East-Southeast

East-southeast is a bearing of 112.5 degrees, midway between east and southeast. Among the more interesting things that can be said about the secondary points is how the horizon was divided before compasses. Polynesian navigators used a star compass, dividing the horizon by the rising and setting points of named stars, a system with far more than thirty-two divisions and one that requires no instrument; the rising points of the same stars are fixed for a given latitude, so a navigator who has memorised them can hold a course through the night.

Arab navigators of the Indian Ocean used a comparable system of thirty-two star risings and settings, the khanat, recorded in the fifteenth-century sailing directions of Ahmad ibn Majid. Both are divisions of the horizon quite independent of the European compass rose, and both are more sophisticated than the point system that replaced them.

East-southeast, at 112.5 degrees, sits on the boundary between the mountain Yi, a heavenly stem lying just south of due east, and the mountain Chen, the branch of the dragon.

On the luopan, the Chinese geomantic compass, the horizon carries twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees rather than the sixteen or thirty-two points of the European rose. The ring interleaves twelve earthly branches with eight heavenly stems and the four corner trigrams, and the result is that the two systems coincide only at the four cardinals and the four intercardinal corners.

The dragon arc has a particular reputation in the compass schools, since Chen is one of the four branches counted as a tomb or storehouse position in the cycle, the point at which a phase is gathered and put away rather than active. It is also the double hour from seven to nine in the morning and, in the older reckoning, the season of late spring.

The wider point is worth stating plainly, because tables of correspondence circulate that pair European sixteen-point bearings with named Chinese mountains as though they matched. They do not. Twenty-four fifteen-degree arcs and sixteen 22.5-degree arcs share eight boundaries and no interiors, so every such pairing beyond the eight principal directions is an approximation at best. Where an accurate bearing matters, the tradition being used has to supply its own division of the horizon.