FOOTNOTES:
[32] Proas.
[33] The name of the capital or chief town of Guam is spelled “Agana” to-day.
[34] The first American census of Guam reported a native population of between 9,000 and 10,000.
CHAPTER XV
NATHANIEL BOWDITCH AND HIS “PRACTICAL NAVIGATOR”
(1802)
“Hail to thee, poor little ship, Mayflower, of Delft Haven,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “poor common looking ship, hired by common charter-party for coined dollars—caulked with mere oakum and tar—provisioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon—yet what ship Argo or miraculous epic ship, built by the sea gods, was other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison!”
This fine rhapsody is of a piece with many another tribute to the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers and their immortal ship, and yet it would seem that some measure of praise were due that sturdy English seaman, Thomas Jones, the master of the Mayflower, who dared to make his blundering way across the Atlantic three centuries ago. Nor can one go wrong in admiring the courage and resourcefulness of any of these bold seamen who crossed oceans, made their landfalls and destined ports in safety and rolled home again with the crudest knowledge of navigation and almost no instruments for accurately charting their courses. Even a century ago shipmasters voyaged to faraway havens without chronometers, trusting to the log-line and compass to find their longitude by dead reckoning, and keeping track of their latitude with the quadrant and a “Navigator” or “Seaman’s Friend.” Nathaniel Silsbee of Salem records that as late as 1827 he made a passage in a brig to Rotterdam when they had no chronometer, and knew nothing of lunar observations, but navigated by dead reckoning, or the estimated speed of the ship. On his first voyage of eighteen months beyond the Cape of Good Hope, “the only spare canvass for the repair of a sail on board the vessel was what was on the cover of the log-book.”[35]
Before informing the landsman who Nathaniel Bowditch was, and what this self-taught astronomer and mathematician of Salem did to aid the great multitudes of those that go down to the sea in ships, it may be worth while to tell something of how our forefathers found their way from shore to shore. The real beginnings of the science of navigation as it is known to-day, are to be sought no further away than the seventeenth century which first saw in use the telescope, the pendulum, logarithms, the principles of the law of gravitation and instruments for measuring minute angles of the heavens. The master of the Mayflower in 1620 was hardly better equipped for ocean pathfinding than Columbus had been two centuries before him. Columbus in his turn had made his voyages possible by employing the knowledge gained by the earlier Portuguese exploring expeditions of the fifteenth century.
In fact, up to the time of the voyages undertaken under the patronage of Prince Henry of Portugal which led to the discovery of the Cape Verde Islands in 1447, and of Sierra Leone in 1460, thousands of years had passed without the slightest improvement in aids to navigation except the introduction of the mariners’ compass or magnetic needle among European nations at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The civilization which bordered the Mediterranean had known only coastwise traffic, and the vast ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules was mysterious and unfurrowed by the keels of trading galleys. Ancient discoveries in astronomy had taught that the altitudes of the sun and stars varied with respect to the location of the observer according to fixed laws, but the sailor had not dreamed of making use of these laws to find his latitude or longitude, except for the tradition that the adventurous Phoenician traders guided their vessels by means of the known position of the constellation of Ursa Minor, or of the Pole star.
Prince Henry of Portugal resolved to collect and systematize all the knowledge of nautical affairs obtainable in the early part of the fifteenth century, preparatory to sending forth his intrepid seamen as explorers of the Atlantic, and established an observatory near Cape St. Vincent in order to obtain more accurate tables of the declination of the sun, by which the mariner obtained his latitude in clumsy and unreliable fashion. The sun’s “declination” is its angular distance from the celestial equator, or the angle that a line drawn to the sun from any point at sea or on the earth’s surface makes with the plane of the celestial equator. In other words, the most important early discovery in navigation, next to the use of the magnetic needle, was the use of an instrument by which these angles could be determined and then utilized by means of astronomical tables to find a ship’s distance north or south of the earth’s equator, in degrees and fractions thereof.
