AVAST ye scurvy dogs ! Feast yer eyes upon this savvy arrrticle on Pirate School. Marvel ye at tales of pirates learning the sine and the cosine and the ship's logarrrithm ! Arrr ! Best yet get yerselves down to yonder Pirate School and behold the arts of navigation. Them landlubbers in the movie industry don't oft include scenes of pirates doing mathemaaaaatical calculations, but this fine piece fer Aeon puts 'em to rights. There be just the one problem : it be not written like a pirate. Arrr !
Celestial navigation was certainly feasible, but it required real technical skills as well as fairly advanced mathematics. Sailors needed to calculate the angle of a star’s elevation using a cross-staff or quadrant. They needed to track the direction of their ship’s course relative to magnetic north. Trigonometry and logarithms offered the best way to make these essential measurements: for these, a sailor needed to be adept at using dense numerical tables. All of a sudden, a navigator’s main skill wasn’t his memory – it was his mathematical ability.
Van den Broucke taught readers and students a useful technique: how to use the Little Dipper to tell time. The handle of the dipper points at the North Star, and the bowl of the dipper rotates around it over the course of 24 hours. That means that when the two farthest ‘guard stars’ moved 15 degrees, one hour has passed. Once the constellation has rotated 90 degrees, six hours have passed. This functionality was so useful that most early textbooks included diagrams, often with volvelles, moveable discs that help the reader understand the concept.
It be faaascinating ter that back in days of yore, it were pr'bly just as difficult ter learn the most advanced knowledge of the day as it is nowadays, even though we be more advanced by far than way back then. It be also fascinating to think of pirates singing nautical songs about naaavigation. Arrr !
To help students remember the stars, the song rendered all the constellations in 12 rhyming verses... These verses were set to the tunes of familiar hymns. Devout sailors could sing along, or so seemed to be the intention... Gietermaker left the songs out of subsequent printings. He did retain two volvelles, suggesting that sailors found the hands-on spinning discs more useful than the verse and tunes.
They be not bawdy enough, pr'bly ! And they be having to wrestle with descriptive maths problems on the seven seas just like schoolchildren today :
"A Merchant man … falls into the hands of pyrats; who amongst other things take away his sea-compasse. When he is gotten clear, he sailes away as directly as he can, and after two dayes meetes with a man of war [ie, a large naval vessel]."What is the next step? Naturally to hunt down the pirates! Since the merchant had ‘sailed since at least 64 leagues betweene the south and west, what course shall the man of warre shape to finde these pyrates?’
And just like today, they be focused on learning the test and not proper stuff :
Instead of paying 36 florins for an entire winter of lessons, Amsterdam-based mariners paid just 6 florins for a crash course focused on the oral and written portions of the tests. Later manuscript workbooks confirm this strategy: students often focused on the questions they knew would be on their exam. Teachers at the close of the 17th century were already ‘teaching to the test’
In 1673, in a North Sea skirmish that killed nearly 150 men, the French privateer Jean-François Doublet took a bullet that tossed him from the forecastle and broke his arm in two places. How did the precocious young second lieutenant choose to spend his convalescence?
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