Bowditch reposes in his study beneath a bust of Pierre Laplace.
In all the history of sea travel, no man did more to tame the empty expanses of the oceans than Nathaniel Bowditch, a Yankee genius who simplified the procedure for determining longitude and who compiled the first reliable manual on celestial navigation. Before Bowditch’s day, navigating by the sun, stars and moon had been an abstruse and uncertain art; after he published his great work, it could be mastered by any mariner.
Bowditch was born in 1773 in the seafaring town of Salem, Massachusetts, the son of an impoverished cooper. After sporadic schooling, he was apprenticed to a ship chandler when he was 12 years old, but he found time to teach himself mathematics, astronomy and—the better to read scientific books—Latin, the first of more than 24 languages he learned in his lifetime.
At 22, spindly in appearance and prematurely gray, Bowditch went to sea as a ship’s clerk on a merchantman. He would make five far-ranging commercial voyages in all. the last one—when he was 29—as a commander. The practical challenge of ocean travel bore instant fruit. At the time, the usual method for finding longitude was by a laborious series of computations based on sightings of the moon. Bowditch tried his hand at the system, pondered its flaws, and developed tables that eliminated several steps in the calculations, greatly speeding the task.
Was so confident he could keep his schedules that he made shippers a unique offer: He would forfeit the freight charges if he did not deliver on time. As far as is known, this bold promise never cost him a penny; he made such rapid crossings that sailors were heard to remark that Captain Samuels had a “secret ocean path between New York and Liverpool.”
As he recounted in colorful memoirs entitled From the Forecastle to the Cabin, Samuels had worked his way up to captain through the ranks. “My stepmother and I had such differences that a house the size of the Capitol at Washington would not have been large enough to hold us both,” he wrote, and so he “took French leave of home” at the age of 11 and shipped out as a cabin boy and cook on a schooner. That was in the year 1833. The sea suited him well, and in 10 years—at the age of 21— he was captain and nominal owner of a full-rigged ship that carried refined sugar from Amsterdam to Genoa.
By the 1840s, when the Liverpool packets were in their glory years, Samuels had become a veteran with firsthand experience in every phase of sailing a ship. He knew well the rigors and dangers encountered by seamen, for he had done every job required of them. In the course of so doing, he had withstood many a mishap: He had fallen
With this sextant, Bowditch determined longitude by sightings of the moon. Longitude could more easily be worked out with the
While at sea, Bowditch methodically checked his own figures for longitude against the charts and tables of the day. most notably The Practical Navigator, a widely used manual by an English mathematician named John Moore. He found more than 8.000 errors in Moore’s work—some of them evidently responsible for shipwrecks.
At the urging of a Massachusetts publisher, he produced a revised version that, in addition to corrected tables, included maps of the night sky. information on winds and currents, and even a seamen’s glossary. In 1802, the book was published under his own name as The New American Practical Navigator. Soon known simply as “Bowditch,” it was a phenomenal success. Mariners the world over clamored for a copy, and ultimately the publishing rights were purchased by the U. S. government. Much revised (Bowditch himself oversaw nine editions during his lifetime), it is still in use today.
Bowditch did not limit the application of his talents to celestial navigation. He went on to run insurance companies in Salem and Boston, and to write on subjects ranging from the orbit of comets to the harbors of Massachusetts. He spent his last years translating the works of the era’s greatest astronomer. Pierre Laplace of France. But he would always be most revered at sea. After his death in 1838. flags were lowered to half-mast in harbors around the globe.
Overboard on the Bahama Bank while reefing a sail, weathered a typhoon in the China Sea, endured a grounding in the Dardanelles and fought pirates in the Mediterranean. He had also earned a reputation for being a dead shot with either hand.
Captain Charles H. Marshall, who commanded three vessels for the Black Ball Line, crossed the Atlantic an astonishing 94 times. Retiring ashore at the age of 42, he bought into the firm and managed it for the next 30 years.
Assuming command of the Dreadnought was Samuels’ crowning achievement; indeed, the Red Cross Line, founded in 1843, had the packet built for him. When sailing the Dreadnought, he took along his wife—a privilege that was granted to all packet captains, but one that few of them exercised. Partly as a courtesy to her and her sensibilities, he banned swearing on board the ship (an order that was hardly likely to be obeyed), instituted compulsory evening prayers, and flew the flags of the United States and the Red Cross Line during the Sunday services. Generally a ship’s flags remained in the locker except when another vessel hove into view. When a passenger asked one Sunday, “Why are the flags hoisted, when there are no ships in sight to see them?’’ Mrs. Samuels sweetly rejoined: “God sees them.’’