John II of Portugal, grand-nephew of this enlightened and ambitious Prince Henry, endeavored to make further advancement in the same field and employed a “Committee on Navigation” to collect new data and make more calculations to lessen the errors in the tables of the sun’s declination. They turned their attention also to the instrument then in use for taking observations at sea, the cross-staff, and recommended that the astrolabe should be employed instead. The shipmaster of Columbus’ time went to sea with a cross-staff or astrolabe, a compass, a table of the sun’s declination, a table for connecting the altitude of the pole star and occasionally a very incorrect chart. The first sea chart ever seen in England was carried there in 1489 by Bartholomew Columbus. The log-line had not been invented and it was not until 1607 that any means was known of measuring a ship’s course through the water.
The cross-staff, as used by Columbus and Vasco da Gamma, consisted of two light battens or strips of wood, joined in the shape of a cross, the observer taking his sights from the ends of the “cross” and the “staff,” on which the angles were marked in degrees. As a device for measuring altitudes, the cross-staff had been known to ancient astronomers, although unknown to their seamen. The astrolabe was a copper disk, suspended from above with a plumb line beneath, and was found to be more convenient for taking altitudes than the cross-staff, and gradually superseded it.
The problem of finding longitudes at sea was far more baffling than that of latitude. It was early discovered that the only accurate and satisfactory method must be by ascertaining the difference in time at two meridians at the same instant, but until the invention of the chronometer this could be done only by finding, at two different places, the apparent time of the same celestial phenomena. The most obvious phenomena occurring to the early navigators were the motions of the moon among the fixed stars, which was first suggested in 1514. Better instruments and a sounder theory of the moon’s course were needed before its motions could be predicted with accuracy and recorded beforehand in an almanac in order to give the mariner a basis of comparison with his own observations, and the very principal of such a theory was, of course, unknown until Newton’s great discoveries, after which the problem of lunar observations began to have a chief place in the history of navigation.
The cross-staff and astrolabe gave place in time to the quadrant, which was a much more accurate instrument for observation and was used by the mariners of the eighteenth century. It, in its turn, was discarded for the sextant during the nineteenth century, which instrument, as improved and perfected, is in universal use at sea to-day for helping to find a ship’s position by means of the measurement of angles with respect to the sun and stars.
The chronometer, for finding longitudes, has taken the place of lunar observations, and the story of the struggle to invent a time-keeping mechanism of requisite accuracy for use at sea is one of the romances of science. Watches were unknown until 1530, but before the end of that century efforts had been made to ascertain the difference in time between two places by means of two of these crude timepieces which, however, were too unreliable to be of any practical service to navigation. The study of the problem was stimulated by the offer of a reward of a thousand crowns by Philip III of Spain, in 1598, to him who should discover a safer and more accurate method of finding longitude at sea than those in use. The States-General of Holland followed this with the offer of ten thousand florins, and in 1674 England became actively interested in the problem and Greenwich Observatory was established for the benefit of navigation and especially to calculate the moon’s exact position with respect to the fixed stars a year in advance and so make the “lunar observation” method of determining longitude a safer guide for the seamen than was the case with the tables then existing.
The pressing need of such investigation was brought home to England by a series of great disasters to her naval force because of blundering navigation. Several men-of-war were wrecked off Plymouth in 1691 through a mistake in their landfall and Sir Cloudesley Shovel, one of Great Britain’s immortal admirals, was lost with his fleet of ships off the Scilly Islands in 1707 because of a mistake in reckoning position. The government became convinced that the whole theory and practice of navigation needed a radical overhauling, and in 1714 a “royal commission for the discovery of longitude at sea” was appointed and at the same time a series of splendid prizes was offered for the invention of an accurate chronometer; five thousand pounds for a chronometer that would enable a ship six months from home to find her longitude within sixty miles; seven thousand five hundred pounds if the limit of error were within forty miles; ten thousand pounds if the position were correct within thirty miles. Another clause of this bill as enacted by Parliament offered a “premium” of twenty thousand pounds for the invention of any method whatever by means of which longitude at sea could be determined within thirty miles. Two years later the Regent of France offered a hundred thousand francs for the same purpose with similar stipulations.
