Signals and Instructions
The problem with details
Last week, I finished teaching my elective “War at Sea in the Age of Sail.” I thought it went pretty well, and the students said the same thing. But there’s always room for improvement. At the beginning of the term, I posted here about attempting to hold discussions as practice:
Sometimes, that happened, but not as often as I would like. Next year, I’m going to work harder to set expectations with the students on that front. I don’t think every class can be entirely a practice discussion, so I’m going to have to explain my methods at the outset and delineate the times during which I’d like to remove myself from the middle of the room. Onward.
But the other note I’m making for next year leads to the subject of this post. The class that I was least happy with was Week 6. Here’s what the syllabus says we were trying to accomplish:
WEEK 6: Medicine and Imperial Rivalry
What role did the environment play in shaping European imperial projects? This class will focus on the Caribbean, where mosquito-borne diseases decimated European soldiers and sailors. What tools were available to fight these diseases? How did empires adapt to conditions in the Caribbean?
I assign most of a fantastic book: J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–87 and 137–91. Students regularly cite it as one of their favorite readings of the term.
In the age of sail, disease killed far more sailors than combat did. I can’t teach a class on war at sea in the age of sail without talking about medicine before germ theory and its implications for naval operations. Also, the Caribbean was the site of dozens of significant campaigns, sitting as it did at the crossroads of the Atlantic world.
All that seems set up nicely, right? I’ve got a good book to read and a topic that connects both some course fundamentals with specific examples of actual naval operations. Yet it didn’t really work as well as I had hoped, and my best guess as to why that’s the case relates to a broader challenge I’m facing in a current research project.
The Siege and Capture of Havana
In the first part of class, we have a general discussion about medicine in the eighteenth century. I have some prepared slides on humorism—the belief that illness was the result of an imbalance in the body’s four humors. We discuss the challenges of scurvy and why it took navies so long to figure out that fresh fruits and vegetables prevented it. We also discuss malaria and yellow fever, reinforcing McNeill’s ideas about the dangers those diseases posed in the tropics.
The class pivots on McNeill’s discussion of how the Spanish empire saved money on imperial defense. The Spanish learned that they didn’t have to deploy massive military forces to the tropics—all they needed were a few forts with “seasoned” defenders. When an enemy force arrived to attack the fort, the defenders just had to delay them long enough to allow malaria and yellow fever to do their jobs. Since the defenders had greater resistance than the attackers (that’s what “seasoned” meant), the attackers usually succumbed before the defenders ran out of supplies.
But that strategy didn’t always work. In 1762, the British overcame the disease threat and captured Havana. (Then, everybody died, but only after the city had surrendered.) In the second half of class, I assign students to groups to get into the weeds on how the successful operation happened. Each group is responsible for recreating the actions of a different British officer involved in the operation, both army and navy. I give them a list of relevant primary documents written by and to those men during the operation, and I try to set the scene for who is doing what, when. It’s very complicated, as all amphibious operations are, and students have to get up to speed quickly on who has which forces where.
I want the students to see similarities between the challenges of an amphibious operation in the eighteenth century and the present. I want them to see the differences, too, mainly connected to medicine and communication. I also want them to see how contingent British success in this operation was. By reading the documents, I hope that the students will get a better feel for how eighteenth-century navies worked and officers thought.
One problem I ran into this year is that I rushed it. Students always take longer to read eighteenth-century documents than I expect. The documents in this case are printed by the Navy Records Society—no eighteenth-century handwriting here—but the syntax is still challenging. I will budget more time next year, if I keep the exercise.
There’s another problem, though, which I’m thinking about both in my own research and as I contemplate next year’s class: details.
What did he know, and when did he know it?
Putting ourselves in the shoes of officers in the middle of a naval or military operation generates a thousand questions. Who knew what, when, and why did they think that what they were doing was a good idea? I spent most of this year’s Week 6 class trying to answer very specific student questions about why their assigned officers behaved as they did. I didn’t spend enough time steering the discussion towards the goals I laid out above. I think we accomplished some of those goals anyways, but I left the class feeling dissatisfied with my own performance.
I should have expected that a thousand questions would bloom, because that’s exactly what happens whenever historians delve deeply into the details of any historical event. I really should have anticipated this problem because it’s happened to me in the past and it’s about to happen to me again. My next article-length research project is going to look at one specific operation, and I will likely focus on one specific ship doing one specific thing based on one specific order. (More to come in future posts, I expect.) I’m excited by the detective work that I’ll get to do, but I’m less enthusiastic about discovering all the questions I can’t answer.
The last time I had a project like this, I got so frustrated by what I did not know, and could never know, that I wrote this:
Ironically, the closer we examine a historical event, the more uncertainty we uncover. At some point, we reach the end of the available empirical evidence and enter a realm where individual thought processes are impossible to reconstruct. A fundamental challenge of empirical historical research is to put ourselves in someone else’s head: to empathize, while remaining detached; to use judiciously our knowledge of how the story ends; and to describe the known unknowns and retreat in the face of the unknown unknowns.
I can’t believe they let me print such over-intellectualized nonsense in an actual journal! Never re-read your own stuff, is the real lesson.
But as I launch a new project that depends entirely on understanding tactical minutiae, I keep coming back to the underlying sentiment I was trying to convey in that passage. I’m fairly confident that I can discover where the empirical record ends in my new project, but it’s going to take a long time. I shouldn’t expect students to get there in an hour. For next year’s class, then, I need to revisit this lesson plan to try to accomplish the learning goals with less reliance on specific signals and specific instructions given at specific times and places. And for this research project, I need to prepare to think like a lawyer. Yuck.