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.