There lived in Yorkshire a young watchmaker, John Harrison, who learned to make better watches than anybody else in England, and he had followed with keen interest the experiments which attempted to find longitude by means of watches set to keep Greenwich Observatory time as nearly as possible. He determined to attack the problem in his way and to compete for these royal prizes if it meant the devotion of a lifetime to the art of making chronometers. He spent years in making one instrument after another until in 1736 he carried to Greenwich a “gridiron pendulum clock” which was placed on board a ship bound for Lisbon. It proved to be accurate enough to correct the ship’s reckoning of observations by several miles, and was a notable improvement on any other timepiece of the day.
The Royal Commission urged Harrison to drop all other work and make a business of competing for the prizes, and offered to supply him with funds. For twenty-four years John Harrison strove to make a chronometer that should win the twenty thousand pounds. He was sixty-eight years old when, in 1761, he wrote the Commission that he had a chronometer which he was willing to send on a trial voyage, and asked that his son William be allowed to go with it to take care of the precious instrument.
The Commission sent the chronometer out in a ship bound to Jamaica in order that its mechanism might be tested by extremes of climate and temperature. On arriving at Jamaica the chronometer had varied but four seconds from Greenwich time. When the ship returned to England after an absence of 147 days, the total variation was found to be less than two minutes, or eighteen miles of longitude. The Commission demanded that the chronometer be given another trial, and it was sent to Barbados on a voyage five months long, at the end of which it showed a variation of only sixteen seconds from Greenwich time, which meant that John Harrison’s chronometer had lost or gained an average of about two-thirds of a second a week.
The Yorkshire watchmaker, after a lifetime of service, had won a momentous victory, but more exacting tests were demanded of his masterpiece and he was threatened with death from old age before he was finally given the twenty thousand pounds. Thenceforth the chronometer slowly made its way among ship owners as a necessary article of the captain’s equipment and the most important contribution to navigation since the magnetic compass.
Nathaniel Bowditch, author of “The Practical Navigator”
Old-fashioned mariners with an eye to expense continued to find their longitude by means of lunar observations for half a century and more after the chronometer had been perfected, and in American merchant vessels the chronometer may be said to belong to the nineteenth century era of navigation. “Dead reckoning” and lunar observations were the main-stays of the Salem sea captains in the days of their greatest activity over distant seas, and their fellow-townsman, Nathaniel Bowditch, author of “The Practical Navigator,” was a far greater man, and more useful to them, than John Harrison of Yorkshire.
The log-line and sandglass have been discarded on steamers of to-day in favor of the patent log with its automatic registering mechanism, but the old-fashioned method of measuring the ship’s course is used on sailing vessels the world over. It gave to the language of the sea the word “knot” for a nautical mile, and the passenger on board the thirty-thousand-ton express liner of the Atlantic “steamer lanes” talks of her six hundred and odd knots per day without knowing how the word came into use, or that at the taffrail of the white-winged bark or ship passed in midocean the log-line and glass are being used to reckon the miles in genuine old-fashioned “knots,” just as they were employed a century ago.
The “log” is a conical-shaped canvas bag, or a triangular billet of wood so attached to the “log-line” that it will drag with as much resistance as possible. The line is wound round a reel, and is divided at regular intervals into spaces called “knots.” These are marked on the line by bits of rag or leather; at the first knot is a plain piece of leather, at the second a piece of leather with two tails; at the third a knot is tied in the line, and so on according to a simple system which enables the observer to identify the sequence and number of the “knots.” The glass is like an hourglass, but the sand is carefully measured to run through in exactly fourteen or twenty-eight seconds. The log-line and its knots are carefully measured to correspond with the glass. That is, if the sand runs out in twenty-eight seconds, the distance between two knots of the line bears the same ratio to the length of a real “knot,” or nautical mile as the twenty-eight seconds for which the sandglass is set bears to an hour of time. Therefore the number of “knots” of the line unreeled out over the stern of the ship while the sand is running in the glass gives the number of miles which she is traveling per hour.
