It's a great story, and they did amazing things with the most basic tools, but they had the luxury of time - they were doing ~7kts, and had weeks to do it, and all nice visual clues that we use too, some of anyway, not all of which are terribly useful in aviation. They had multi-crew to manage the workload. If they got a bit lost they had time to fix it. You don't hear from the ones that didn't make it though ... Survivor bias again.
Harold Gatty has an amazing story too, but .. they were _lucky_ and a lot didn't make it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Gatty
Prince of Navigators is a good telling of his tale.
Seriously, while we learn DR and 1:60 and all that stuff, and look at the charts (electronic, not paper), with a charter pilot hat on, instead of a XC instructor hat, I'm using AvPlan and a Garmin 430. When we get a "you're going to XXXX in YY minutes", you have time to fuel up and bang the plan into AvPlan*, print out the flight log and relevant DAP/ERSA/Country guide pages, look at the satellite pics of the aerodrome if it's unfamiliar, and go. In flight I am managing passengers, fuel and weather, and keeping my iPad cool ?
* - NOTAMs, weather etc from AvPlan, brilliant. I have a backup iPad in the plane as per our ops manual, and a phone with it on it too.