| 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.”