When the speed is to be read, one man throws overboard the “log” and line, while another stands ready with the glass. The first twenty or thirty fathoms of line are allowed to pay out before the knots are counted. When the drag has settled quietly in the sea astern and anchored itself, a white rag tied to the line marks the instant for turning the glass. As the bit of white rag flashes over the rail the man with the reel begins to count the knots that slip past, the glass is set running, and when the last trickle of sand has sifted through, the man holding it shouts “stop her.” The other man with the log reel notes the number of knots paid out, and down on the ship’s log-book go the figures as the number of miles per hour the ship is making through the water.
The log and sandglass, along with the sounding lead, are survivals of a vanished age of sea life, perhaps the only necessary aids to navigation which are used to-day precisely as our forefathers used them. For this reason, and also because the log and glass played so vital a part in the day’s work of the navigators of such ports as Salem, they have been discussed at some length in this introduction to a sketch of the life of Nathaniel Bowditch, for his place among the truly great men of his time, great in benefactions to humanity, cannot be perceived by the landsman without some slight knowledge of the conditions which then existed in the vastly important science of deep-water navigation.
The nineteenth century had to thank this seafaring astronomer of Salem for its most valuable working treatise on navigation which illustrates with singular aptness the fact, often overlooked, that the ship captain is a practical astronomer and this his calling has been more and more safeguarded by methods of applied science. Or as Professor Simon Newcomb has expressed it:
“The usefulness of practical astronomy and the perfection it has attained may be judged from this consideration: take an astronomer blindfolded to any part of the globe, give him the instruments we have mentioned, a chronometer regulated to Greenwich or Washington time, and the necessary tables, and if the weather be clear so that he can see the stars, he can, in the course of twenty-four hours tell where he is in latitude and longitude within a hundred yards.”
For more than a century the name of Nathaniel Bowditch has been known in the forecastle and cabin of every American and English ship, and a volume of “The Practical Navigator” is to be found in the sea kit of many a youngster who aspires to an officer’s berth. The book is still one of the foremost authorities in its field, a new edition being published by the United States Hydrographic Office every three or four years. A multitude of landlubbers who have no knowledge of seafaring as a calling have heard of “Bowditch” as a name intimately linked with the day’s work on blue water. At his death in 1838, his fellow mariners of the East India Marine Society, of which he had been president, spread upon their records a resolution which voiced the sentiment of shipmasters in every port and sea:
“Resolved, That in the death of Nathaniel Bowditch a public, a national, a humane benefactor has departed; that not this community, nor one nation only, but the whole world has reason to do honor to his memory; that when the voice of eulogy shall be still, when the tear of sorrow shall cease to flow, no monument will be needed to keep alive his memory among men, but as long as ships shall sail, the needle point to the north, and the stars go through their appointed course in the Heavens, the name of Dr. Bowditch will be revered as one who helped his fellowmen in time of need, who was and is to them a guide over the pathless ocean, and of one who forwarded the great interest of mankind.”
This ocean pathfinder of Salem, Nathaniel Bowditch, made no important discoveries in the science of navigation, but with the intellect and industry of a true mathematical genius, he both eliminated the costly errors in the methods of navigation used in 1800, and devised much more certain and practicable ways of finding a ship’s position on the trackless sea. So important were the benefits he wrought to increase the safety of shipping that when the news of his death was carried abroad, the American, English and Russian vessels in the port of Cronstadt half-masted their flags, while at home the cadets of the United States Naval School wore an official badge of mourning, and the ships at anchor in the harbors of Boston, New York and Baltimore displayed their colors at half-mast. The London Atheneum said of “The Practical Navigator,” in the days when no love was lost between British and American seamen:
“It goes, both in American and British ships, over every sea of the globe, and is probably the best work of the sort ever published.”
