Changing ways to learn seamanship in Europe circa 1600–1920: Books,institutions and sociopolitical contexts

Abstract

Seamanship is the art of handling and manoeuvring a ship. For centuries, seamanship skills were transmitted not in writing, but by hands-on instruction on board. However, between circa 1600 and 1920, this ‘tacit’ knowledge was increasingly made ‘explicit’ in printed literature. Why did this happen? To answer this question, this article analyses dozens of books on seamanship produced in Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy. It discusses the different genres, the background of the authors and the intended reading publics. It shows that the transformation occurred almost simultaneously across Europe and that it was not triggered by technological change. The article argues that the explanation instead can be found in the rise of new institutions for the education and selection of seamen, which was linked with the growing aspirations of states and other organizations to gain more control over the quality of the personnel needed to man their ships.

According to John Harland, ‘[s]eamanship was, and is, for the most part a practical subject, learnt primarily by doing rather than reading’. ¹ Seamanship is the art of handling and manoeuvring a ship, as distinct from navigation, which is the art of finding your way across the seas. The way in which the art of seamanship was handed down to new generations of seamen significantly changed over time. ‘Doing’ remained necessary, but ‘reading’ became more and more important. Seamanship skills were no longer only taught by seasoned sailors through hands-on instruction on board, but were also increasingly transmitted through writing, with or without pictures. Tacit knowledge was thus made more and more explicit.

This change in the way to learn seamanship began before the transition from sail to steam in the late nineteenth century, but it lagged far behind a similar development in navigation technology and all sorts of mechanical arts on land. David Waters, Karel Davids, Luis de Albuquerque, José María Lopez Piñero and Margaret Schotte, to mention but a few, have written extensively about the rise and spread of printed literature on the art of navigation. ² Pamela Long, Pamela Smith and others have shown that many craftsmen in Europe, too, began to put their knowledge in writing from the early fifteenth century onwards. In the early modern era, printed manuals, treatises, collections of recipes and the like were quite common in many sorts of crafts and trades. ³

Printed texts on seamanship, however, did not appear until the seventeenth century, and they only became more widespread in the later eighteenth century. Yet the rise and spread of literature on seamanship has been the subject of hardly any research so far. Harland, the foremost expert on the subject, consulted books on seamanship in many different languages but did not carry out a historical comparative analysis himself. ⁴ Schotte's Sailing School devotes merely a few pages to the topic of seamanship. Her survey of nautical manuals and instruments between 1550 and 1800 does not discuss any books on seamanship. ⁵ A recent collective volume on the professionalization of European naval officers in the eighteenth century mentions education in seamanship a few times but does not discuss any manuals or guides. ⁶ An essay by Elin Jones on treatises on ‘practical seamanship’ between circa 1760 and 1810 concentrates entirely on developments in Britain. ⁷

Why did this codification of knowledge on seamanship eventually take place? This question is the subject of this article. Contrary to Jones, I will demonstrate that the shift from learning by doing to the transmission of knowledge on seamanship by means of texts and images occurred more or less simultaneously in all major seafaring nations in Europe, including France, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, as well as Great Britain. By taking a long-term perspective and comparing a variety of European countries, it will be possible to develop a more complex, nuanced explanation of this change in learning seamanship – which is attentive to common factors as well as specific circumstances – than if the gaze were only directed to late eighteenth-century Britain. The argument in this article is based on the analysis of some 70 printed texts on seamanship from Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the end of the First World War. These sources, selected from Harland's Seamanship in the Age of Sail and Lars Bruzelius’s bibliographies, ⁸ are listed in chronological order in Appendix 1.

The first section of this article presents an overview of the emergence, evolution and diversity of printed texts on seamanship between circa 1600 and 1920. To answer the question why knowledge on seamanship was put on record, it is important to know more about the authors of these texts, the sources from which they obtained their material and the readership for which the texts were intended. This is the topic of the second section. The third section seeks to determine the underlying causes of this transformation from tacit to explicit knowledge on seamanship, and briefly discusses why developments in seamanship in this respect differed from those in navigation technology. The conclusion summarizes the main findings.

‘Seamanship’ explained

‘Show, don’t write’ – this was, for a long time, the normal way to transmit knowledge on seamanship. No record was made of the skills and techniques that were being transmitted. As the examiner of pilots of the Dutch East India Company, Cornelis Pietersz, wrote in 1789: ‘Seamanship is a skill where experience must count for much, which is also, as the saying goes, in everything the best teacher’. ⁹

Interestingly, this quote comes from a book – Handleiding tot het practicale of werkdadige gedeelte van de stuurmanskunst – that aimed to do precisely something that was normally considered to be hardly possible at all – namely, transmit the art of seamanship in writing. Pietersz presented his book as a manual for the ‘practical’ side of navigation. As a former seaman boasting 40 years of experience, he wished to aid ‘those with less experience’ in dealing with particular practical matters at sea in the form of over 100 questions and answers. ‘Being a seaman’, he declared, he was ‘not a writer’, and he therefore only tried to express himself plainly and intelligibly ‘in the manner of speaking peculiar to seamen’. ¹⁰

Pietersz’s manual exemplifies a transformation in progress. Tacit knowledge on seamanship was increasingly being made explicit. In writing his Handleiding, the Amsterdam examiner was neither a pioneer nor an exception.

