Nautical Rutters and the Notion of a Global Earth in Early Modern Europe

In 1596, Jan Huygen van Linschoten published within his Itinerario, a section named the Reys-gheschrift. It contained the first published compilation of nautical rutters comprising the navigation made on those days in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Van Linschoten’s goal in organizing all these nautical rutters was to try to simplify as much as he could the technical information of rutters to mariners (shallows, tides, nautical dangers, geographical signs and descriptions of several places). Meanwhile, he attempted to make available to the Dutch audience sixty-three Portuguese and four Spanish nautical rutters, detailing the main sailing routes that both Iberian Crowns always tried to keep secret from their maritime rivals. For the Indian Ocean section, this comprised rutters detailing the Portuguese India Run navigation and the technical details of the routes between the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian subcontinent, as well as routes from India to Sri Lanka, Siam and Malacca. Regarding the Pacific Ocean, Van Linschoten printed rutters on the navigation to China and Japan, and also recent nautical routes such as the Manila Galleon’s route and a pioneering route that sailed directly from Macau to Mexico, first tested in the 1580s. In the Atlantic Ocean section, Van Linschoten published rutters detailing navigation to the Caribbean and Brazilian coasts, to Angola and the Strait of Magellan. These three sections were supplemented by a more technical one in which a regiment of the nautical compass in the voyage between Lisbon and Goa, a list of latitude of ports worldwide and a quick set of questions and answers for sailors were also printed.

But who aided Van Linschoten in this titanic and encyclopaedic task? What were the original sources he used? Did he introduce changes to them? These are some of the questions I attempted to answer in my recent article Jan Huygen van Linschoten and the Reys-gheschrift: Updating Iberian Science for Dutch Expansion. The Reys-gheschrift impacted the Dutch maritime expansion, but also the French and English ones (due to several 17th century translations). However, Van Linschoten’s publication played also a role in fuelling an idea already being developed through the 16th century: humans lived in a Global Earth that could all be known by the technical mastery of the rutters for voyages into the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. One of the bases for this idea was precisely the nautical rutters that Van Linschoten published, which through their rich information, not only ensured a safe navigation and successful maritime expansion to the Dutch, the English and the French in the 17th century, but also made a contribution to the development of the so-called Scientific Revolution. [Nuno Vila-Santa]