A rutter is a mariner's handbook of written sailing directions. Before the advent of nautical charts, rutters were the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation.
It was known as a periplus ("sailing-around" book) in Classical antiquity and a portolano ("port book") to Medieval Italian sailors in the Mediterranean Sea. Portuguese navigators of the 16th C. called it a roteiro, the French a routier, from which the English word "rutter" is derived. In Dutch, it was called a leeskarte ("reading chart") and in German a Seebuch ("sea book").
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Before the advent of nautical charts in the 14th C., navigation at sea relied on the accumulated knowledge of navigators and pilots. Plotting a course at sea required knowing the direction and distance between point A and point B. Knowledge of where places lay relative to each other was acquired by mariners during their long experience at sea.
The earliest peripluses of classical antiquity were not necessarily written as practical navigational handbooks. Some were more akin to an adventure travelogue, to celebrate a famous voyage. Others were disguised as such, notably the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax from the 4th C. BCE, which described the harbors and landmarks along the north African coast west of the Nile delta. Still others were designed as commercial guides for merchants, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written around 100 BCE by a Greek merchant in Egypt, as a guide to the market ports of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
The re-emergence of maritime commerce in the Mediterranean Sea during the Middle Ages (12th–13th centuries), spearheaded by Italian ports like Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa and Venice, led to the rise of a new set of handbooks, known as portolani ("port books"), designed for the practical use of mariners. These were likely first compiled by professional mariners and pilots, probably as a mnemonic set of notes for their own personal use.[1] These notes were probably passed secretly within their profession ranks, from master to apprentice. Only a few of these Italian handbooks were made public, and even fewer have survived to this day. The most complete surviving portolano is the famous Il compasso da navigare, written c.1250 and published in Genoa in 1296.
In their sailing instructions, Medieval portolan handbooks distinguished between various types of routes, e.g. per starea (coastal cabotage), per peleggio (open-sea sailing between two points). Portolan handbooks expressed their sailing directions in terms compass rose points and distances. The reliance on the magnetic compass (an instrument that only really began being used for navigation in the 13th C.[2]) distinguishes the Medieval portolano from the earlier Classical periplus.
It is believed that the nautical charts that suddenly emerged in Genoa, Venice, Majorca and other maritime centers after the late 13th C. were constructed from the written information contained in contemporary written pilot handbooks, hence the term portolan charts.[3] The wealth of detail contained in portolano handbooks is reflected in the portolan charts, stunningly accurate even by modern standards.
Handbooks often contained a wealth of information beyond sailing directions. For instance, they frequently had detailed physical descriptions of shorelines, harbors, islands, channels, notes about tides, landmarks, reefs, shoals and difficult entries, instructions on how to use navigational instruments to determine position and plot routes, calendars, astronomical tables, mathematical tables and calculation rules (notably the rule of marteloio), lists of customs regulations at different ports, medical recipes, instructions on ship repair, etc.[4] As a result, the nautical chart never fully replaced the handbook, but remained suppementary to it.
Among notable rutters is the Grand Routier, written by the French pilot Pierre Garcie, c.1483 and published in 1502–3, which focused on the shores of the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, and its peculiarities. Translated into English as the Rutter of the Sea in 1528, it was reprinted many times, and remained the pre-eminent rutter used by English sailors for decades.[5]
Perhaps the most dramatic rutter was the 1595 Reysgheschrift by Dutch sailor Jan Huygen van Linschoten. Having sailed to the Asia aboard Portuguese ships, Linschoten publicized the sailing directions to the East Indies that had been assiduously kept secret by the Portuguese for nearly a century. The publication of Lischoten's rutter was an explosive sensation, and launched the race by a myriad of Dutch and English companies for the East Indies in its aftermath.[6]