Maritime dictionaries and other genres

The lengthy process by which seamanship was made explicit began with the publication of maritime dictionaries in the seventeenth century. Maritime dictionaries contained brief written descriptions or definitions of nautical terms, ship parts and/or the functions of different crew members. Although these books did not explain the actual handling or manoeuvring of a ship, they lifted the corner of the veil on an intricate technical process that up to then had only been intelligible to experienced insiders.

Captain John Smith, a former Governor of Virginia, who authored the first maritime dictionary printed in English in 1626, declared that a ‘discourse [on this] subject I never see writ before’. An Accidence, or The Path-Way to Experience was meant ‘as an intraduction [sic] for such as wants experience, and are desirous to learne what belongs to a Seaman’. ¹¹ Before the century ended, Smith's booklet was reprinted in enlarged and revised editions at least nine times. Henry Mainwaring's The Seamans-Dictionary (1644), which was a printed version of a manuscript written in the early 1620s, probably went through four editions up to the mid 1670s. ¹² Shortly after the appearance of the first dictionaries in English, similar works were published in French, Dutch and Spanish: Estienne Cleirac's Explication des termes de marine, first printed in 1636; Georges Fournier's ‘Inventaire des mots et facons de parler, dont on use sur mer’ in his Hydrographie contenant la théorie et la practique de toutes les parties de la navigation, printed in 1643; Nicolaes Witsen's ‘Verklaringen van scheeps-spreeckwoorden’, first printed as an appendix to his Aeloude en hedendaegsche scheeps-bouw en bestier in 1671; and Sebastián Gamboa's Vocabulario marítimo, first printed in 1696. ¹³ Like Smith's and Mainwaring's texts, all of these works soon went through a number of revisions and reprints. None of them were translations from foreign sources. However, Witsen was clearly familiar with the publications by Smith, Mainwaring, Fournier and others, which prompted him to compose his own book in order to prove that the nautical achievements of the Dutch were second to none. ¹⁴

During the eighteenth century, the body of written works on seamanship evolved in several different ways. First, maritime dictionaries became multilingual and transnational. Cross-referencing and translations between different languages became increasingly common. Nicolas Aubin set the example in 1702. He published the voluminous Dictionaire de marine, contenant les termes de la navigation et de l’architecture navale in Amsterdam, which contained not only an extensive alphabetical list of nautical terms with their explanation in French, but also a Dutch translation for each of these terms. Some of the verbal explanations were also accompanied by illustrations. Aubin's main source for the Dutch terms was what he called the ‘incomparable book’ by Nicolaes Witsen, Aeloude en hedendaegsche scheeps-bouw en bestier. ¹⁵

Aubin's Dictionaire, which was reprinted four times up to 1747, was, in turn, the principal source for the nautical terms explained in the Dictionnaire historique, théorique et pratique de marine by Alexandre Savérien, published in 1758. Savérien's book was translated into Italian in 1769. William Falconer's An Universal Dictionary of the Marine, which first appeared in 1769 and had six reprints until 1789, included a translation of ‘French sea-terms and phrases’ collected from, among others, the works by Aubin and Savérien. ¹⁶ A French–English dictionary of nautical terms was published by Daniel Lescallier in 1777. ¹⁷ The internationalization of dictionaries reached its eighteenth-century climax with the publication of Johann Hinrich Röding's Allgemeines Wörterbuch der Marine between 1793 and 1798, and Henry Neuman's A Marine Pocket-Dictionary in 1799. Röding's work offered readers a huge number of nautical terms in English, Dutch, French and Spanish, as well as German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish, while Neuman's book was a collection ‘of the most useful sea terms' in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German, with English–French and French–English indices. ¹⁸

Another new development in the body of written works after 1700 was the appearance of introductory guides and manuals on seamanship. An early example was the Handboekje voor den zee-leerling, by the Dutch author Martinus Lambrechts in 1731, which briefly described what a future naval officer should know about the layout and equipment of a man-of-war and the day-to-day operations on board. ¹⁹ Comprehensive manuals that discussed the actual handling and manoeuvring of a ship began to appear in several European countries in the last third of the eighteenth century. Jacques Bourdé de Villehuet's Le manoeuvrier from 1765, on the theory and practice of the movements of a ship, was the pioneer in this genre in France, while William Hutchinson's A Treatise on Practical Seamanship, first published in 1777, was the trailblazer in England. One of his successors, Darcy Lever, later called it ‘a work of great merit, written by a real seaman; the first of any consequence on this subject ever published’. ²⁰

Next to these introductions and general overviews emerged, thirdly, a more specialized literature dealing with particular elements of the ship or the execution of particular operations at sea; in some cases, they also included, just like rutters and pilot books, information that could be useful for crossing certain areas at sea or sailing specific maritime routes. In France, Nicolas Charles Romme, Pierre Forfait and Daniel Lescallier published treatises on masts, rigging and sails between the late 1770s and early 1790s. ²¹ Jan de Boer in the Dutch Republic and Henry Taylor in England wrote about the handling of anchors in different weather conditions, while Cornelis Pietersz. dealt with the ins and outs of handling a ship on the way from Europe to Asia and in Asian waters. William Nichelson's Treatise on practical navigation and seamanship not only offered ‘remarks, observations and directions for managing and conducting a ship in all kinds of weather, either under sail or at anchor’, but also discussed in particular what seafarers had to take into account when sailing in the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean up to the Cape Verde islands. ²²

