That’s All Folks—Summing Up and Reflecting on our Blogging Stint

Over the past six years, we published a total of 128 posts here, plus 59 in our sister Arabic Science and Philosophy blog. It was clear from the beginning that we needed, as part of our publication and outreach activities, some “light” counterpart to formal institutional publications. In view of the variety of options, multiplying at pace and always morphing into new media, we settled on a combination of media accounts (X/Twitter, Facebook) and these two blogs. The experience has been rewarding and educational on several fronts. Here are a few stats and reflections.

The top three posts by number of views are:

• The exotic “Canopus: Gentle Celestial Key” in the Arabic blog (346 views).
• The amusing “Beware the Edge of the Earth!” (294 views).
• And the disturbing “Mental Illness and Suicidal Tendencies in Early Modern Oceanic Voyages” (256 views).

Now, the top-ranking post owes its position most likely not to its amazing philosophical contents, but to a mention of Harry Potter in the text! Like this one, we have other examples that made us confirm clearly, often amusingly too, the wonder-greedy and showbiz-focused nature of the internet.

As academics, we need to learn how to capitalise on the use of sound-bytes and the myriad pervasive tags and hashtags, to play on the nature of the ephemeral tools at hand for our perennial intentions. There is often a fine line between using, exploiting and making fun of the circumstances. For example, we could have written posts about a tailor swift in his work on board a ship, or about elections, chocolate, sex, and it is certain that any of these terms would trump our serious and well-researched keywords, but we would never stoop that low, no!

It was also made clear that to a certain extent we needed to understand the “digital mind”, the elements of HTML and XML code, and the TEI Guidelines, especially if we wanted to join in the international drive towards really digital humanities. We made our efforts, and in the end, apart from their light-hearted tone, the blog posts often contain snippets of original research that eventually made it into our academic publications. As such, while the RUTTER Project comes to a close this Sunday 31 August, they will remain, we hope, a source of valuable information for our colleagues and any interested readers (of English) worldwide.

Thanks for reading! [J. Acevedo]

Image by Luís Ribeiro.

Fish-Tasting and Toxic Navigation: Life and Death at Sea in 1526

When we think of pilots’ technical writings, we tend to imagine raw materials—hurried notes, rough sketches, a synthetic and telegraphic style. So it comes as a surprise to encounter richly crafted codices, adorned with elegant graphic elements and beautiful handwriting. This is precisely the case with the Livro de Marinharia by Bernardo Fernandes, preserved at the Vatican Library. It is one of the oldest surviving nautical collections, comprising around forty texts—rutters, logbooks, nautical regulations, treatises, and questionnaires for pilots—dated between 1514 and 1548. These texts incorporate earlier knowledge and hands-on maritime experience, alongside insights from more recent long-distance voyages.

At the heart of this post is the logbook of the ship Conceição, which sailed from Lisbon to Goa in 1526. It provides a vivid account of daily life on board. In many logbooks, the rhythm of the journey is shaped by problems and setbacks. Pilots frequently report on the presence of the sick, the types of treatments administered, and even the deaths that occurred during the voyage. The journey of the Conceição is no exception and offers a striking case of poisoning.

The source of the poisoning was a type of fish consumed by the crew between the Angoche Island and the African coast. The author of the logbook wrote that the sailors who had gone ashore to fetch water caught some small fish resembling the peixe-sapo (anglerfish, fam. Lophiidae), of which about three men died immediately, and the other three, when they returned to the ship, were already swollen. The account also mentions the use of theriaca, the theriac of ancient physicians, a complex antidote used in early medicine, which was considered especially useful against animal venom and stomach aliments, to save the three men. The symptoms and context suggest that a toxic species, possibly a pufferfish (fam. Tetraodontidae) or toadfish (fam. Batrachoididae), was mistakenly consumed during the voyage. Especially, the consumption of pufferfish could lead to symptoms like swelling, paralysis, and death. [Luana Giurgievich]

Pilots Always Win: A Socio-Epistemic History of European Early Modern Navigation III

And so, as I was saying, such epistemic incommensurabilities need not have been a problem if pilots and cosmographers plied their trades independently—as, indeed, had been the case for much of history. This time round, however, the novel panorama resulting from the early modern oceanic expansion forced their epistemic frameworks to collide.

In the second part of my dissertation, I explore several socio-epistemic clashes between pilots and cosmographers, from 1450 to 1800. By giving a central role to the pilots’ rationale, I offer an original approach to episodes such as the debates on the nautical chart in sixteenth-century Iberia or the introduction of the Mercator-Wright projection in European navigation.

I show that the artisanal epistemic framework constructed by the pilots to perform their profession was as epistemologically sound as the one constructed by cosmographers to perform theirs. Thus, when both frameworks collided, the former always prevailed over the latter.

Jacques Devaulx, Premières Œuvres, 16th c.

Paradoxically, the mainstream narratives of the history of early modern nautical science have been constructed almost exclusively from the voice of those “defeated” in the epistemic clashes I analyze. The truth is that the tempo of early modern navigation was always set by the pilots. The truth is that, after all, pilots always win.

[Jose María Moreno Madrid]