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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 âge 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 á cette âge!"
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.