Like maritime dictionaries since Aubin, these general and specialized works on seamanship sometimes contained both illustrations and explanations in words. They did not remain confined to the specific language area where they first appeared. Many of them became part of a body of literature that transcended national boundaries, especially manuals originating in France. France, after all, was at the time widely seen as a shining example of the development of a more theoretical approach to the education of seafarers. ²³ Bourdé de Villehuet's Le manoeuvrier, for example, was translated into Dutch as early as 1768. A Dutch naval officer, Jan Olphert Vaillant, published a manual in 1786 on ‘the effects of the wind and the sea on a ship, its sails and rudder’, which ‘largely followed the plan of the Manoeuvrier by Mr. Bourdé’. ²⁴ David Steel's The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship, published in 1794, contained many references to Bourdé, Lescallier and other French authors, and the same applied to John Clerk's theoretical essay, ‘Seamanship’, first published in 1798, which heaped praise on ‘the endeavours of that ingenious nation’ for the ‘systematic study of this art’. ²⁵ Carlo Aurelio Widmann, from Venice, who in 1773 wrote a manuscript on masts, rigging and sails, was familiar with all the relevant French works on the subject, including Bourdé’s, and several Dutch ones as well, such as Witsen's book of 1671. ²⁶

Finally, information on seamanship was sometimes added to books on navigation. John Hamilton Moore's commonly used The New Practical Navigator (first published in 1772), for instance, contained an ‘Explanation of sea terms’ and an example of an examination for candidate officers of the Royal Navy and the East India Company, with a number of questions and answers regarding seamanship. The author, moreover, remarked that the explanation of sea terms might ‘be thought useless to seamen’ but was ‘not so to many teachers and learners, as there [were] many excellent mathematicians, who on account of their being far distant from any sea-port [were] at a loss for the terms made use of at sea’. ²⁷

The basic pattern of the literature on seamanship was thus in place well before 1800. There were dictionaries, introductory guides and manuals of a general as well as specialized nature, which offered explanations on seamanship in words and sometimes also in images, and all these works were to an increased extent based on international communication and exchange.

Changes in the literature after 1800

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a growth in the number of publications on seamanship and an expansion of their content, rather than a transformation in their nature. After 1800, more maritime dictionaries were published than ever before, especially bilingual or trilingual ones, such as English–French, Italian–English, Danish–French and Portuguese–French–English. ²⁸ The pinnacle was Henri Paasch's De la quille à la pomme du mât, first published in 1885, which contained a vast number of terms, definitions and explanations, accompanied by numerous diagrams, in English, French and German. From the fourth edition in 1908 onwards, Paasch’s dictionary included terms in Italian and Spanish as well. ²⁹

New guides and manuals on seamanship succeeded the pioneering works by Lambrechts, Bourdé and Hutchinson. The most popular in England in the first decades of the nineteenth century were Richard Gower's A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Seamanship and Darcy Lever's The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor, and, after 1860, George Nares' The Naval Cadet's Guide and Seamanship, A. H. Alston's Seamanship, and John Todd and W. B. Whall's Practical Seamanship. Standard works in France after the mid 1830s were the Manuel de matelotage et de la manoeuvre by P. J. Dubreuil, the Manoeuvrier complet by Pierre Marie Joseph de Bonnefoux and E. Paris, and the Manuel de gréement et de la manoeuvre by Emile Bréart, while works by J. C. Pilaar and G. P. J. Mossel gained a similar status in the Netherlands. ³⁰ Moreover, specialized manuals and treatises on rigging, masts, sails and other aspects of seamanship continued to appear as well. Nicholas Tinmouth's An Inquiry Relative to Various Important Points of Seamanship (1845), for example, contained a thorough discussion of the strength of materials used for ropes and chain cables. ³¹ A new subgenre was guides specially designed for seamen who were preparing for examinations in the merchant marine, such as R. Maxwell's The Seamanship Required for the Ordinary and Extra-ordinary Examination of the Local Marine Board from 1869 and Tait's New Seamanship, first published in 1907. ³²

The proliferation of dictionaries shows that the shift from tacit to explicit knowledge about seamanship truly was a transnational phenomenon. On the other hand, the very fact that many dictionaries were multilingual also indicates that there was a growing need for translations. A maritime lingua franca, which everyone involved in maritime affairs readily understood, apparently did not exist. Dutch, Italian or Portuguese no longer fulfilled that function. As John Hattendorf remarks in connection with the spread of dictionaries from the later eighteenth century: ‘each nation had developed a specific vocabulary for use at sea’. ³³ Using guides or manuals on seamanship in foreign languages was a problem for mariners, too, except for officiers savants – officers well versed in science. One of the reasons why Joseph Franc, an instructor of Dutch naval cadets, decided to write an introductory guide on manoeuvring a ship in his own language in the early 1820s was his observation that ‘many young people were not sufficiently familiar with the English language to understand the explanations’ in the manual of Darcy Lever. ³⁴ In Spain, captain Baltasar Vallarino solved the problem by making a translation of Lever's book for the benefit of cadets and young officers, which appeared in 1842. ³⁵

When we take a closer look at the content of the guides and manuals on seamanship, one of the new features that stands out is the more frequent use of images in support of the printed text. Using images in texts was, of course, a well-known practice in many sorts of literature, including books on navigation or ship construction. But it was a different matter with books about seamanship. Darcy Lever was, in 1808, the first author to write a manual on seamanship containing a large number of illustrations because, as he put it, ‘a mere verbal explanation often perplexes the mind’ – at least the mind of those who are not, or not yet, familiar with the practice of seamanship. The total number of images amounted to almost 600. In the very same year, Richard Gower decided in the third edition of his treatise to include ‘explanatory figures’ in the text instead of adding them as separate plates, in order to preserve the ‘contiguity of the figure with the subject’ and thus prevent ‘any interruption to the chain of reasoning by the repeated examination of distant figures’. ³⁶ Similar works on seamanship published in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often included hundreds of illustrations. Mossel's 1859 guide to the ship, for example, contained more than 270 figures; the 1901 edition of Todd and Whall's Practical Seamanship had 274; and the 1886 edition of Nares’ Seamanship boasted almost 350 black-and-white illustrations, plus a number of coloured ones showing flags and signals.