Such piety was not likely to influence tough seamen, but Samuels liked his crews tough, and he took great pride in his ability to handle them. “I never rejected a crew or a part of one on account of their bad character,” he claimed. “1 generally found among these men the toughest and best sailors. I frequently had a number of the ‘Bloody Forties,’ as they styled themselves, among the crew.” The Bloody Forties was a gang of about 40 Liverpool men who had been sailing together for years, and long comradeship in the demanding conditions of packet sailing had filled them with braggadocio. Their ringleader was an especially hardened fellow known as Finnigan, and they claimed to have killed a captain at his prompting during one of their voyages. Now they were to give Samuels his sternest trial as a commander.
On July 11,1859, the Dreadnought weighed anchor in Liverpool with a cargo of iron bars and a number of German emigrants aboard. Finnigan and the Bloody Forties were among the crew, and Captain Samuels had been warned that they intended to mutiny; in a certain Mrs. Riley’s tavern on the Liverpool waterfront, Finnigan had been heard inciting the men “to clip the wings of the bloody old Dreadnought and give the skipper a swim.”
Before the day was out, Samuels knew that trouble was brewing. At noon, off Queenstown, the helmsman failed to acknowledge a “Steer steady” order to Samuels’ satisfaction. “The impertinent tone of his voice caused me to jump towards him,” Samuels wrote. “He attempted to draw his sheath-knife. Seeing my danger, I struck the man, knocking him senseless leeward of the wheel. Wallace, my dog, then took charge of him, and kept his fore paws on his chest. I took the knife from him, and called the officers to handcuff him. He was then put in the afterhouse, and locked up.”
Samuels entrusted the helm to the third mate, a Mr. Whitehorn, who had been sailing with him for years. The captain then issued a command to the crew at large. “Turn to, and haul taut the weather main-brace,” he ordered. Not one man moved.
By now, word of trouble aboard had spread to the passengers. For safety’s sake Samuels ordered them below. He went to his cabin to get his
Pistols and cutlass, which he concealed beneath a raglan cloak and then carried back on deck, with his dog Wallace trotting alongside him.
He was walking past the water cask by the galley door when the crewmen rushed at him with their knives. “The time had come,’’ Samuels decided, “for me to prove to these men that moral courage was superior to brute force. With a pistol in each hand, pointed at the heads of those nearest to me, and a cutlass at my side, 1 stood immovable. The screaming of the women and children below, blended with the noise on deck, beggars all description. Not a man dared to come nearer than about 12 feet from me, knowing that another step forward would seal his doom.’’ But Finnigan bared his breast and dared Samuels to shoot him, calling the captain “an outrageous name.’’
Samuels stood fast, and both sides settled down to a siege. Samuels ordered the food cut off from the mutineers. As for himself, he paced the deck throughout the night, together with Wallace and the three mates.
At seven bells (3:30 a. m.], the captain made another appeal to reason, with no better results. At noon the breeze freshened and he commanded in a voice that could be heard fore and aft: “Take in the royals,’’ the sails that were used when the winds were steady and favorable. The command was acknowledged with an equally firm “Go to hell!’’
With too much canvas set, the ship was soon tearing through the water at a speed of 12 knots, pitching and burying her forecastle and sending spray from the weather bow up over the captain’s head. With the assistance of his mates, he might have lowered the sails, but he dared not, for four men alone could never have hoisted them again; on a 1,400-ton ship, that was a job requiring close to a dozen men.
On the second morning without breakfast the men began to show signs of yielding; they offered to turn to if they were fed first. “You shall work before you eat,’’ the captain responded. They declined, and the siege continued.
The German passengers, confined below, had only the faintest idea of what was at stake, and thought the captain was being too hard on the men. During the second day a delegation of passengers approached him, asking him to let the mutineers have some food. He refused, warning: “If they conquer me they will scuttle the ship, after having committed the greatest outrages on those whom you hold most dear; and at night, while you are asleep, the hatches will be battened down and the ship sunk, while they will take to the boats.’’ That quieted the passengers.
By sunset at the end of the second day, 56 hours had passed without sleep for the captain and his officers, or food for the mutineers. Samuels decided to enlist the passengers in his service. He went into the after steerage and asked them to join him in quelling the mutiny.
According to his account, they responded as one man: “Order us. Captain, and we will obey.’’ Samuels promptly armed 17 of them with iron bars taken from the cargo, placed four men in ambush behind the pigpen, and strategically scattered the rest about the deck.
The night passed in silent tension, while Samuels waited for the mutineers to make their move. Around midnight, as he stood watch on the quarter-deck, his faithful dog Wallace suddenly gave a growl. Two men had crawled as far as the capstan, 20 feet or so away. It turned out they
At Q Manhattan dock, canal barges are laaded ivith ivestbound cargaes. Steamers tawed the barges up the Hudsan ta Albany.
