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The Seaman and the Printer

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The Seaman and the Printer R. A. SKELTON THE SEAMAN AND THE PRINTER I f COIMBRA-1970 !5C9v R . A. SKELTON r THE SEAMAN AND THE PRINTER COIMBRA - 1970 {~ THE SEAMAN AND THE PRINTER R. A. SKELTON This paper presents no new discoveries or interpretations. I offer merely some reflections on the process by which documents used by seamen passed from script into print, on the conditions in which this transition occurred, Separata da and on its consequences for the development of hydrographic literature in Revista da Universidade de Coimbra the 15th and 16th centuries. These thoughts are prompted by, and nourished Vol. XXIV on, the work on the literature of navigation done by pioneers to whom all students are in debt: notably Behrmann, Kretschmer, Fontoura da Costa, Gemez, E. G. R. Taylor, B. R. Motzo and my friend Commander Waters. The papers and discussions at this conference have been marked by a strong tone of empirism. They have dealt with instruments and books, methods of observation and computation, mainly insofar as they were within the seaman's capacity to use, and particularly to carry and use on board his ship. Here I accept the same emphasis in a restricted context, namely the transmission of sailing directions or pilot-books. My paper is concerned with the men who produced and used textual or graphic aids to navigation. In the evolution and the evolution and transmission of written pilot guides, the virtual absence of any medieval Latin tradition constitutes a hiatus in the historical records of hydrography which has perplexed many students. Konrad Kretschmer (for instance) expressed the conviction that a Latin pilot-guide must be assumed as a link between the Greek sailing directions of the Hellenistic period and the Italian porto/ani of the late Middle Ages (1). Gemez thought that 'even if no book of this kind has been preserved, it must not be supposed that none ever existed, but that they were lost' by use at sea or the hazards of time (2). These affirmations imply acts of faith rather than deductions. Gemez offered no reasons, and the evidence cited by Kretschmer in support of his hypothesis appears very slender. It amounts in fact to no more than the early 13th-century Italian fragment in the Biblioteca Marciana, with its sprinkling of latinisms, uncertainty about distances, and (1) K. KRETSCHMER, Die italienischen Portolane des Mittelalters (1909), pp. 169- 172, 175-6. (2) D. GERNEZ, 'Esquisse de l'historique de l'evolution des livres d'instructions Composto e impresso na •lmprensa de Coimbra, Limitada· nautiques', Comm. de i'Acad. de Marine de Belgique, V (1950), 4 5 addition of the route from Acre to Alexandria. A Latin original (if it existed) whole. There is no need to postulate a revolutionary innovation. For may well have been itself a translation from Italian. The earliest extensive pilot-guides of northern origin, the manuscript tradition does not extend so pilot-book in Latin, that of Marino Sanudo (c. 1320), is plainly translated far back, apparently not beyond the 14th century. But we may recall that, from Italian, and it is embodied in a work of propaganda addressed to an before about 1250, the date ascribed to the compilation of Lo Compasso da international audience. navigare there were already three manuscript recensions of the sailing direc­ Anyone who could understand Latin in the Middle Ages was probable tions fr;m Denmark to Acre preserved by Adam of Bremen or his scholiast. literate, but we cannot assume that a man who could express himself only This indicates (as Dahlgren suggested) a wide circulation in standardised in his mother tongue was able to read or write. Latin was universally used form in Scandinavia and north Germany (5). for didactic, technical and (so to speak) scientific texts, as the only language It follows also, surely, that we need not postulate any Latin forerunners with the full vocabulary required. But in the Middle Ages, as before and or models. The literary form of itineraries by land and the content of world since, the transmission of hydrographic information from experience-whether maps was still influenced, and sometimes dominated, _by late Roman pro­ orally or in writing- must always have taken vernacular forms; it was totypes; here the Latin tradition was unbroken and still strong. In hydro­ communicated in the mother tongue of the speaker or writer. The medieval graphy there is no evidence for any such continuity or d~~endence, and the~e shipmaster or pilot was not always literate, and the very earliest medieval was no occasion for it. The vigour of the vernacular traditiOn helps to explam rutters known to us were conveyed by word of mouth to some more litterate the relatively late appearance of printed aids to navigation. person who wrote them down. So, at the end of the 9th century, Ottar the In the Middle Ages Latin, as the lingua franca of culture and the