Honorificabilitudinity

THE YANKEE STARGAZER: THE LIFE OF NATHANIEL BOWDITCH -- Robert Elton Berry--Whittlesey ($2.50).

Astronomer Nathaniel Bowditch had the greatest single influence on U.S. navigation and seamanship. His Practical Navigator ("the seaman's Bible" --first published in 1802), revised and brought up to date by the U.S. Hydrographic Office, is still a standard text for U.S. seamen.

Since modest Biographer Berry has had the good sense to let Bowditch's story tell itself with a minimum of literary asides and insights, the result is a simple, read able, well-researched life of a remarkable American--a kind of deepwater Benjamin Franklin who by grinding spare-time study made himself the outstanding U.S. mathematician and astronomer of his day.

Nathaniel Bowditch was born in Salem in 1773. His father, Habakkuk, was un educated, but was said to be "not destitute of powers of mind," and was best remembered by his pastor for "his knowledge of the Scriptures and his extraordinary consumption of rum."

Often hungry, young Nathaniel attended Salem's best school whose only equipment was a dictionary. There he learned to spell honorificabilitudinity by chanting it syllable by syllable with the other children each morning. He also evinced a precocious talent for arithmetic. But his real education began when he was apprenticed to a firm of ship's chandlers. He began to teach himself after closing hours in his attic room or in the kitchen while minding his employer's baby.

At 13 he compiled a notebook on navigation. At 14 he began a notebook on surveying entitled The Practical Surveyor. At 15 he compiled a notebook on algebra. He also constructed a barometer and wrote an almanac which "will shew . . . Suns rising, setting, declination, amplitude, his place in the Ecliptic, Right Ascension, Equation of time, the Moons Right Ascension & place in the Ecliptic, time of her rising and setting and southing . . . and the time of high Water at Salem, Epact, Golden Number & the year of the Julian Period. . . ."He was 16.

At 17, teaching himself Latin for the purpose, he began his five-year study of Newton's Principia. In it he discovered an error. At 19 his brother-in-law gave him a copy of Euclid's Elements; Bowditch later concluded that Euclid was "a second-rate mathematician." To study French mathematicians, he taught himself French. His method was simple. He got a copy of the New Testament and a French dictionary. When he had translated the New Testament into French, he knew French (except its pronunciation).

Pucelage. At 22 Bowditch first went to sea. Later on he used to say that he never wanted to. He was a strange looking sailor--small (about 5 ft. 4 in.) with a high forehead and already grey hair. He was also "invincibly cheerful." His knowledge of mathematics got him on shipboard "through the cabin window" instead of the usual way, "through the hawsehole"--i.e., he began as a ship's clerk instead of a common sailor.

Bowditch's first voyage took him to the French Isle of Bourbon (now Reunion) in the Indian Ocean. It was exotic after Salem, but not as exotic as Bowditch seemed to the French when he blushed at their conversations. "Il n'a pas encore perdu sa pucelage," a Frenchman explained to a French lady. "Quelle age avez-vous, monsieur?" she asked Bowditch. "Twenty-three." The French lady threw up her hands: "C'est une chose absolument impossible de conserver la pucelage a cette age!"

Later Bowditch was on the first Salem ship to visit Manila, where he admired the girls. "You can live with them in their houses," he wrote, "like man and wife. . . . Their dress is chiefly in white with a small skirt which reaches no lower than their knees, so that a small puff of wind would discover their nakedness. . . ." Pucelage was giving way to a certain worldliness.

Bowditch's last voyage took him to Sumatra to buy pepper. This time he was part owner of his ship. One Christmas, in a driving snow storm, he sailed into Salem blind, except for a glimpse of the land at the mouth of the harbor. Then he sold the ship, never went to sea again. His feat became a New England legend. Actually it showed that he knew more about navigation than any other man of his time.

