Handbook for a Proper Rutter: What Cannot be Missing

When reading an early modern rutter nowadays, one can be overwhelmed by the amount of information of various kinds contained in it. For a twenty-first century historian of science these documents are a spectacular source of information, used to deepen knowledge of the biology, geography or meteorology of that time. However, what a sixteenth-century pilot expected from a rutter was that it would facilitate his voyage between point A and point B. For such a critical task, any available information would be welcome, but there were some elements which became really indispensable.

Latitude measurements, for example, were invaluable. Any worthwhile rutter had to include them. It should also include information on the behavior of the winds and tides, as these were the “fuel” for the early modern vessels. Accurately providing the depth of the waters was equally crucial, since running aground on an unnoticed sandbank could be the last mistake a ship ever made. With the same aim of avoiding misfortunes and facilitating the pilot’s labor, the courses also became an obligatory element of any proper rutter.

Excerpt from the Derrotero hecho por el piloto Isidro de la Puebla desde la barra de Sanlúcar hasta San Joan de Ulúa…1579. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Mss/4541.

When the ship was approaching the coast, a careful description of its geographical features, such as capes or gulfs, was very helpful. The specifics of natural harbors, bays and beaches were detailed with special care, since these were the favorite places to stop over. Conventionally, the distances between the aforementioned locations were specified. They were preferably given in leagues, but more rudimentary distance measures were also used, such as the well-known “just a stone’s throw away”.

If this is “just” the essential data that a standard rutter had to include… Can you imagine the amount of knowledge on the natural world that is gathered in the thousands of rutters written during the Modern Age? Just thinking about it makes one dizzy!
[José María Moreno Madrid]

Pigafetta’s Thesauri, a Small Nautical Treasure

On their way to the Moluccas, golden land of spices, the Magellan expedition found a way to the treasure chest of mace, clove and nutmeg. Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) followed the well-established route to Brazil, but the passage to the Pacific, its crossing, and the path from the Philippines to the Moluccas were achieved without any nautical documents. Thus arose the need to create them, and they stand as a precious trove of information in the form of rutters and travel diaries written by the crew as they navigated the Strait of Magellan, the Pacific Ocean, and the Sulu, Celebes and Molucca seas.

This new “treasure map” is partly to be found in the Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo by Antonio Pigafetta (1491–1534), one of the few who survived the circumnavigation. Like a vault keeping the secrets of this transoceanic voyage, this travel diary allows us to follow the path of the unexplored route from Seville to the Moluccas and back. Typically conceived as a product from astronomical observation, this route was also created from cultural interactions between expedition members and indigenous people.

Pigafetta’s thesauri of Tupi, Tehuelche, Visaya and Malay languages give us a glimpse of new words and worlds, and illustrate how local knowledge was used in creating the route. While the Tupi words refer to trade, and so tell us that material exchanges were common in Brazil, the documented Tehuelche words show a different phase of the voyage. In Patagonia, where Magellan had no geographic or nautical information about the route to the Moluccas, the linguistic exchanges indicate his interest in navigation topics; this interest is represented by expressions like “water” (holi), “sun” (calexchen), “stars” (settere), “sea” (aro), “wind” (oni), “storm” (ohone), and “to go a long distance” (schien).

This concern intensifies in the Philippines, after a grueling crossing of the Pacific and the death of Magellan in Cebu, when the expedition is unable to reach the Moluccas, given the lack of nautical information about Southeast Asia. The Visaya words display linguistic novelty regarding spices, numbers and navigation, which shows a local maritime culture, a connection to the Moluccas, and the need for the expedition to invent the latter stage of the route. Words like “sun” (adlo), “moon” (songhot), “star” (bolan binthun), “small boat” (sampan), “large boats” (balanghai), “small boats” (boloto), “ship” (benaoa), “captain-general” (raia) illustrate this concern.

The word-gathering reaches its climax during several failed attempts to reach the Moluccas from the Philippines, when native pilots are kidnapped, maps of islands are drawn, and a comprehensive thesaurus of Malay is written, which must have helped the expedition reach Ternate and Tidore. What was of interest in this exchange of information is preserved in words like “seaport” (labuan), “galley” (gurap), “ship” (capal), “stern” (biritan), “to navigate” (belaiar), “sail” (leier), “anchor” (sau), “boat” (sapan), “wind” (anghin), “sea” (lait), “north” (iraga), “south” (salatan), “east” (timor), “west” (baratapat). A seemingly small nautical treasure, these thesauri shine some light on the process of creating a nautical route, made from science, technology and such cultural gems as these encounters.
[Joana Lima]

Dogs, Sympathy and Longitude Measures

The longitude problem had been a serious issue for centuries, and it became a paramount concern in the Early Modern period, following the Treaty of Tordesillas (7 June 1494), when longitude was the parameter chosen to divide the newly discovered lands all over the world between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires.