What Nathaniel Bowditch did was to undertake the revision of a popular English handbook of navigation by John Hamilton Morse in which his acute mind had detected many blunders which were certain to cause shipwreck and loss of life if mariners continued to use the treatise. This work was found to be in need of so radical an overhauling that in 1802 Bowditch published it under his own name, having corrected no fewer than eight thousand errors in the tables and calculations, including such ghastly and incredible mistakes as making 1800 a leap year in reckoning the tables of the sun’s declination and thereby throwing luckless shipmasters as many as twenty-three miles out of their true position at sea. It was declared at the time that several ships had been lost because of this one error.
Expert opinion hailed the work of Bowditch with such eulogies as the following:
“It has been pronounced by competent judges to be, in point of practical utility, second to no work of man ever published. This apparently extravagant estimate of its importance appears but just, when we consider the countless millions of treasure and of human lives which it has conducted and will conduct in safety through the perils of the ocean. But it is not only the best guide of the mariner in traversing the ocean; it is also the best instructor and companion everywhere, containing within itself a complete scientific library for his study and improvement in his profession. Such a work was as worthy of the cultured author’s mind as it is illustrative of his character, unostentatious, yet profoundly scientific and thoroughly practical, with an effective power and influence of incalculable value.”
At a meeting of the East India Marine Society on May 6, 1801, “to examine a work called ‘The New American Practical Navigator,’ by Nathaniel Bowditch, a committee of sagacious and experienced shipmasters, veterans of the seas beyond the Cape of Good Hope and the Horn, submitted the following report:
“After a full examination of the system of navigation presented to the Society by one of its members (Mr. Nathaniel Bowditch), they find that he has corrected many thousand errors in the best European works of the kind; especially those in the tables for determining the latitude by two altitudes, in those of difference of latitude and departure, of the sun’s right ascension of amplitudes, and many others necessary to the navigator. Mr. Bowditch has likewise in many instances greatly improved the old methods of calculation, and added new ones of his own. That of clearing the apparent distance of the moon, and sun or stars from the effects of parallax and refraction is peculiarly adapted to the use of seamen in general, and is much facilitated (as all other methods are in the present work), by the introduction of a proportion table into that of the corrections of the moon’s altitude. His table nineteenth, of corrections to be applied in the lunar calculations has the merit of being the only accurate one the committee is acquainted with. He has much improved the tables of latitudes and longitudes of places and has added those of a number on the American coast hitherto very inaccurately ascertained.
“This work, therefore, is, in the opinion of the committee, highly deserving of the approbation and encouragement of the Society, not only as being the most correct and ample now extant, but as being a genuine American production; and as such they hesitate not to recommend it to the attention of navigators and of the public at large.
| Jonathan Lambert | Committee | |
| Benjamin Carpenter | ||
| John Osgood | ||
| John Gibant | ||
| Jacob Crowninshield |
“Approved, Benjamin Hodges, President.
“Moses Townsend, Secretary.
“Salem, May 13, 1801.”
This report is dry reading for the landsman, but it concerned matters of the most vital import to many thousand sea captains, who later blessed the name of this astronomer and mathematician of Salem.
As a shipmaster, Nathaniel Bowditch made a somewhat incongruous figure among the sturdy, full-blooded, simple-minded seamen of his port and his time. He was an intellectual prodigy, a thinking machine, and his tastes were not at all those of the practical navigator and trader overseas. He served his time at sea, and acquitted himself successfully, largely because he was trained for the calling of his father, Habakkuk Bowditch, who had begun his career on shipboard.
The family was in straitened circumstances when Nathaniel came into the world in 1773, and his period of schooling was exceedingly brief. At the tender age of seven he was sent to a Salem “seminary of learning,” the master of which drilled his pupils’ minds by making them spell at frequent intervals that uncouth monster of words “honorificabilitudinity.” The Bowditch offspring survived this ordeal and at twelve years was apprenticed to a ship chandler. In this tarry environment he learned algebra and “could not sleep after his first glance at it.” An old British sailor taught the lad what he knew of the elements of navigation after hours in the ship chandler’s shop. The precocious love for mathematics had set the lad’s brain on fire and he reveled in problems which would have baffled the wisest old heads of Salem.