The content of these works expanded in another sense, too. The variety of subjects discussed increased over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the First World War, guides and manuals on seamanship contained much more information about signals, stowage, safety equipment, the use of instruments and the weather than their predecessors had 100 years before. And they also dealt with a topic that was still absent in 1800: the handling and manoeuvring of ships powered by steam.

Changes in the literature on seamanship thus reflected the prolonged transition from sail to steam that occurred in reality. Steam became a regular subject in dictionaries and manuals on seamanship in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the Dictionnaire abrégé de marine of 1834, Bonnefoux added some 110 technical terms relating to steamships because, as he explained, ‘cette navigation prend un tel essor, que la definition de ces termes ne pourra être que fort bien accueillie’. ³⁷ His Dictionnaire de marine à voiles et à vapeur, published in two volumes in 1847 and 1848, contained as many terms relating to steamships as to sailing ships: about 1,200 for each. And his manual Manoeuvrier complet from 1852 discussed both manoeuvring with ‘bâtiments à vapeur’ and ‘bâtiments à voiles’; Mossel's Manoeuvres met zeil- en stoomschepen did likewise in 1865. ³⁸

However, the increased amount of space devoted to the discussion of steam only gradually crowded out the treatment of topics relating to sailing ships. In his Seamanship of 1861, Nares stressed that ‘the value of seamanship [was] in no degree lessened by the employment of steam as a motive power for H.M. ships of war’ because steam still was only used occasionally because of the ‘limited storage for coal’. His Naval Cadet's Guide, published the year before, did not talk about steam at all. ³⁹ In fact, explanations of the handling and manoeuvring of sailing ships continued to be an integral part of standard works on seamanship well into the twentieth century. Austin Knight remarked in his Modern Seamanship of 1901 that treatises such as Nares' would ‘never be out of date until the time, still far in the future, when sails shall be entirely driven out by steam’, although ‘the Steamer has long since established its claim to consideration in Seamanship’, and that there ‘was room for a work in which this claim shall be more fully recognized’. This is what his own book and other popular guides and manuals in the early twentieth century, such as those of Tait or Todd and Whall, set out to do. Yet all of these works still covered sailing vessels as well as steamships. ⁴⁰

Authors, sources and intended readership

Who were the authors of these books on seamanship? What were their sources? Who were their intended readers? The observations by Pamela Smith, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and others about technical literature at large also hold true for printed literature on seamanship: these works cannot be reduced to a single type. ⁴¹ There was not just a diversity of texts, but also a variety of authors and of intended readers.

First of all, maritime dictionaries were often written by different kinds of authors to other sorts of maritime literature. Up to 1800, many of the authors of the best-known maritime dictionaries were not seafarers themselves. While John Smith, Henry Mainwaring, William Falconer and Jacques Bourdé de Villehuet were seasoned sailors to be sure, Estienne Cleirac, Nicolas Aubin, Nicolaes Witsen, Sebastián Gamboa, Alexandre Savérien, Daniel Lescallier, Johann Röding and Henry Neuman were not. Cleirac was a lawyer, Aubin a Huguenot pastor, Witsen a regent and director of a trading company, Gamboa an artillery officer, Savérien a mathematician and naval engineer, Lescallier a naval administrator and colonial governor, Röding a tea merchant and Neuman a professional translator. ⁴² Their works were largely, although not exclusively, based on printed sources. References to books by authors both past and present were common. Sometimes, this data was supplemented by information from oral sources. In the preface of his French–English dictionary, Lescallier, for example, explained that he had assembled his material in various ways. He was not just familiar with publications in English, such as William Falconer's book, but knew the English-speaking world at first hand. He had lived in England in his youth, become acquainted with English naval administrators, naval officers and shipbuilders, and travelled on English merchantmen to the Baltic to improve his knowledge of English maritime vocabulary. ⁴³ Röding borrowed his knowledge both from books and from conversations with ‘Seeleute von Profession’ from many different countries. ⁴⁴ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers without a seafaring background did not disappear but the most popular maritime dictionaries were compiled by authors with a record of service in the navy or the merchant marine, or as an instructor at a nautical school. Examples are J. J. Moore, William Burney, Jean-Baptiste Willaumez, François Lemétheyer, Pierre Bonnefoux, A. C. Twent, Hendrik Lantsheer and Eduard Bobrik. Henri Paasch was a former sea captain turned inspector at Lloyd’s Register. ⁴⁵