Cantino planisphere (1502) with the Tordesillas line depicted (Biblioteca Estense, Modena, Italy).

Despite its importance, however, sailors and explorers struggled to determine longitude, and practical accurate measurements onboard only became possible much later, with Harrison’s marine chronometer, in the late 18th century. Before that, countless attempts were made to solve the longitude problem, using strictly scientific and, sometimes, more imaginative approaches. Among the creative solutions proposed, my curiosity was caught by the anonymous idea (Curious Inquiries, 1687) of using Sir Kenelm Digby’s “powder of sympathy” (unguentum armarium or weapon salve).

This was a preparation made of green vitriol (sulfuric acid), dissolved in water and recrystallized or calcined in the sun, that was supposed to cure a wound by being applied not to the wound itself, but to the weapon that inflicted it. The inventor suggested taking advantage of the long-distance effect of the powder for sailing purposes.

So, a ship should take on board a wounded dog. A trustable helper on shore, provided with a precise clock, would immerse a bandage previously soaked in the dog’s blood in a solution of the powder of sympathy, at a previously agreed time of day. That would cause the dog to complain at the same moment on board the ship, where people would then know the exact time and would be able to determine the longitude.

Although it is unknown if the method was ever tried (hopefully not!), the idea inspired the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who recreates this painful situation in his novel L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before).
[Silvana Munzi]

Nautical Knowledge Exchanges at the Dutch Nautical School

Lucas Waghenaer’s (1534-1606) works had a great impact in the late Renaissance. Waghenaer’s first book, the two volume-edition of 1584-85 of the Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Mariner's Mirror), was the first compilation of nautical knowledge regarding Western Europe as a whole. It was composed as a pilot guide with nautical rutters and an atlas of charts. The 1592 Treasure of Navigation is usually considered as an update of the Mariner’s Mirror. The representation was extended from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea, and smaller charts were made to be carried on board. But, how did Waghenaer come up with these detailed rutters and charts for such a huge area?

A former pilot in the Northern Seas during the 1550-70’s, Waghenaer exchanged nautical knowledge with Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Italian seafarers. Based on this experience, he founded a Dutch nautical school to train pilots and hydrographers. He also benefited from several close contacts with the Dutch elite. The relevance of his books is proved by their swift translation into other languages. Above, we can observe the English translation of the Mariner’s Mirror. Alongside is a map of Western Europe and a chart of the Portuguese coast, from the same book. Becoming acquainted with Fernando Álvaro Seco’s first known map of Portugal of 1561, Waghenaer used it to update the depiction of the Portuguese coast. This chart influenced later Portuguese developments.

The Dutch ability in acquiring nautical knowledge was matched by their capacity to update and transform it, firstly regarding Europe, and later including other far away locations. The Dutch school became the trading-zone between different nautical traditions (Iberian, Mediterranean, Northern, Baltic), and this explains why Waghenaer’s books became the international standard during the seventeenth century for producing new charts of Europe. Now, could such developments have occurred without the nautical and cartographical developments taking place at the Portuguese Armazéns da Índia and the Spanish Casa de la Contratácion since the beginning of the sixteenth century? History of Science studies have already shown how quickly nautical knowledge circulated across Renaissance Europe, making scientific developments possible in different places. Still, further historiographical enquiries are needed in order to address this question in detail. [Nuno Vila-Santa]

Being “In the Know”

From around the eighth to the nineteenth century, among sailors, slaves and other riff-raff who went on board ships through the Mediterranean, flourished a maritime contact language, fascinating mixture not only of most Romance languages, but also of Greek, Arabic and Berber languages from the North African shores. This pidgin came to be known at some point as lingua franca, “the language of the Franks,” meaning something like “the language of Western Europeans.”

Centuries later, one of its variants came to be known as sabir, a term cognate of saber—“to know”, in most Iberian languages. Thus, the shared maritime language of the Mediterranean was simply “the knowing”. This resonates with the perennial experience of life aboard ships, where crew and passengers, when boarding their vessels, enter not merely a floating structure of planks and ropes, but a separate linguistic realm, where everyday terms acquire new or technical meanings, and where unique special words become daily fare.

