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

by Sara Caputo

From their first appearance on Renaissance maps, linear tracks representing maritime voyages have shaped the way we see the world. But why do we depict journeys as lines, and what is their deeper meaning? Ferdinand Magellan's route to the Pacific embodied the promise of adventure and colonisation, while the scientific charts of the Royal Navy inspired others to plan conquests, navigate treacherous waters and establish settlements across the oceans.

In Tracks on the Ocean, prize-winning historian Sara Caputo charts a hidden history of the modern world through the tracks left on maps and the sea. Taking us from ancient Greek itineraries to twenty-first-century digital mapping, via the voyages of Drake and Cook, the decks of Napoleonic warships and the boiler rooms of ocean liners, Caputo reveals how marks on maps have changed the course of modernity.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

Published August 29, 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 😒

[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.