The ships and sailors of old Salem

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

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.