Molière gave this language a spectacular appearance in literature with the words of an “Ottoman” mufti in his Bourgeois gentilhomme:

Se ti sabir
Ti respondir
Se non sabir
Tazir, tazir

(If you know/You answer/If you don’t know/Be silent, be silent.)

Moving further from Mediterranean shores, one of the fascinating and still barely studied aspects of oceanic exploration was the international mix of the crews, and the development of and the encounter with other sabirs on the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. Think of the burgeoning studies on lascar crews and language…

Moving closer to our research in Lisbon, impartial observers have detected early signs of the development of a sabir among our team members, based on Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, academic English sprinkled with Latin and a dash of Arabic, maybe… Watch out for thrilling and unexpected RUTTER linguistic developments!
[Juan Acevedo]

The “Mystery of the Needles”

“It is a thick, very high, fallow and melancholy place.” With these words, the Dominican friar João dos Santos presented the Cape of Needles (in Portuguese Cabo das Agulhas) in his book Ethiopia oriental (1609). Reading the tourist guide by Carrie Hampton, Passport to the Best of Cape Town, South Africa (2004), the impression that comes out is quite similar: the cape is an area “with dense fog, unpredictable currents and dangerous seas and worth a visit for its portentous atmosphere.” Nowadays, the Cape of Needles is commonly known as the southernmost point of the African continent, the place where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic. But why was it called so?

Do you know that one of the more frequent words in a Portuguese rutter was precisely “agulha”? In fact, the agulha de marear was a fundamental instrument for navigation, used to adjust the direction of the ships. This instrument was also a frequent source of errors, result of the magnetic declination of the Earth, but from very early the Portuguese pilots became aware of the problem and the determination of the angle of variation of the needle on board was part of their daily practice. The diplomat and scientist D. João de Castro seemed “obsessed” with it and wrote to the King about his hard work on the “mystery of the needles, about which so frequently the pilots complain.” In the rutter resulting from the voyage to Goa of 1538, Castro reported more than fifty observations of magnetic declination, trying to correct the Tratado da Agulha written in 1514 by João de Lisboa. The origins of the toponym Cabo das Agulhas were explained by the same D. João de Castro: the pilots claimed that the Cape was the place where “the needles don’t vary at all.”

After almost two centuries, in 1699, the cosmographer Manuel Pimentel described in detail the “Portuguese needle”, as well as the travel experiences to India of the previous forty years, and for him it was still a “magnetic mystery” whether the variation of the needle was regular or not.
[LG]

A Rutter for the Sea of Love of Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos

Saltwater runs in the veins of sixteenth-century Portuguese theatre, brimming with technological vocabulary and a fresh cartographical vision of the world. So, it should come as no surprise that the scientific concept of the rutter flowed as a metaphor into the heart of this body of works, pervading its plays with terms of the science and technology which made oceanic voyages possible. It was a lexicon of the lived experience at sea which Portuguese theatre audiences were very familiar with, since it was used by all social strata, deeply involved as they were in this enterprise. Both a scientific document and a mental construct, at the hands of playwrights the maritime rutter became symbol of successfully finding a way to get to a desired place.

In Comedia Ulyssippo (circa 1561), by Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos (1515-1585), the destination is a place of love, when noblemen Regio and Alcino speak about how to get to a woman’s heart (Act II, scene 3). Commenting on an encounter between himself and Otoniam, both in love with noble sisters Tenolvia and Gliceria, Regio metaphorically describes Otoniam’s lack of seduction skills, employing the image of the rutter:

He knows little about this piloting, because it seems he did not sail outside the strait of peasant girls and concubines. And for this superior hunt there is the need for other rutters and a vast experience, as it encompasses many arts and deceptions in which the very Palinurus often loses sight of hope, which is the north of his endeavours. And his lordship has no practice in this route.

To seduce a noblewoman, one must be a pilot in the sea of love. For successfully finding a way to her heart, one must read instructions that allow for a safe arrival to the most desired place. Unlike Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas’ ship, who was only guided by hope and therefore died at sea, the skills that Regio mentions shine with rationality, a scientific spirit, and point to the true north. Quite different from trying to gain the affection of a concubine, or to sail near shore where no rutters are needed, the path to a noblewoman’s love is not an adventure. Such as an oceanic voyage is accomplished by reading a carefully designed rutter and by relying on the experience to navigate these emotional waters.
[Joana Lima]