offictal Norwegian 'told his lord, Alfred the King', the particulars of his voyages language of Church and Empire, was of course a unifying factor. In limited north to the White Sea and south to the Baltic. The scribe who first wrote professional fields, however, the use of vernacular languages did not necessari~y down the Latin rutter from Ribe (in Denmark) to Acre, preserved in a gloss make for diversification or independent local development. The Atlantic on Adam of Bremen's 'Description of the northern islands', must have had coasts of Europe, between Gibraltar (or Cartagena) and Flanders, were it in a vernacular language from the mouth of a seaman. It is an oral tra­ frequented by both northern and southern shipping. In this overlap b~twe~n dition that is reproduced in the sailing directions found in Icelandic and the pilot-guides originating in the Mediterranean and those comphed m Norwegian written texts from the twelfth century onward. From southern western or northern Europe, extensive and close agreement has been demon­ Europe the only text of comparable antiquity is the Marciana fragment of strated by Behrmann and Cdr Waters, from analysis of various 15th-century about 1200, which (in the words of E. G. R. Taylor) 'gives us little indication texts: the Low German Seebuch, the Italian porto/ani of Versi and Rizo of the richness of detail and refinement of bearings that were now accumulating (Ca' da Mosto), Portuguese roteiros, and the French routiers of Pierre Garcie (6). in the notebooks of literate sea-masters, or were stored in the memories of This justifies Waters's conclusion that, to some extent, these sailing directions local pilots' (3). (whatever the language in which they were written) were 'common knowledge Such accumulations of navigational data, from personal observation among seamen of western Europe of the 14th and 15th centuries'. and from information supplied in ports visited, were essentialy of a private Their transmission is wholly undocumented; but it is not difficult to character. They could not contribute to the common pool of hydrographic visualise the circumstances in which intercommunication of hydrographic information until they were reduced to systematic form and codified. The data between (say) a Venetian and a Scandinavian seaman, or between a terminus post quem for this development is of couse the date by which a ver­ Portuguese and a Fleming or Englishman, could occur. The prof~s~ional nacular language became sufficiently disciplined to serve as a vehicle for vocabulary of languages other than their own must have been famihar to written transmission. In Italy this codification seems to have taken place many pilots and shipmasters (7). In ports on the common trade routes during the 13th century (4). If the earliest composite and comprehensive followed by shipping of various nationalities, seamen could compare . and sailing directions, which then appear, establish a model of such maturity enrich their notes, and those from northern Europe no doubt saw the wntten as to sugegst the end rather than the beginning of an evolutionary process, porto/ani compiled in Italy and learnt the habit of putting together similar this must be ascribed to the wealth of data avaible, to opportunity for assembling and collating them, and doubtless to the 'orderly and precise mind' (in Cdr. Waters' words) of the man who organised them into a coherent (5) E. W. DAHLGREN, 'Sailing-directions for the Northern Seas', in Nordenskiold's Periplus (1897), p. 102. ~" ' (6) W. BERMANN, Ueber dje deutschen Seebuclzer des 15. wzd 16. Jahrlumderts(1906) ; D. W. WATERS, The Rutters of the Sea (1967). (3) E. G. R. ·TAYLOR, The haven-finding art (1956), p. 103. (7) Motzo cites the common language of Italian seamen used in Mediterranean (4) B. R. MOTZO, Il compasso da navigare (1947), passim. ports, when Italian as a literary language was in its infancy. 6 7 systematic sailing directions in their own languages. Most authors suppose but also (as Dr Curt Buhler has shown) even in the copying of printed books. the principal centre of such interchange to have been Sluis, the port of Bruges. The printing of the Rizo Portolano in 1490 did not bring to an end the scribal There is an interesting parallel in the merchants' guidebook known as the production of transcripts by hand; and the mutual intercopying of printed Bruges Itinerary (printed by Lelewel and Hamy), which was written down and manuscript pilot-books during the 16th century is exemplified in the some time before 1424 (8). But other ports are known to have been collecting study of the Antwerp manuscript made by Denuce and Gernez (12). centres for the knowledge of the Portuguese oceanic discoveries - and also This professional vested interest in the transcription of sailing directions doubtless for other hydrographic information- diffused abroad during the by hand may well have contributed to the fewness of the printed texts of use 15th century.
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