The history of navigation and nautical science in early modern Europe has been written mainly by listening to the voice of cosmographers, mathematicians, and other like-minded scholars—hereinafter I group them under the denomination of “cosmographers”. Their scientific perspective on how navigation should be performed was assumed to be “the right one”, and thus obediently followed by every worthy pilot of the time.
However, the sources reveal that most of the early modern pilots used to ignore or reject many of the proposals made by their contemporary cosmographers. There were, therefore, two clearly dissenting voices on how navigation should be practiced in the early modern period. Although nautical historians have long agreed on this, they have only taken seriously the cosmographers’ reasons for trying to impose their view on navigation on the pilots.
As far as the pilots’ view was concerned, rather than really trying to understand it, they have settled for much more simplistic interpretations from both a historical and epistemological point of view. At best, they argued that pilots perverted the cosmographers’ nautical theories by the way they put them into practice—a major oversimplification of the real issue. At worst, they simply branded the pilots as “ignorant”, “conservative” people, anchored in “scientific obscurantism”.
The narrative that has emerged from this approach is laden with presentist and deterministic overtones. In it, pilots seem to have no agency. Their role appears to be limited to the passive assimilation of scientific “discoveries” that they were desperately waiting for to improve their “rustic” nautical practices.
Now… if you are interested in the other side of this story, and in what the pilots’ practice was really about, watch out for next week’s post! [José María Moreno Madrid]
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