Margaret Schotte received her BA in history from Harvard, an MA from the University of Toronto, and her PhD from Princeton. “Sailing School” is her first book, and it builds upon the topical foundation of her publication history, which concerns the systemization of nautical logbook-keeping processes, as well as a study of data-gathering practices by the Dutch East India Company (the “VOC”). Overall, her research focuses on processes of formal maritime knowledge formation during the Age of Discovery – a period when growing theoretical knowledge from mathematics and astronomy integrated steadily with centuries of “small navigation” seamanship grounded in tacit knowledge. The unprecedented demands of “large navigation” — wayfinding across vast distances on the open ocean, without the benefit of landmarks — drove inexorable systematization and professionalization of navigational techniques by all the major European naval powers over a period of three centuries. In Sailing School, Schotte chronicles the emergence of a dialogue between pure and applied science that persists to this day.
Schotte structures her book around five “schools” of maritime navigation, arranged in chronological order and framed as case studies. The prologue describes the formation of the Casa de la Contratacion, the “House of Trade”, in Seville, under the patronage of the Spanish crown, headed by a chair of cosmography. This school served as a state-sponsored template for its later northern European counterparts, and Schotte points out that the variations between these northern European players, in their respective implementations of the Spanish model, reveal the subtle influences on national-level navigational cultures. For example, she cites the importance of maritime trade and business arithmetic in England as a key factor in the eventual English emphasis on arithmetic over astronomy, and a Mediterranean safely traversable largely without recourse to theory as an explanation for the paucity of Italian contributions to the large-navigational literature. This revealed pattern of cultural evolution under competitive selection pressure is typical of Schotte’s ability to synthesize patterns across a truly vast trove of primary sources, drawn almost exclusively from maritime archives across Europe. The book features over fifty pages of endnotes and a forty-page bibliography, and this extraordinary compilation reflects both the author’s exhaustive efforts and maritime history’s remarkable legacy of documentation and preservation.
Chapter one chronicles a thriving commercial market for maritime reference material in Amsterdam, owing to high rates of literacy in the population, the involvement of a large cross-section of Dutch society in the growth of Dutch sea power, and the relatively high social status of sailors. Chapter two examines Dieppe, on the French channel coast, and the efforts of Guillaume Denys to introduce the powerful mathematical tools of trigonometry and tables of logarithms to standard navigational practice. Chapter three details three distinct class-oriented paths to navigational certification in Greenwich, England: a high-aptitude theoretical track for promising math students at the Royal Mathematical School, seasoned “small-navigators” who wished to upgrade their skills for larger vessels (not unlike modern airline pilots qualifying for multiple engines and instrument ratings), and sons of the nobility seeking commissions in the Royal Navy. Here Schotte cultivates a “you are there” atmosphere as she puts readers in the shoes of examinees, particularly those subject to curricula influenced heavily by mathematical and astronomical luminaries like Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley. She also makes great use of the legendarily prolific output of Samuel Pepys, the administrator of the Royal Navy. The fourth chapter returns to the Netherlands and depicts the emergence of the modern test preparation industry — a network of private educators selling practice tests and cramming regimens for the exacting VOC navigational certification process, almost 250 years before SATs, ACTs, LSATs, GREs, GMATs, and MCATs.
The book culminates with chapter five’s harrowing tale of Lieutenant Edward Riou’s experience in the crucible of an iceberg collision, causing a hull breach and a broken rudder, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope en route to New South Wales. Riou guided his ship Guardian and much of the crew to safety at Table Bay in South Africa through two months of dogged navigation and extreme privation across the vast Southern Ocean. Early in his career, Riou had served in Captain James Cook’s fleet on Cook’s third and final voyage of discovery. The story of the Guardian brings together all the techniques Schotte describes, as Riou draws upon every ounce of his theoretical training and practical experience to accomplish the impossible.
Sailing School’s most penetrating insights are twofold and of profound import for modern economic and policy debates regarding the nature of scientific and technological development, as well as concerns about human skill growth and maintenance in a world of increasing automation and complexity. First, that there was no oversimplified narrative of one-way navigational progress from theory to application. Schotte writes, “no consensus will emerge; the pendulum of opinion will continue to swing between shipboard practice and classroom study. . .[there is] no straightforward trajectory from traditional to scientific sailing or from memory to mathematics.” Second, that new theories and technologies, far from outright superseding human capability, require ever-more-sophisticated modes of human-machine collaboration. For parents and teachers concerned that their children and students cannot navigate without Google Maps or remember once-hallowed facts now available on-demand from Wikipedia or ChatGPT, Schotte offers some comfort: “We find this is not a teleological story of inexorable mathematization, where traditional techniques were sloughed aside to make room for rational modernity, One of the most traditional hallmarks of the professional navigator maintained its paramount importance: his memory. There was simply a sea change in the nature of what he was expected to memorize. Instead of geographic and calendrical details, which were increasingly easy to look up in reference works (especially as tables proliferated), the eighteenth-century navigator had to master mathematical calculations and remember formulas — and comprehend them as well. Yet, even when offered a panoply of labor-saving inventions, he still continued to use a range of older techniques”.
Reading Sailing School, one is reminded of the primary finding in the loss of an Air France flight over the south Atlantic between Buenos Aires and Paris: when foul weather caused automation systems to fail, the pilots proved incapable of snapping out of their state of decreased vigilance and simply flying the airplane, as they were once capable of doing. Arguably, the lessons of Edward Riou’s nuts-and-bolts training and experience had been forgotten. Schotte’s work provides a fascinating window into the earliest efforts to extend human cognitive and sensory capabilities with technology.
