Abstract
‘Nauigation is not the leaste, but one of the principall matters to be knowne . . .’, wrote William Bourne in his A Regiment for the Sea at the end of the 16th century. 1 From ancient times young men must have learned the art of navigation from experienced navigators in practise. As navigation went from purely coastal to wide-open ocean crossings during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, new methods and instruments developed, resulting in an increase of the amount of knowledge required to become a good navigator. As a result, it no longer sufficed to train these young men on board only; other ways of learning were required.
How these navigators-to-be came to be educated in this art of navigation in early modern times is the topic of Margaret E. Schotte’s Sailing School. Schotte, who has Dutch-Canadian roots and is professor of history at York University in Toronto, Canada, takes the reader through early modern times to show how the art of navigation was taught in the Iberian Peninsula, the Netherlands, France and England. She does so in a prologue and five chapters, before rounding off with an epilogue, all of which are handsomely blue linen bound with a colour dust wrapper.
As one may expect, the prologue starts with the Iberian ventures into the New World in the 15th century and the establishment of the Casa de Contratación, a formal school for maritime education, in Spain in the early 16th century. The prologue ends with the foundation of similar institutes throughout Europe in the early 17th century.
In the following five chapters Schotte takes us along five situations, in as many places and periods. Chapter 1 discusses the situation, skills and methods in Amsterdam around 1600, both for coastal and open-ocean navigation. Chapter 2 considers the introduction of mathematics in navigation in 17th century France: the doctrine of triangles (trigonometry) and logarithms (Napier’s Bones). Mathematical navigation became increasingly important, but, to speak with Nicholas Lefèvre de Méricourt, ‘experience was crucial [. . .as. . .] celestial navigation was ineffective in the shallow waters’ (p. 86). The following chapter discusses Trinity House and the Royal Mathematical School in England at the end of the 17th century. At this time navigation developed from an astronomy-related profession to a more mathematical one. In the fourth chapter Schotte returns to the Netherlands around the start of the 18th century, discussing Dutch nautical textbooks and the famous Dutch manuscript Schatkamers (treasuries), named after a few famous Dutch works that were (in part) diligently copied and at times extended with classroom knowledge. These first four chapters, filled with a wealth of information, are written in a usual academic manner, which is quite dry, but that is fine for a work like this. But the fifth chapter offers a welcome change as Schotte takes us on board the vessel Guardian with Lieutenant Riou in the Southern Indian Ocean around 1789. Although still academic, this chapter reads like a thriller with Riou and the vessel as protagonists. After initially having been reported lost at sea, the vessel finally makes it way back to safe harbour and Schotte explains how Riou’s nautical education contributed to its remarkable survival. In the epilogue Schotte summarizes the situation around 1800.
Were one ever to consider launching an early modern nautical school, Sailing School would serve perfectly as a guide for how to do so. Schotte describes in great detail how nautical education was done and how it changed over the years. Although each chapter is dedicated to a certain situation in time and geographical location, she regularly veers off to a few decades earlier or later and different locations to elucidate the situation under discussion. There is so much material in her work that I cannot imagine any significant omissions, even though I am not an expert on this topic. We might hope that one day someone will write the sequel to Schotte’s book and show us how nautical education continued from 1800 to the present, in a similarly excellent manner.