Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel

by Sara Caputo

An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.

 

Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.

 

Genres: History, Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2024

Reviews

[History Today]

In Tracks on the Ocean, Sara Caputo focuses on another imaginative leap, this one made by the anonymous sailors who, for long-forgotten reasons, decided to record their voyages as a line on their charts. In her inventive cartographic history, Caputo frames these tracks as conceptual tools as well as narrative ones. Sometimes ‘simple [and] unidirectional’, sometimes a ‘puzzling maze of pencilled lines’, they provoke discussions of celebrity, patriotism, secrecy, and surveillance.

Sometime after the voyages of Vikings and Columbus alike, the notion from the biblical Book of Wisdom that a ‘ship follows no path and leaves no signs’ was dramatically overturned. Why? Like Haywood, Caputo sees the ocean as a precipitating factor. Terrestrial journeys did not inspire their protagonists to trace out paths for the simple reason that roads already showed their progress. But in the 16th century, ‘ship tracks appear almost out of nowhere’.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Margaret E. Schotte teaches at York University, Toronto and is the author of Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

[Brian Hanson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, how disappointing. "Trailblazing" should be an exciting subject, but Sara Caputo (an apt surname) gives us an academic thesis riddled with the usual academic obsessions with imperialism and the exercise of power.

[Leena · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shit. Filled with anecdotes that have no follow up with the subject they are talking about.

Constant downgrading of Indigenous cultures feats on the ocean and the possibility they could have done their seafaring WITHOUT influence from the west! Key example Pacific Islanders, PNG, Timor, and Indigenous Australians.

Also, in the first few chapters where they talk about who invented maps and the different types of maps, again with the downgrading of Indigenous cultures. The oldest continuous culture on earth, Indigenous Australians, have been painting aerial and hydrographic maps and there is NO mention of them but a tiny reference to a South American Indigenous group but AGAIN referenced to the possibility of them being influenced by the west 😒

[Minh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuốn này ngược lại với cuốn "DNA cổ đại" đã review trước đó, thiên về story-telling và rõ ràng là cuốn hơn hẳn. Nó sẽ khám phá các đường hải tuyến được tạo ra thế nào và bằng cách nào trong lịch sử loài người, khởi phát từ các bản đồ ghi lại chặng đường trong Kinh Thánh đến khi khoa học - địa lý phát triển, chúng dùng để khai phá các vùng đất mới, được thủy thủ dùng để đánh dấu đường đi và nhanh chóng trở thành công cụ giám sát, chuyển từ để "giám sát" sang "bị"giám sát. Sau đó, tác giả cũng bàn nhiều hơn đến các chủ đề bên lề: môi trường, giới tính lẫn chủ nghĩa giám sát. Cuốn sách được viết khá dễ chịu, đi kèm với nhiều dẫn chứng thú vị, qua đó cũng bàn về ngành bản đồ học từ cổ chí kim. Những câu punch-line khép lại các chương hoặc đoạn cũng rất thú vị. Chỉ là nó thiếu 1 sự phản tư gì đó để lại ấn tượng, bởi nhìn chung nó vẫn đi theo 2 cách riêng biệt: theo chiều lịch sử và đặt góc nhìn vào các cộng đồng bên lề.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim whilst visiting Maritime Greenwich - and I'm so glad I did! This is a fascinating, well-written, and brilliantly researched book about maps and maritime travel. It's academic, but highly readable and engaging. It also poses some thoughtful questions about how we record the history of travel and exploration - and about the voices who are not heard. Highly recommended.

[Lina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read, with quite a unique premise I think, investigating how and why we’re using tracks on maps to represent journeys, especially on the sea. That being said often it was a bit convoluted and also jumped between topics and points quite wildly. Every chapter opened with an anecdote but then by the end when it closed with the anecdote I often didn’ feel like it was well connected. I think I’ll remember some interesting fun facts, but that’s about it.

[Ivor Armistead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic.

[Roger Morgan-Grenville · Rating 3 out of 5]

Work of enormous scholarship, but a surprisingly hard read

[Mairead · Rating 2 out of 5]

Varied

[SWC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating description on how sailors and others plot their courses on the high seas.