Whatever sins of omission may be charged against the literary account of First Mate William Haswell, it is greatly to his credit that he should have taken pains to write this journal of the Lydia, a memorial of the earliest voyage under the American flag to that happy-go-lucky colony of Uncle Sam which in more recent years has added something to the gaiety of nations.
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.