Book Report

As mentioned in Megan’s Hot Chocolate News our group read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, the story of Nathaniel Bowditch, the man who revised the standards for sailing ships around the world.

Set just after the Revolutionary War period, tall sailing ships sailed around the world, trading spices, clothing, machines, and ideas, young Nat Bowditch grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, part of a family of sailors.  When he was only 12 years old, he was indentured at a Chip Chandlery – a sort of hardware store for ships and sailors.  While there, he discovered that he had a knack for learning on his own. 

When he was sent on an errand to look something up in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, he discovered a whole new world of interesting things to learn about.  However, when he got to the advanced math, he became stumped because the Cyclopaedia only skimmed over the subject rather than diving deeply into it.  To solve his questions, he was given the loan of a copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia” to learn the math, but it was written in Latin.  To learn Latin, Nathan began with his Bible, John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  He then read it in Latin, used a dictionary to look up words he didn’t know, and moved forward.  Once he became sufficiently comfortable with Latin and the Bible, Nathan started in on Principia – he would work to translate each word of a sentence, and then had to figure out what the sentence meant!

By the time Nat was 21, and at the end of his indenture, he had learned quite a lot about many different things.  He was offered a job with a group of men who were going to survey the countryside around Salem.  His great success with this job landed him his first opportunity to sail on a ship, thus beginning his several trips across the oceans and around the world.

Everyone depended on Moore’s Navigator to know where things were in and about the ocean, but because of the huge number of computations in each table and the large number of tables in the book, no one had ever checked the math.  Therefore, for many years, ships and sailors had been killed by the sea because of the mistakes found in Moore’s.  Nathaniel Bowditch set out to check each computation so that corrections could be published, but by the time he found 8000 mistakes, he decided it would be easier to just write his own book.  “It’s a simple matter of mathematics!” he’d say.

Nat included in his book, The American Practical Navigator, simply worded instructions to use a sextant, the definitions of ship words, how to navigate a ship, a new method of “taking a lunar”, as well as all the various tables that go with each.  His goal in writing the book was that anyone who could follow the instructions and read the charts, along with do simple addition and subtraction, could navigate confidently.

Today, the American Practical Navigator, or “Bowditch”is the standard for ships and sailors around the world.   It is an easy-to-read reference book that is interesting and understandable.  Regularly updated, it has gone through at least 75 editions since 1802, when it was first published.    “Bowditch is carried on the bridge of every U.S. Navy ship and should be the mainstay of any serious navigator’s library.” (http://astore.amazon.com/idrathebesail-20/detail/0939837544)

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is one of my personal all-time favorite books, so I was especially happy to re-read it for this assignment.  I loved the persistence of young Nat; I loved the sturdy brother, friend, captain, and husband he was; I loved that he worked hard to fulfill a life’s dream; and I loved that he learned so thoroughly on his own.

Kevin’s Totally Awesome Blog and his fun Prezi presentation, gave some interesting info about Jean Lee Latham, the author of Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, who had to study math, science, astronomy, and navigation in order to write the book convincingly; the Newberry Award the book won in 1956; and how the book really does tie into our Digital Civilization class.

Since Amazon.com is the favorite bookseller in our house, I reposted this blog post as a review.  However, since they take a day or two to actually get it online, it doesn't show up quite yet!