One year before packet service across the Atlantic came into being, work began on the Erie Canal, a threadlike inland waterway that would give a disproportionate boost to the transocean trade. The canal aimed at nothing less than opening the West: It would link Buffalo on the Great Lakes with Albany on the Hudson River, thus allowing the port of New York to exchange goods with an enormous sweep of territory extending almost halfway across the continent.
Proposals for a waterway through upstate New York had surfaced as early as 1800. But the difficulties were immense. Some 360 miles separated Buffalo and Albany, including sizable tracts of swamp and forest. Any canal between the two points would have to contain locks to overcome the 565-foot elevation difference, as well as aqueducts to carry the canal over rivers.
’ The project began to receive serious attention when New York City’s Mayor DeWitt Clinton pressed its commercial advantages in letters to newspapers and in a petition to the legislature. In 1817, the state legislature agreed to provide financial backing, and for the next eight years an army of several thousand men labored steadily at the great enterprise. When the canal was finally finished in October 1825, Clinton made the inaugural voyage from Buffalo to New York, where he poured a cask of Lake Erie water into
The Atlantic to symbolize the “wedding of the waters.”
The marriage proved singularly felicitous. During the first year, 218,000 tons of cargo moved along the canal: 25 years later, the figure was 3,076,617 tons. Settlers from as far away as Lake Superior sent flour, timber, whiskey and livestock down the waterway and on to New York for shipment to coastal markets or across the ocean. And with the sale of their produce. Western farmers could now afford to import manufactured goods from Europe.
Accompanying this freight were tens of thousands of emigrants, who had heard about the easy access to America’s interior. Every day hundreds of emigrants reached New York, and many of them continued up the Hudson to the canal, crammed together into squat barges. So heavy was the passenger traffic that residents along the route “must have frequently thought that Europe was moving to this country,” observed an upstate editor in 1847.
After 1850. the canal began to lose traffic to the railroads, which offered faster service to the West. But by then, it had surpassed its promoters’ wildest dreams. Tolls had paid off the state’s original seven-million-dollar investment within a decade, and the canal deserved much of the credit for the prosperity of the packet lines and for giving the port of New York a commanding lead over its East Coast rivals.
Were not there to fight, however, but to surrender. They informed the captain that some of the others had planned to launch an attack on the galley in the morning.
At daybreak, as Samuels was taking a reconnoitering stroll along the starboard side of the galley, accompanied by Whitehorn and Wallace, Wallace suddenly growled again. Instantly two of the mutineers leaped at Samuels, their knives drawn. The captain leveled his pistol at one of them, and Wallace made for the other’s throat.
The other mutineers rushed in next, only to be met by the Germans, swinging their iron bars. The ruffians retreated to the starboard side forward, where Samuels again leveled his pistol and thundered: “Death to the first man who dares advance! I will give you one moment to throw your knives overboard!’’
“You shall be the first to go, you damned psalm-singing —’’ Finnigan began. But he had lost his support. One by one the mutineers threw down their knives. Samuels demanded an apology from Finnigan, but did not get one, so he dealt the mutineer a blow that sent him headlong down the forecastle.
When Finnigan regained consciousness, Samuels had him shackled and thrown into the sweatbox—a narrow box kept aboard practically all ships for punishment of insubordinate seamen. “In less than half an hour,” Samuels recalled, Finnigan “cried out for mercy, and was ready to say or do anything to be let out of irons.” By this time Samuels had ordered the cook to dispense coffee to the crew, and had put them to work scouring the quarter-deck. Before them all, reported Samuels, the repentant Finnigan declared: “Captain, I have had enough. To say this does not make a coward of a man when he has found his master.”
Indeed, there was nothing that a seaman admired more than a resolute captain. After the ship had docked, the ex-mutineers gathered on deck, hats in hand, and crowded around Samuels to pay him homage. Clearly the occasion called for a speech, and Samuels was not the man to avoid the challenge. “Let me say that I would trust any of you hereafter with my life,” he told them, “I never had or expect to have a better set of sailors with me.” The crew, if Samuels’ account is to be believed, responded with “God bless you. Captain,” as they left the Dreadnought.
So ends a tale that—for all its shameless hyperbole—reflects the strength of will and mastery of men that packet sailing demanded of every captain.
By the time of Captain Samuels’ career, packet ships and their reliable schedules had long since become an established fact of transatlantic commerce. Indeed, it had taken scarcely a decade to happen. Merchants and passengers had come to rely on them. So had the nation’s officials; in 1828 the duties that were collected on cargoes arriving in New York were estimated to be enough to pay the entire cost of running the United States government. But the packets were more important than the profits the owners made on them or the revenues the government collected from them. By keeping to their schedules year in and year out, in spite of all the perils the Atlantic had to offer, they had changed forever the habits of the commercial shipping industry.
World History
