Learning to Sail, Living at Sea: Vernaculars of Transatlantic Knowledge

The literary tradition of self-invention through maritime storytelling reaches back centuries. Through the medium of print, some transatlantic mariners succeeded in forging identities reflective of their experiences at sea. However, the majority of stories of ocean crossing remain untold because the vast majority of those who crossed the Atlantic Ocean had no access to the publishers and booksellers who turned these sailor-narratives into commercial products. These published accounts of seamen’s narratives that we can read today reveal (often embellished) first-hand reports of life at sea in the colonial era, but they also reflect that privileged access, of one kind or another, to the printing press itself.

Ubiquitous at sea, printed naval manuals were an essential element of marine education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They instructed officers and ordinary seamen in the daily practices of navigation as well as in the rigid social roles that defined shipboard life. Mariners interacted with both the physical manuals themselves and the navigational science contained within them in striking and distinctive ways. As we see here, naval manuals were not simply vessels of static and abstract scientific knowledge; instead these objects bear the marks of ownership, attachment, circulation, contestation, and reveal idiosyncratic and deeply personal reflections of the complexities of early modern navigational science.

Sailing ships were the institutional structures directly responsible for the peopling of European colonies in the Americas, transporting captive, coerced, and free laborers (and others) across oceans. As such, ships were physical living—and dying—spaces for hundreds of people over a period of several weeks, if not months. Alongside the violence of captivity, the single variable that had perhaps the greatest impact on the survivability of these voyages was the food consumed by ships’ residents - and indeed the dietary regime of sailors and other sea goers was the subject of fierce debate over centuries. Disputes over naval nutrition and the cost of provisions were interwoven with the intense social stratification on board ships, producing deeply precarious and unequal systems of food consumption.

European marine cartography in the early modern period focused on producing increasingly accurate nautical charts for ship pilots and navigators trying to anticipate and avoid difficulties and obstacles in both blue water and coastal sailing. The pursuit of precision in understanding and cartographically representing ocean worlds often fell back on subjective and deeply embodied methods of observing, documenting, and inscribing. This selection of maps, charts, and other cartographic objects illustrates the range of techniques used to represent the marine environment and its wonders, highlighting the subject positions of the cartographer/observer that are perhaps unexpected.

The most profound acts of embodiment involve the beginning and end of life itself. Maritime history is necessarily filled with both (the latter featuring much more regularly than the former), with the sailing ship serving as the site of occasional births and very regular deaths. The records of these life events are sometimes hidden in the margins and in the details of engraved images of the printed record of maritime ventures, such as on these two documents. What they show is that however universal these experiences were (and are), being born and dying at sea were embedded in the vertiginous social hierarchies that characterized life at sea.

Setting out to cross the Atlantic Ocean was a risky business in the age of sail, when ships were at the mercy of both grueling environmental conditions and attacks from enemies. Authority at sea was always vulnerable to insurrection and rebellion, whether that meant external attacks from pirates, mutinous sailors seizing the control of vessels (and of the narrative of how disasters unfolded), or African captives rising up against their jailors. These reversals in status also heralded the opportunities that shipboard life could hold, especially for African-descended enslaved workers, who—as we see here—sought to use seagoing labor as a potential escape route.