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.”
FOOTNOTES:
[35] The Boston ship Massachusetts sailed for the East Indies in 1790. She was the largest merchant vessel built in the United States up to that time, and was especially designed and equipped for the Oriental trade, measuring six hundred tons and carrying a crew of eighty men. Winthrop L. Marvin’s American Merchant Marine states:
“In view of the importance of the Massachusetts it is astonishing to learn from Delano’s Narrative that she went to sea without a chronometer, and without a single officer who could work a lunar observation. This compelled her to creep down the coast of Africa, feeling her way along, as it were, by the discolored current. She tried to sight the Cape Verde Islands to correct her reckoning, but missed them, and standing too far back toward the East came near bringing up on the inhospitable sands of South Africa. But the worst miscalculation of all was the missing of Java Head, that great landmark of East India voyagers. This blunder compelled the Massachusetts to make at least fifteen extra degrees of ‘easting’ and cost her about three weeks’ time. If a great ship like the Massachusetts were so ill-provided with the instruments of navigation, it is inexplicable how the small ships of poorer owners ever found their way around the Cape of Good Hope, and through the labyrinths of the East Indian Archipelago.”
[36] Dr. Richard Kirwan (1733-1812) was born in Cloughballymore, Ireland. He was a distinguished investigator and writer in the fields of mineralogy, chemistry, and meteorology, a member of the Edinborough Royal Society, the Royal Irish Academy, and a number of foreign academies. He received an honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Dublin, and declined a baronetcy offered him by Lord Castlereagh. His works were translated into Russian, German and French. The capture of Doctor Kirwan’s library was a misfortune of sufficient importance to find mention in the National Dictionary of Biography which relates:
“In 1776, Kirwan, having conformed to the established church, was called to the Irish bar, but threw up his studies after ten years, and pursued scientific studies in London, exchanged for Greek at Cregg in 1773. He resided in London from 1777 to 1787, and became known to Priestley, Cavendish, Burke, and Horne Tooke. He corresponded with all the savants of Europe; his Wednesday evenings in Newman St. were the resort of strangers of distinction; the Empress Catharine of Russia sent him her portrait. His library, dispatched from Galway to London on 5th Sept., 1780, was captured by an American privateer. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 24th Feb. 1780, he received the Copley medal in 1782 for a series of papers on chemical affinity.”
[37] A probable error of memory as the library was on its way to England according to other sources of information.