In other genres of literature on seamanship, authors with a maritime background dominated from the start. Among the pioneers, Martinus Lambrechts was a captain of the Admiralty of Amsterdam, William Hutchinson a mariner and dock master in Liverpool, and Jacques Bourdé de Villehuet an officer in the service of the Compagnie des Indes. Naval officers and masters and mates in merchant marines and trading companies continued to form the majority of the authors of general guides and manuals on seamanship throughout the period under discussion. William Nichelson, for example, sailed in the merchant marine, and Charles Martelli, George Nares and A. H. Alston served in the Royal Navy. Nicholas Tinmouth was a master in the Royal Navy before he became master attendant at the dockyard in Woolwich. P. J. Dubreuil, Louis-Stanislas Baudin, Emile Bréart and Pierre Bonnefoux were French naval officers; Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen, Joseph Franc, J. C. Pilaar and G. P. J. Mossel were officers in the navy of the Netherlands. Cornelis Pietersz. and Jan de Boer were navigators in the service of the Dutch East India Company, Richard Gower was an officer of the English East India Company, and Henry Taylor was a seasoned seaman from the coal and Baltic trades, while John Todd called himself a master mariner in the Indian marine and Turkish navy. All these authors could draw on their own vast experience at sea when writing their books. In the nineteenth century, quite a few of them also boasted a record of teaching service at a nautical school.

The main exceptions to this pattern were David Steel and Darcy Lever, who wrote their books on seamanship without ever having worked as a seaman or a teacher themselves. However, Steel talked with ‘actual workmen’ and Lever took pains to check and double-check his explanations of nautical matters with dozens of naval officers and ‘gentlemen of known experience in the merchant service’. ⁴⁶ Books on specialist subjects of seamanship, such as rigging, masts and sails, were sometimes written by authors with a background in ship construction rather than seafaring. ⁴⁷

Not all books on seamanship were intended for the same readership. Prefaces, dedications and lists of subscribers reveal the existence of a variety of audiences. This is particularly true for maritime dictionaries. Some dictionaries, starting with Gamboa's Vocabulario marítimo, were first and foremost meant as an aid for seamen in the making, to be sure, but others were composed for ‘non-specialist readers’, as John Hattendorf calls them, ⁴⁸ who for one reason or another had an interest in the language of mariners. Even if these readers often had no seafaring aspirations themselves, they still wanted to know what seamen were talking about. Cleirac added his list of ‘terms de marine’ as an aid for readers to understand his expositions on laws and customs of the sea. Smith offered his ‘sea-mans grammar’ not ‘as an instruction to mariners nor sailors’, but to ‘many young gentlemen and valiant spirits of all sorts [who] desire[d] to try their fortunes at sea’, and Mainwairing, for his ‘sea-mans dictionary’, had a similar public in mind. Witsen, Aubin, Savérien and Röding wrote their books for the general reader rather than for an audience of seamen. Aubin claimed that his dictionary would be specifically useful as an aid for translating history books and travel accounts that contained references to events at sea. ⁴⁹ Falconer's Universal Dictionary of 1769 attracted hundreds of subscribers, including naval officers and staff of the English East India Company, as well as numerous people from ‘polite society’. ⁵⁰ This is consistent with a growing interest in travel accounts and maritime fiction in the eighteenth century, notably in Britain. Falconer himself not only wrote a maritime dictionary, but also composed a popular poem about a shipwreck in the Mediterranean. ⁵¹

After 1800, the number of maritime dictionaries specifically intended for seafaring readers increased but this genre of book continued to be produced for non-seafaring readers, too. To take two examples from Italy, a baron, Giuseppe Parrilli, from 1846 onwards published the multivolume Vocabulario militare di marineria francese-italiano without adopting the language of mariners themselves, while Captain Luigi Fincati in 1870 composed the Dizionario di marina italiano frances e frances italiano, which, he explicitly claimed, used ‘the vocabulary of seamen for seamen’ in both the navy and the mercantile marine. ⁵² Henri Paasch wrote his multilingual dictionary of 1885 for ‘the use of ship-owners, -builders, brokers, insurance- societies, average- staters, barristers, translators and editors of journals’, as well as for nautical experts, marine engineers, naval cadets, captains and other naval officers. ⁵³

Guides and manuals on seamanship, by contrast, were aimed at a seafaring public from the very start. In particular, they were meant for what Lambrechts called the zeeleerling, Lever the ‘young sea officer’ and Baudin the jeune marin. In other words, they were written for young men who aspired to become seafarers.

Institutions and sociopolitical contexts

Why did all these printed texts on seamanship appear? And, more specifically, why did authors with a maritime background put knowledge about seamanship on record? The key to the explanation evidently does not lie in the transition from sail to steam. Steam power and its implications for seamanship were integrated into existing formats of literature after 1830, but the rise of steam did not bring about the transformation from tacit to explicit knowledge as such. Technological change was not the trigger. Nor can the transformation be sufficiently explained as being part of the rise of ‘experimental natural philosophy’ in late eighteenth-century Britain, as a recent article suggests. ⁵⁴ The codification of knowledge on seamanship was, after all, a phenomenon that occurred in several European countries at more or less the same time. To understand why this happened, we should take a closer look at the institutional settings in which this burgeoning literature on seamanship functioned, and at the social and political contexts that, in turn, shaped these settings.

