Description du projet
Les routiers nautiques: une source historique de l’histoire des océans
Les routiers nautiques et les journaux de bord des navires sont des documents qui regorgent d’informations importantes sur la navigation océanique. Ces registres contiennent des informations qui vont au-delà des distances et des latitudes et qui concernent un large éventail de disciplines. Les informations relatives à la géographie, l’océanographie, la météorologie et la géophysique figurant dans ces précieux documents en font des sources importantes de connaissances historiques. Les routiers nautiques pourraient révéler le processus historique dans le cadre duquel des concepts globaux de la Terre ont été formés. Le projet RUTTER, financé par l’UE, entend décrire comment les navigateurs des XVIe et XVIIe siècles percevaient l’observation de la Terre. Le projet permettra également d’identifier et de classer les informations contenues dans les routiers et les journaux de bord ibériques de la période.
Objectif
Early modern nautical rutters (sailing directions) are the earliest Western documents that testify to the stable and regular lived experience of traversing the earth’s oceans on a global, planetary scale. Nautical rutters (and ship’s loogbooks) are technical documents that collect and analyse critical information for the successful accomplishment of oceanic navigation. This includes elements of strict nautical nature (courses, distances, and latitudes), as well as information on oceanography (currents and tides), meteorology (winds and storms), geography, geophysics (magnetic declination) and the natural world. Their unique value lies not only in the fact that they are exceptional historical repositories of information about the world on a planetary scale but, more importantly, that they document the emergence of global concepts about the earth. In fact, no earlier documents contain information about the earth on a comparable worldwide scale. Thus, their historical value is peerless. Using these exceptional, yet poorly known sources, the main objective of this project is to write a narrative of the scaling up of a scientific description of the earth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the lived experience of travelling and observing the earth in long-distance sea voyages. As a preliminary task, a systematic search, identification and classification of the information contained in early modern Iberian rutters and ship’s logbooks will be performed. This will be followed by an extensive multidisciplinary study of their content aiming at radically improving our present knowledge of the historical process that led to the formation of global concepts about the earth.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitution d’accueil
1749-016 Lisboa
Portugal