How Sailors Learned to Find Their Way

Historian Margaret E. Schotte traces how European sailors were trained in navigation between 1550 and 1800, a period when finding one's position at sea shifted from an experience-based craft passed down among seafarers to a discipline taught through formal schools and mathematics. Drawing on training manuals and ships' logs from England, France, Spain and the Netherlands, she shows how competing approaches to teaching navigation shaped who was allowed to command a ship.

An engaging piece of maritime history for readers interested in the age of sail, navigation or the history of science, rather than a practical sailing manual.

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