New institutions and the rise of literature on seamanship

All of the printed works on seamanship discussed above, except for a number of maritime dictionaries, were primarily produced for educational purposes. Most of the texts were written by experienced seamen for a readership of young seamen in training. The training of seafarers increasingly took place in an institutional setting. Whereas knowledge on seamanship until the end of the eighteenth century was usually transmitted by hands-on instruction during voyages at sea, formal schooling became more and more important after 1800. This happened in two ways – namely, on specialized training ships moored in port or as part of the curriculum of a nautical school on land. Examinations became a normal means to assess whether seamen possessed the necessary qualifications for employment on board. The nineteenth century thus became, for seamanship, the era of schools, training ships and examinations. And the emergence of literature on seamanship was largely an outcome of these changes in training and selection.

The connection between the rise of schools and the production of printed literature on seamanship first emerged in Spain and France. These were the very states where the emphasis in the education of naval officers from an early date was on science and theoretical instruction. ⁵⁵ Gamboa's Vocabulario of 1696 was originally written for the pupils of the Real Colegio Seminario de San Telmo in Seville. This nautical school, which opened its doors in 1681, admitted orphans between the ages of eight and fourteen for a basic education in reading, writing, arithmetic and the Christian religion, followed by training in seamanship, gunnery and the art of navigation, which would prepare them for a career in the navy or on merchant ships sailing to the Indies. San Telmo was perhaps also the first nautical school to boast a facility for teaching seamanship in practice within its very walls. A movable model ship was built in its courtyard in 1729. A similar vessel was installed in its twin institution in Malaga 60 years later. Although these model ships were smaller than real vessels, they still had the equipment needed to teach pupils the essentials of how to handle a ship. ⁵⁶

In France, a link between schools and literature on seamanship already existed before 1800, too. Nicolas Charles Romme, who in the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s published the first books specifically dealing with masts and sails, as well as a manual on ship construction and a maritime dictionary, was a professor of mathematics and navigation at the school for naval cadets in Rochefort. ⁵⁷ State-sponsored schools for the training of officers such as Rochefort existed in the country from the end of the seventeenth century. The first test with a ‘floating school’ in the form of a training vessel took place in 1774. Training ships became a permanent fixture of the school system in the mid nineteenth century. ⁵⁸

Britain and the Netherlands, by contrast, only saw a connection between schools, training ships and the production of books on seamanship emerge after 1800. The 1834 Naval Officer's Guide for Preparing Ships for Sea, by Lieutenant Charles Martelli, was still a product of the time-honoured practice of instructing young officers during regular voyages at sea. The book was written on a vessel of the Royal Navy, HMS Donegal. The author called himself ‘a mate of twenty years servitude’ who had long resided ‘in a midshipman's berth’. ⁵⁹ The Naval Cadet's Guide, published by Lieutenant George S. Nares in 1860, by contrast, was written while Nares was teaching naval cadets on board HMS Britannia ‘in the intervals between the hours of instruction’. ⁶⁰ The Britannia, moored in the port of Dartmouth, was specifically commissioned for the training of young naval officers the year before – the first ship of its kind. The Royal Navy remained focused on training ships well into the twentieth century. ⁶¹ A similar evolution as in Britain took place in the Netherlands. While the Handboekje voor den zee-leerling by Martinus Lambrechts in 1731 was, like Martelli's guide, an outcome of instruction at sea, the Handleiding tot de scheepsbesturing by Joseph Franc, which appeared nearly a century later, was a product of teaching seamanship at the school for naval cadets in Delft. ⁶²

Dictionaries, guides or manuals for seamen were normally not commissioned by a higher authority. They were written on the initiative of the authors themselves, although often in response to a perceived need in education or for examinations, as they explained in their titles or prefaces. Captain Maxwell, a teacher of navigation, left no doubt about his motivation in the preface to his guide on seamanship from 1869: ‘these pages have been written expressly for the purpose of assisting candidates to pass both the Ordinary and Extra Examinations of the Local Marine Board’. ⁶³

However, some books on seamanship were produced at the instigation of state agencies. And where else could this have happened but in France? The first attempt to coordinate the production of books on seamanship was a failure. The Académie royale de marine, founded in 1752, launched an ambitious project to publish an extensive maritime dictionary written by a team of the best specialists in France. Work on this huge undertaking continued until 1780, but it was never finished. ⁶⁴ Another attempt partly succeeded. Charles de la Croix, Marquis de Castries, conceived during his tenure as Ministre de la Marine between 1780 and 1787 a great scheme to offer ‘young men who devoted themselves for service at sea’ a set of separate treatises, each dealing with a particular aspect of the navy, such as ship construction, masts, rigging, cordage or sails. ⁶⁵ The books by Forfait on masts and Lescallier on rigging were an outcome of this second grand projet.

Officers and ratings

The target audience for this growing literature on seamanship at first mostly consisted of young naval officers, with officers of long-distance trading companies in second place. The titles, subtitles and prefaces of many books make this abundantly clear. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the intended reading public expanded to include prospective masters and mates of the mercantile marine. Officers in these various branches of shipping were also the very group of seamen who for a long time formed the majority of the pupils enrolled in nautical schools and on training ships.

