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]