Sailing School: Q&A with Author Margaret Schotte

What made you want to write Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800?

I wanted to combat two assumptions: one, that sailors were not capable of doing mathematics, and two, that math textbooks are not interesting! Before becoming a historian, I worked in the antiquarian book field, and I was drawn to the brief prefaces of small technical books; that was where you could actually hear the voices of the authors—and they were usually fairly opinionated entrepreneurs. There are so many of these navigation textbooks produced throughout the early modern period, and they have not been looked at in a comparative perspective, so I set out to do that. With my book history background, it just did not seem logical that hundreds and hundreds of books were being produced only for elite armchair navigators—and my research has debunked that assumption. I have found lots of average sailors carrying out fairly sophisticated math, marking up their copies and producing elaborate manuscripts, and still more opinionated teacher-author-entrepreneurs.

What sets your book apart from others in the field?

No one has taken such a long perspective, or a comparative one. Nor have other people looked for actual classroom evidence of how sailors learned—but there was a huge amount waiting to be found.

Whereas many maritime histories emphasize difference among navies and sailors in the name of patriotism, this book shows how similar they were. By focusing on three countries over two centuries, we get a much richer picture of how these standard training systems developed—and how they gradually changed in response to local expertise, economic and political situations. It is striking how many classrooms in different countries used the same techniques, even down to the exact textbook or methods of recording observations. I think it is fascinating to trace how these technical practices cross borders; often it happened anonymously on board ship, but books, authors, and publishers were another important avenue. 

Image: Petrus Plancius Instructing Students in the Science of Navigation, early 17th century, by David Vinckboons

Does Sailing School debunk any widely believed myths or misunderstandings?

Sailors should be considered scientists! The long-standing stereotype of the drunken sailor doesn’t hold water here (although I do find repeated complaints against certain teachers!). I have found many meticulous seamen who decorated their manuscripts with beautiful sketches of ships, flags, compass roses, as well as snippets of poetry and music, and records of debts and bets. Some were good at math, some were terrible (and again, we could say the same of the textbook authors) but a large number seem to have been interested in innovative techniques and instruments. This is an important step towards including navigators in the Scientific Revolution—they were not clueless greenhorns or crotchety old tars. Many of them sought out teachers and paid for lessons with the aim of improving their careers. They offered advice and feedback to authorities, and invented tools to simplify their jobs. Rather than the Scientific Revolution being elite and theoretical, here we have an example of technical knowledge flowing up from practitioners, getting codified in print, and then circulating among other practitioners, continuing to oscillate between high and low science. It does not make sense to divide early modern science into ‘theory’ and ‘practice’; we can see that from the early 16^th century these actors were having very sophisticated debates about how to balance those aspects, ultimately producing a hybrid applied science. 

Did you find any particularly interesting surprises while researching Sailing School?

A: Many of these navigation teachers tried to make their lessons memorable, even fun. They had their students produce quirky diagrams of anchors and castles, they marched them to the beach to make observations, they rewarded them with swords when they passed their exams. Of course, many of them still had a good deal of trouble convincing their students to come to class and pay attention!

What do you think is the single most important fact revealed in your book and what makes it significant?

Print changed sailing. Readers might be surprised that printing had such an impact on early modern sailors and their daily practice—but as ships started crossing the open ocean, navigation grew substantially more complicated. In order to learn the new techniques of celestial navigation (looking to heavens rather than the shore to figure out where you were), sailors needed to become familiar with a new set of concepts: definitions of the pole and the equator, instructions on how to use new instruments, basic arithmetic. Experts started writing these down in textbooks in the early 16^th century—and within one hundred years, there was a critical shift in the practice of sailing. Navigators needed to be literate and numerate. Print made this new type of sailing possible, but it also changed the definition of expertise. It was no longer a question of gaining experience over many years, and honing one’s observational skills; instead, 17^th-century experts had to be good at calculating. This is ultimately a story about the many tricks and strategies that teachers and authors used to help spread a fairly dense set of technical practices throughout an unexpected sector of society. The message hasn’t changed in four centuries: doing your homework diligently can carry you a long way towards becoming an expert! 

Margaret E. Schotte is an assistant professor of history at York University. She is the author of Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800.