It is well known that Mercator charts took a long time to become a common instrument in the nautical panoply of Early Modern pilots. Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) published his Ad Usum Navigatium—the earliest Mercator projection chart—in 1569, and Edward Wright (1561-1615) his Certain errors in Navigation—containing the relevant mathematical tools for constructing such charts—in 1599, but it was still almost two centuries before European Early Modern pilots decided that they were worth using. Cosmographers and mathematicians of the time blamed this decision on the conservatism and scientific illiteracy of the pilots, a representative case being that of the famous Royal Astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742). In the preface to his Atlas Maritimus et Commercialis (1728) one can read:
It is well known that many of our sailors, and some that would be accounted artists are at this day obstinate in the use of the Plain Chart […]. And many of our masters that teach navigation teach what they call plain sailing (and many times that only) to such as are designed to take charge of ships […]. And this they do for no other reason but because they think they can measure distances thereon by a scale of equal parts, rejecting the truly Nautical Chart, commonly called Mercator, because one single scale cannot be fitted to all its parts.
Historians of navigation and nautical science have echoed such view on this issue until our days. The pilots’ decisions on which charts to use, however, have nothing to do with any kind of “conservatism” or “scientific obscurantism”, but with more complex particularities of their epistemological reality. Stay tuned for more news on this subject soon! [José María Moreno Madrid]