Before 1800, seamen in lower ranks, by contrast, rarely received any formal schooling at all. One of the few exceptions was the institute of San Telmo in Seville, which, initially at least, aimed to take in boys ‘to teach them to serve as apprentice sailors’ in the navy and fleets to the Indies. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the emphasis increasingly lay on the training of pilots for the Indies trade. ⁶⁶ The Convitto di San Giuseppe, established in Naples in 1770, likewise admitted orphans to train them for different jobs at sea. A shipmaster gave them instruction on the art of navigation; a carpenter taught on the art of ship repair and ship construction; and seamen trained them in the art of handling a ship. ⁶⁷ Another example is the Kweekschool voor de Zeevaart in Amsterdam, which was founded in 1785. Like San Telmo and San Giuseppe, the Kweekschool offered boys in-house training for all seamen’s ranks in different branches of shipping. And like the institute in Seville, this school had a small-scale sailing vessel in its courtyard, where pupils could practise the basics of seamanship. ⁶⁸

The bulk of common seamen did not learn the ropes at school but in the same way as sailors always had – by hands-on instruction on board. The most structured form of instruction existed in the British mercantile marine. As a result of regulations laid down by law since 1703, shipowners were obliged to take apprentices on board on every sizable vessel. The number of apprentices was specified in relation to tonnage, with up to a maximum of five on ships of 800 tons or more. Apprentices were bound for four years. Masters, in return, were obliged to teach them the ‘art, trade or business of a mariner or seaman’. This did not imply that all young sailors had to be apprenticed; most of them never were. Yet, in around 1850, the total number of registered apprentices still formed more than 16 per cent of all seafarers in Britain. After mandatory apprenticeships in merchant shipping were abolished shortly afterwards, along with the entire framework of the Navigation Laws, the proportion of apprentices dropped to barely two per cent in 1900. The only reason why apprenticeships in the merchant navy survived at all was that sail experience at sea was still required for prospective masters and mates. ⁶⁹ In the fishing industry, apprenticeships continued to flourish a while longer because they were widely seen as a useful means to solve the problem of the shortage of labour. ⁷⁰

As apprenticeships declined in the nineteenth century, training ships multiplied. The earliest known training ship was the Marine Society, which was moored on the River Thames in 1786 and provided an education in seamanship for boys for the navy. But a veritable ‘training ship movement’ did not emerge until after 1850. Between 1856 and 1885, no less than 21 stationary ships were established for the training of personnel for the merchant marine in ports all over Britain, two of which were meant for future officers and the rest for ratings. ⁷¹ Training ships also supplied a growing number of apprentices for the fishing industry by the end of the nineteenth century. ⁷²

Similar facilities for training in seamanship were created outside Britain, too. In the Netherlands, for example, stationary training ships for sailors in the merchant marine appeared in Amsterdam and Rotterdam in around 1850, and for seamen in the navy in the 1870s. ⁷³ From the 1850s, boatswain apprentices in the navy were trained on a guard ship moored in the port of Flushing. A school for the training of sailors for the navy, the Kweekschool voor Zeevaart, was established in Leiden in 1855. ⁷⁴

Unlike schools or training ships for officers, however, these institutions for the training of ratings seldom gave rise to the writing of printed guides or manuals on seamanship. An exception was the manual on rigging published by Lieutenant G. P. J. Mossel in 1858, which was an outcome of his teaching of boatswain apprentices on the guard ship in Flushing. ⁷⁵ Even in a new institutional setting, common seamen as a rule still learned seamanship by hands-on instruction rather than with the help of books.

The shift from tacit to explicit knowledge regarding seamanship was thus related to a change in the environment in which the training and selection of seamen took place. But it was not a relationship of a simple, direct kind. Not all guides and manuals on seamanship were produced in new institutional settings such as schools or training ships, and not all new institutional settings generated printed works on seamanship.

Driving forces

Why were officers especially supposed to need books on seamanship? It was, after all, not the officers who did the actual work on the rigging, sails, anchors or engines. Yet, even if officers did not pull the ropes, tie the knots, heave the anchor or fire the engines themselves, they still had to know all about the handling and manoeuvring of ships in order to be able to give the right orders. Was the codification of these seamanship skills in printed literature just another example of the ‘appropriation of knowledge’ by people from ‘middling and elite social backgrounds’, which ‘excluded’ ‘manual workers’ and hardened social and intellectual hierarchies, as Jones has argued for Britain? ⁷⁶ Even if this were the case, the question remains: Why? Was this phenomenon somehow related to the process of the professionalization of naval officers? It is true that naval officers in the eighteenth century ‘began the process of defining [the] boundaries’ of their group, but one of the ways they did so was by self-replication: ‘The most common occupation for naval officers ‘fathers across the eighteenth century was naval officers’, as Evan Wilson put it. ⁷⁷ But if the sons of naval officers were more likely to be competent naval officers than the sons of different kinds of professionals because they could acquire the required skills through transmission from father to son, why were seamanship skills nevertheless increasingly put down in print?

The explanation, I would suggest, can rather be found in a number of other factors of a sociopolitical nature. First, officers had to learn seamanship skills in a different, more standardized way than before because higher authorities required them to do so, even if the actual work continued to be done by lower-ranking crew members. The higher authorities in question were state officials, politicians and directors of semi-public organizations such as chartered trading companies. It was these powers that were the main driving forces behind the increase in the number of new institutions for the training and selection of seamen, starting with officers and, in a next phase, moving to other ranks of mariners. ⁷⁸ This process began before 1700 but gathered pace in the eighteenth century. ⁷⁹

A similar process had started much earlier for the art of navigation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an explosion of printed manuals and treatises on navigation, sailing directions, nautical charts and sea atlases. This increase in printed material relevant to navigation was closely linked with the expansion of European ocean shipping and the growing interconnection between science and navigation technology, which had much more revolutionary consequences for the art of navigation than for the art of seamanship. Thanks to the massive shift to print, knowledge and skills useful for navigating the oceans could be transmitted more easily to larger groups of seafarers than if it were purely done by oral or hands-on instruction on board. And the first bodies that set competency requirements for their personnel in the art of navigation were organizations involved in ocean shipping – navies, state-controlled shipping organizations and chartered trading companies. ⁸⁰