While Nathaniel was still in his teens his ambition received a mighty impetus by the discovery of a treasure trove of learning, the philosophical library of Dr. Richard Kirwan,[36] a famous Irish scientist. This precious collection of abstruse literature had come to Salem in a manner highly characteristic of the time and place. While cruising off the British coast during the Revolution, an audacious privateer of Beverly snapped up a merchant vessel and took out her cargo as lawful prize of war. Among the plunder was the library of this luckless Doctor Kirwan, which he had been in the act of shipping from Ireland to England. The privateer came home to Beverly and her booty was sold, according to custom. Several gentlemen of Salem clubbed together, purchased the books, and used them to found the library of the Salem Atheneum, which institution lives even unto this day and is housed in a beautiful new building of colonial design on Essex Street.
Nathaniel Bowditch never forgot his youthful obligation to this source of learning and wrote in his will:
“It is well known that the valuable scientific library of the celebrated Dr. Richard Kirwan, was during the Revolutionary War, captured in the British Channel on its way to Ireland,[37] by a Beverly privateer and that by the liberal and enlightened views of the owners of the vessel, the library thus captured was sold at a very low rate, and in this manner was laid the foundation upon which has since been established the Philosophical Library so-called, and the present Salem Atheneum. Thus in early life I found near me a better collection of Philosophical and Scientific books than could be found in any other part of the United States nearer than Philadelphia, and by the kindness of its proprietors I was permitted freely to take the books from that library and to consult and study them at pleasure. This inestimable advantage has made me deeply a debtor to the Salem Atheneum, and I do therefore give to that institution the sum of one thousand dollars, the income thereof to be forever applied to the promotion of its objects, and the extension of its usefulness.”
Dr. Richard Kirwan had the shadowy consolation of being compelled to furnish enlightenment to this hostile port of Salem, but the most important benefit reaped by this singular privateering adventure was the stimulus it conveyed to the mind of young Nathaniel Bowditch. He became wholly submerged in the volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Indeed, he copied one book after another, making these manuscripts with infinite pains in order that he might possess them and carry them to sea with him. He was in his teens when he copied “A complete collection of all the Mathematical Papers of the Philosophical Transactions; Extracts from various Encyclopedias and from the Memoirs of the Paris Academy; a complete copy of Emerson’s Mechanics, a copy of Hamilton’s Conics; extracts from Gravesand’s and Martyn’s Philosophical Treatise; extracts from Bernoulli, etc., etc.”
At the age of seventeen Bowditch began to learn Latin without a teacher in order that he might read Newton’s Principia, and when he was old enough to vote “he was unsurpassed in mathematical attainments by any one in the Commonwealth.” But he must needs earn his bread and go to sea, and so in 1795 Nathaniel made his first voyage as captain’s clerk in the Salem ship Henry, Captain Prince, to Mauritius. His sea life covered a period of nine years, during which he made five voyages, one of them to Manila in 1796-7, in the ship Astrea, as supercargo with Captain Prince. The Astrea was the first American ship to fly the stars and stripes in the harbor of Manila, a fact of some historical worth. The American trade to the Orient was then in its beginnings and it was Elias Hasket Derby, who, with characteristic enterprise, sent the Astrea to Manila in search of sugar, pepper and indigo, of which she fetched home a large and valuable cargo.
Nathaniel Bowditch kept a journal of this voyage as was required by the laws of the East India Marine Society, and his journal, written in a precise and delicate hand, is preserved in the Society’s collection of records. His impressions of the capital city of the Philippines in 1797 read in part as follows:
“The city of Manila is about three or four miles in circumference, is walled all around, and cannon are placed at proper intervals, but we were unable to get much information with respect to the state of the place, as they were shy of giving any information to foreigners. The buildings within the wall are all of stone, and none except the churches is more than two stories high, on account of the violent earthquakes which they generally have at the breaking up of the monsoons. The month of March is when they most expect them, but on the fifth of November, 1797, we experienced several violent shocks at about 2 P. M. which came from the northward, and proceeded in a southerly direction, continuing with violence nearly two minutes. It threw down a large house half a league from the city, untiled several buildings, and did much other damage. It was not observed on board the ship lying off the bar. The motion of the earthquake was quicker than those usual in America, as the latter are generally preceded by a rumbling noise; the former was not.
