Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 by Margaret E. Schotte is a piece of history that documents the methodological tools of sea navigation during the mid sixteenth century until the beginnings of the nineteenth century. The book touches on several different events that triggered a stark development that occurred during this time in this profession. Some of these include the development of the printing press, the development of the nautical expert, and the development of different nautical theories that saw the subsequent battle between sailors that believed in learning to sail from books in classrooms and those that believed in learning from hands on experience. She touches on print culture, the scientific revolution, and the histories of six different countries. I believe this to be a good contribution to the history of science and historical intellectual and methodological thought.
Margaret Schotte is an associate history professor at York University. She received her BA from Harvard University, her MA from the University of Toronto, and she has an MA and PhD in history from Princeton University. Her research interests include early modern science, book history, maritime history, and digital humanities. She has been published in a variety of journals, some ranging from intellectual history to cultural history, and she has had two book chapters published. Sailing School is her first published monograph and she is currently working on a project related to Sailing with the French: Labour, Trade, and Mobility in the Indian Ocean World. Sailing School has received the 2019 John Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History, the 2020 Leo Gershoy Award from the American Historical Association, and the 2021 LA&PS Dean’s Award for Distinction in Research https://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/mschotte/.
Chapter 1 of Sailing School starts the book by examining Amsterdam’s harbor in the seventeenth century. It goes over how new methods of teaching nautical skills were developing. With the invention of the printing press, teaching navigation by memory and hands on training was starting to be challenged by purely learning by theory in a classroom. Textbooks started to be developed bt teachers to illustrate their expertise. This chapter highlights the different areas of focus that different teachers would have, whether that be spending more time on astronomy, mathematics, or how to calculate tides.
Chapter 2 focused in on the mathematics of navigation and what was taught and who taught them. Navigators needed to be absolutely proficient in math and the next major development of calculating ship positions was trigonometry and logarithms. These mathematical tools helped sailors determine where their ships were in relation to other land masses. Some of the teachers of these techniques that are pointed out by Schotte include Denys, Dieppe, and Jean-Francois Doublet. Towards the end of the chapter the book documents how legislation stepped in to solidify the transition into theoretical classroom-based learning by requiring future navigators to take classes.
Chapter 3 turns to the state of naval navigation training in England. It explains how students were required to answer questions that were on the one hand theoretical, and other sets of questions that were very hands on. They would all have to face a panel of nautical experts before they could get their credentials. The chapter runs through a series of anecdotes of different experiences of young aspiring navigators and highlights the deficiencies and advantages of different curricula. It finally argues that it was the development of in classroom hands on learning that created a new space for developing mathematical minds.
Chapter 4 continues the ongoing debates of the optimum use of theory it nautical navigation training. It takes a look at different Dutch textbooks and curricula, comparing and contrasting them and their developments. It documents the classrooms that were contained by the small private schools that were used to educate these students. It outlines how they would use realistic word problems to improve their trigonometry skills and how teachers incorporated old, as well as new methods of teaching. It goes over the role that exams played in proving to the teachers that the students knew how to manage daily calculation problems.
Chapter 5 shows just how much of the nautical profession changed over the course of the eighteenth century. “Over the course of the eighteenth century a great deal had changed for sailors, including new instruments, revised techniques for solving classic problems, and updated institutions and forms of certification,” (Page 152). There were a variety of changes due to the changing political landscape of Europe at the time. Some of these involved the French and American revolutions, respectively.
Margaret Schotte’s pros are easily understandable, and her arguments appear to be quite clear. This does not seem to be a popular history, as I do not believe most average readers are interested in 18th century nautical history, however I could be mistaken. It seems that the audience is primarily for academics and historians interested in the history of thought and science. Schotte provides a robust understanding of the scientific developments at hand and lays them out in a way that is chronological and she provides anecdotes that detail the developments in a concrete way. She does a good job of documenting her sources throughout the book. Between her paragraphs of in-depth explanation, she provides images of textbooks and nautical sources. These may be in different languages than she is speaking in but they provide good accompaniments to her commentary. She provides the mathematical formulas used first hand by the students and teachers of sailing.
Overall, Sailing School can be classified as a history of science book. I would argue that it certainly has social, cultural, and political elements, but it is primarily a history of methodological progress. It documents the processes of learning and what it meant to be a navigational sailor and the other subjects are backdrops to these developments. It talks about the development of the role of mathematics, the evolution of the textbook, and the role of hands-on versus theoretical learning. I think it could also be argued that it may be an intellectual history, albeit in the pursuit of scientific progress. Sailing School is a solid contribution to the history of scientific development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
