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.
[Illustration: 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 }
Benjamin Carpenter }
John Osgood } Committee
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.
[Illustration: 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.”
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.