Nathaniel Bowditch’s chart of Salem harbor
“The suburbs of Manila are very extensive; most of the business is done there. The houses of the wealthier class are of two stories, built of bamboo with thatched roofs. No house can be built in the suburbs without the particular permission of the Governor, fearing if they were too high an enemy might make use of them, as was the case when the English took the place formerly, for one of the churches near the walls was very serviceable to them.
“All the women have a little of the Indian blood in their veins, except the lady of the Governor and two or three others, though by a succession of intermarriages with Europeans they have obtained a fair complexion. The natives (like all other Malays) are excessively fond of gaming and cock-fighting. A theatre is established for the latter business from which the government draws an immense revenue, the diversion being prohibited at any other place. Sometimes there are five or six thousand spectators, each of whom pays half a real. A large sum arises from the duties on tobacco and cocoa wine. Tobacco is prohibited, but if you smuggle any on shore it cannot be sold for more than the ruling cost in America, notwithstanding the price is very high. Particular people, licensed by the King, are the only persons allowed to deal in it.
“All the natives chew dreca and betel, though not mixed with opium as in Batavia. This with chewing and smoking tobacco make their teeth very black. The segars used by the women, and which they smoke all day, are made as large as they can possibly get into their mouths. The natives are about as honest as their neighbors, the Chinese; they stole several things from us, but by the goodness of the police we recovered most of them.
“On the second of December, 1797, thieves broke into the house where we lived, entered the chamber where Captain Prince and myself were asleep, and carried off a bag containing $1,000 without awakening either of us, or any of the crew of the long-boat sleeping in an adjoining chamber.
“The guard boat discovered them as they were escaping and pursued them. They, in endeavoring to escape, ran afoul of a large boat, which, upsetting them, the money went to the bottom, and, what was worse, the bag burst and the money was all scattered in the mud, where the water was eight feet deep. However, by the honesty of the captain of the guard, most of it was recovered. The thieves were caught, and, when we were there in 1800, Mr. Kerr informed us that they had been whipped, and were to be kept in servitude several years.
“The same day another robbery was committed, equally as daring. The day the indigo was shipped, the second mate came ashore with several of the people to see it safe aboard. The boats we had provided, not taking all of it, we sent the remainder aboard with a black fellow as a guard, who was esteemed by Mr. Kerr as an honest man, but he had been contriving, it seems, to steal a couple of boxes. When the cases containing the indigo had passed the bar, a small boat came aboard with two boxes filled with chips, stones, etc., appearing in every respect like those full of indigo, and, pretending that we had put on board two wrong boxes, they exchanged their boxes for two real boxes of indigo, but, in bringing them ashore, they were detected and the indigo returned.
“There are great numbers of Chinese at Manila. It is from them most of the indigo is purchased. They trade considerably with China; their junks arrive at Manila in January, and all their goods are deposited in the custom-house. Some of these cargoes are valued at a million of dollars, the duties on which amounted to nearly $100,000. The Chinese at Manila retain all the customs of their country, excepting those respecting religion and a few other things of small moment.”
Captain Benjamin Carpenter of the Hercules, 1792
When the Astrea arrived at Manila on this voyage, Captain Prince was asked by another shipmaster how he contrived to find his way in the face of the northeast monsoon by dead reckoning. He replied that “he had a crew of twelve men, every one of whom could take and work a lunar observation, as well for all practical purposes, as Sir Isaac Newton himself, if he were alive.”
During this dialogue Nathaniel Bowditch, the supercargo, who had taught these sailors their navigation while at sea, “sat as modest as a maid, saying not a word but holding his slate pencil in his mouth,” according to Captain Prince who also used to relate that “another person remarked there was more knowledge of navigation on board that ship than ever there was in all the vessels that have floated in Manila Bay.”