When Bowditch first went to sea, captains navigated by faith and "the feel of the seat of their pants." They gauged drift and current "by hunches," set courses "by intuitions," and when they could not see land, "smelled" it. Since not all captains were gifted with a sixth sense, wrecks were frequent. Position was found by making lunar observations, for which all the formulas now found in charthouse books had to be worked out on the spot. The result gave longitude within 30 miles. Of course, there was John Hamilton Moore's Practical Navigator, a British work. But Bowditch and many another navigator had come to suspect that Moore was barnacled with errors, and that his errors had landed many a ship on the rocks.

The Seaman's Bible. So when Edmund M. Blunt, just beginning his career as No. 1 U.S. publisher of nautical books, asked him to revise Moore, Bowditch said yes. By the time Bowditch finished, there was little left of Moore's book but its title. Bowditch revised most of Moore in his cabin: "The sounds of the moving ship provided a musical background for the slow and tedious work of preparing a guide for other ships." Carefully, he kept a record of every error he found in Moore, then added them up. There were more than 8,000. "When he was through," says Author Berry, "he had produced a book a man could trust in navigating a ship." "Eventually there was to be a 'Bowditch' in most sea chests, and the ship's officer and the seaman were to spread the name of the Yankee navigator with the trade winds and the monsoons." And Van Wyck Brooks praised old Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's book on puerperal fever by saying that it had probably saved as many human lives as Bowditch's book.

One cause of the success of Bowditch's manual was its simplicity. For this there was a simple reason. Many of the crews Bowditch sailed with were ambitious. Bowditch, a practical democrat, would teach anybody who was willing to learn. "If one explanation of a mathematical principle proved too difficult for a seaman to understand, Bowditch could try another one." By teaching sailors on his ships, Bowditch learned to write simply for generations of sailors to come.

How well he educated U.S. seamen, Salem Shipmaster George Crowninshield liked to illustrate with a story. One day in a European port, German Astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach visited Crowninshield's yacht, expressed surprise that anybody on board could take lunar observations. "Our cook can do that!" said Crowninshield, pointing to a Negro in a white apron with a bloody fowl in one hand and a big knife in the other. "By what method do you calculate lunar distances?" the German astronomer asked the American cook. "It is immaterial," said the Negro, "I use sometimes the method of Maskelyne, Lyons, or Bowditch, but I prefer that of Dunthorne, as I am more accustomed to it."

Lonely Scientist. Settled in Salem again, Bowditch became president of a prosperous insurance company. The pattern of the chandler's shop was repeated on another plane. By day Bowditch was "a capable and prudent businessman." By night "he slaved over astronomical papers. ... A gregarious man, fond of society and taking pleasure in the town meetings and dinners ... he nevertheless spent a great part of his leisure studying a lonely science--for astronomy is inherently a lonely science, and in Bowditch's case ... his only companions in astronomy on the whole North American continent were his books."

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead says that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness." Perhaps that explains in part the contemplative but shrewd prelatical look on Bowditch's face in Gilbert Stuart's unfinished portrait (see cut).

Bowditch became president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, wrote for the North American Review, tanned his sons with a slide rule whenever they disturbed him. An unreconstructed Federalist, he ran for office, finally was elected member of the Massachusetts Executive Council. Sometimes the self-educated mathematician lectured perennially rebellious Harvard students, once remarking of some of them that "I should have some little respect for their offensive if it had been carried on in a manner that indicated strength of mind or body, or that they had an immortal soul," but when they put themselves "upon a level with mischievous monkeys or baboons, in breaking their plates, glasses &c., it was too contemptible."

The great work of Bowditch's later years was his translation of Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace's Mecanique celeste, which he began during the War of 1812. The American Academy offered to bring it out by subscription; Bowditch refused. He did not want anybody to be able to say: "I patronized Bowditch by buying his book, which I cannot read." Instead, at his wife's urging, he spent a third of his life's savings ($12,000) to publish four volumes himself. A fifth volume was untranslated when Bowditch died.

Author Berry believes that Bowditch was "not particularly democratic," charges him with having a "quarterdeck attitude toward the common people." Sailors, with less literary standards of democracy, apparently felt otherwise. "As the word of [Bowditch's] death spread from harbor to harbor around the world the flags of ships were lowered to half mast."

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