anno Mundi started with the biblical Creation of the world. Sadly the latter suffered in that there were different epochs depending on which version of the Bible one chose: 5500 BC if you were a Greek Septuagint believer, 4000 BC if the Hebrew Masoretic text was your preference. If you’re a dating purist – I know, I know – or just someone who likes fully-qualified domain names then you know that the official abbreviation is ADNIC (Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi) and, because it sources from Latin the convention is to place the AD before the year, ie AD 2012, as opposed to the non-Latin Before Christ and thus 112 BC. If you’re particularly zealous then you could, I suppose, shift to ACN 112 with the recognition that ante Christum natum does have a certain flair to it. The politically correct CE and BCE are particularly noxious to me so we’ll ignore those and leave their usage to people with little sense of tradition or history!

Technically speaking, Dionysius wasn’t originally chartered with changing the frame of reference for everyone’s calendars, rather his task was to assemble the Computus for upcoming Easter dates on behalf of Pope John I starting with what became the year AD 525. Careful readers already know that while Hallmark defines Easter as landing on the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon (first full moon after the vernal equinox), the Catholic Church uses a theoretical model known as the Ecclesiastical Full Moon instead which would be fine if, for example, 19 tropical years had the same duration as 235 synodal months. Sparing you the details, it doesn’t, but heck if it weren’t for Galileo the Christian faith tradition would still hold that the Sun orbits the Earth so what’s 235 vs. 234.997 amongst friends!

In the course of his work Dionysius also happened upon another major milestone and became the first medieval Latin writer to make use of a true zero through the Latin nulla. This sort of makes sense because carving I’s, V’s and X’s is pretty straightforward, but can you imagine having to carve a 0? The first true zero symbol emerged in India around AD 500, and in AD 880 the Persian scientist al-Khwarizmi first published the Hindu-Arabic numeral system which remains in use to this date. Not so fast, though, in Europe one had to wait for the Latin translation first published in the 12th century. That’s right, until the 12th century it was impossible to be a number 0 in Europe. Oh how times have changed.

Zeroes seem like the kind of thing that a Greek philosopher would have discovered centuries earlier, but there progress ground to a halt as they were stumped by the proposition “how can nothing be something?” This same logic is, apparently, in use by their modern-day government budgeting offices but really in its inverse form, “if we have nothing then that’s something.”

Wrapping things up, and without even getting to my original topic which was that Jesus Christ’s year of birth turns out to be 4 BC (oops!), I leave you with a brief party trick for your New Year’s Eve festivities. If you were counting down the big crystal ball at the close of 1 BC, would the soon-to-illuminate year be 0 BC or AD 0? Buzz. Wrong answer, there was no year 0 in either lexicon, 0 hadn’t yet been invented. Second, at the time it would have been 3760 AM or 753 AUC as BC, AD and aD references had yet to be invented. Duh!

Regardless of snow, sleet, hail, wind, vacation, late flights, traffic jams, long lines at the mall or even the upcoming end of the world (thank you Mayan long count) please be have a very Happy New Year and celebrate AD 2012, aD 2296, AM 5772 or AUC 2765 (take your pick).