Seamanship, by contrast, remained for a long time outside the span of control of such higher powers . As of old, it was entirely transmitted by hands-on instruction on board. But states and other organizations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt an increasing urge to intervene more directly in this transmission process as they became more concerned about whether enough well-trained seamen would be available in future to keep up with international rivals. Seafaring states needed a reliable ‘pool’ of skilled manpower – both officers and ratings – to be able to keep in naval competition with other states. Chartered trading companies, followed by other firms in the shipping industry, likewise required a sufficient supply of qualified seamen to sustain competition in their respective spheres of activity. What had happened before with regard to the art of navigation, from circa 1700 onwards, increasingly also took place with regard to the art of seamanship. New institutional arrangements were created for the transmission and certification of knowledge and skills relating to seamanship, in the form of schools, training ships and examination regulations. These arrangements were supervised, or subsidized, by states, chartered trading companies or other organizations in the shipping industry.

In this drive for new institutions, France and Spain initially led the way, with the express purpose of supporting their navies and Indies fleets. The reason was probably that, in these countries, the ‘self-replication’ of naval officers was less common than in Britain, for example. The vast majority of French and Spanish naval officers were recruited from the nobility. ⁸¹ An early example of intervention on the part of the state to ensure a continued supply of skilled seamen for the navy in Britain was the statute of 1703 regarding apprentices on merchant ships. In the middle of the nineteenth century, as David Williams has shown, traditional concerns about the manning of the mercantile marine were given ‘an added impetus’, first, because ‘the growth of Britain's trade and mercantile marine demanded more men’; second, because 'the navy's abrogation of impressment placed additional emphasis on the mercantile marine’; and third, because the removal of restraints on the employment of foreign labour led to ‘a steadily growing non-British presence in the labour force’, which was deemed undesirable for ‘strategic and nationalistic reasons’ as a result of the repeal of the Navigation Laws. To these fears about supply was added ‘the more specific fear of [a] shortfall of skilled seamen’, Williams remarks, which in the public's mind was partly related to the decline of the apprenticeship system. ⁸² Founding schools, establishing training ships, introducing statutory examinations for masters and mates in the mercantile marine – all these initiatives after 1850 were attempts to address the growing concerns about the supply of native seamen and the transmission of seamanship skills that had become evident by mid-century.

In the Netherlands, it was the biggest trading company, the Dutch East India Company, that took the lead in establishing new institutions for testing the knowledge of seamanship. From the mid 1740s, candidate officers of the Company had to sit examinations not only on the art of navigation (‘theory’), as had been usual since the early seventeenth century, but also on seamanship (‘practice’). Special examiners were appointed to take these examinations on seamanship; these examiners in turn also began to write books on the subject. Cornelis Pietersz., author of the Handleiding quoted above, was one of these examiners ‘on practice’ in the service of the Dutch East India Company. ⁸³

Another sociopolitical factor that favoured the rise of new institutions, which in turn promoted the demand for literature on seamanship, lay more in the field of philanthropy. This was particularly true for schools and training vessels that offered training in seamanship skills for free. In this way, these facilities provided employment opportunities for all sorts of people in need, especially orphans and paupers. Local governments, charity organizations and other kinds of associations in many places in Europe, concerned about the problem of poverty, committed themselves to support these new institutions. The Seminario de San Telmo in Seville, the Convitto di San Giuseppe in Naples, the Kweekschool voor de Zeevaart in Amsterdam, the Kweekschool voor Zeevaart in Leiden and the numerous training ships in Britain from the establishment of the Marine Society in 1786 onwards all owed their existence to some extent to this concern from above for the disadvantaged in society. ⁸⁴ The increase in the number of new institutional settings for the transmission of seamanship skills in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was thus the product of a complex mix of sociopolitical forces that operated both inside and outside the shipping sector.

Conclusion

‘Show and write’ – such was the rule for transmitting knowledge on seamanship by the end of the nineteenth century. Seamanship had finally been made explicit. The transformation from tacit to explicit knowledge, as this article has shown, began with the publication of the first maritime dictionaries in the early seventeenth century and, from the middle of the eighteenth century, branched out to other genres of maritime literature – notably, introductory guides and manuals on seamanship, which dealt either with seamanship in general or with specific topics such as rigging, masts or sails.

While maritime dictionaries were not only written by authors with a maritime background and were, in fact, often also aimed at non-specialist readers, the other genres of maritime literature were mainly produced by seamen for seamen. Most of this literature was produced as an aid for training young officers in the art of seamanship. From the late eighteenth century onwards, in all major seafaring countries in Europe, the teaching of seamanship skills increasingly took place in an institutional setting – that is, schools and training ships. Moreover, examinations became a normal means to assess whether candidates were fit to be admitted to a higher rank in the ship's hierarchy. This article has thus demonstrated that the codification of knowledge on seamanship in the form of printed literature was closely related to a change in the environment in which the training and selection of seamen took place. And the impetus behind this transformation was not technological change but the growing aspirations of states and semi-public organizations to gain more control over the quality of the personnel – both officers and ratings – needed to man their ships.