During his seafaring years this singular mariner, Nathaniel Bowditch, learned French thoroughly, and studied Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. One who sailed with him said, “all caught a zeal to learn on board his ships. The whole crew of twelve men on board the Astrea later became captains, first and second mates. At sea his practice was to rise at a very early hour in the morning, and pursue his studies till breakfast, immediately after which he took a rapid walk for half an hour, and then went below to his studies till half-past eleven o’clock, when he returned and walked till twelve o’clock, the hour at which he commenced his meridian observations. Then came dinner, after which he was engaged in his studies till five o’clock; then he walked till tea time, and after tea was at his studies till nine o’clock in the evening. From this hour till half-past ten o’clock he appeared to have banished all thought of study, and while walking he would converse in the most lively manner, giving us useful information, intermixed with amusing anecdotes, and hearty laughs, making the time delightful to the officers who walked with him, and who had to quicken their pace to accompany him. Whenever the heavenly bodies were in distance to get the longitude, night or day, he was sure to make his observations once and frequently twice in every twenty-four hours, always preferring to make them by the moon and stars on account of his eyes. He was often seen on deck at other times, walking rapidly and apparently in deep thought, when it was well understood by all on board that he was not to be disturbed, as we supposed he was solving some difficult problem. And when he darted below the conclusion was that he had got the idea. If he was in the fore part of the ship when the idea came to him, he would actually run to the cabin, and his countenance would give the expression that he had found a prize.”
In keeping with this picture is the story of Bowditch’s behavior when during his third voyage, from Cadiz to Alicante, his ship was chased by a French privateer. The Yankee captain decided to make a fight of it and Bowditch was assigned to hand powder on deck from the magazine. One of the officers, going below after the vessel had been cleared for action found the supercargo sitting on a keg of powder with his slate in his lap, absorbed in making calculations.
Nathaniel Bowditch had made the sea serve him, both to gain a livelihood and to test his theories of practical navigation for the benefit of his fellow seamen. But he did not consider “The Practical Navigator” to be an achievement by which his intellectual powers should be measured. His magnus opus, the fond labor of his best years was the translation and commentary of the monumental work of the great French astronomer, La Place, entitled “Mécanique Celeste” (Celestial Mechanics). So much of his own learning appeared in his exhaustive notes that the American edition of four volumes was a lasting memorial to the industry, knowledge and researches of Nathaniel Bowditch, and was the foremost American achievement in scientific letters during the early nineteenth century. It won a solid fame for Nathaniel Bowditch, both at home and abroad. Where one American, however, has heard of his edition of Mécanique Celeste, a thousand have studied the pages of his “Practical Navigator,” which is a living book to-day.
From the log of the Hercules, showing the beautiful penmanship with which Captain Carpenter adorned his sea journals
Shortly after he retired from the sea, Doctor Bowditch was elected president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company and continued in that office until 1823, declining professorships at Harvard, West Point and the University of Virginia. In 1823 he was persuaded to move his residence to Boston as actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Society which position he held until his death in 1836. A self-taught scientist, a notable benefactor of mankind, Nathaniel Bowditch was with singular fitness, a son of Salem in the days when its splendid race of navigators were his fellow-townsmen. He loved the storied seaport in which he was born, and he was generally beloved for those very genuine qualities characteristic of the shipmasters among whom he lived. There was a rare simplicity and an absence of all false pride in the reasons which he gave to his executors for making a bequest to the Salem Marine Society.
“He told us, and all our children,” his sons wrote to the officers of the society, “at the time of executing his will that his father, Habakkuk Bowditch, for nearly twenty years received from your charity fund the annual sum of fifteen dollars or thereabouts, so that his own food and clothing when a boy were in part derived from this source. Under these circumstances, we felt with him, that he had incurred a debt of gratitude toward your society which justified and indeed required from him an acknowledgement in return.”