Born on March 26, 1773 in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Bowditch is known today as the “Father of Modern Maritime Navigation” for writing “The American Practical Navigator,” an encyclopedia of navigation now known as simply “Bowditch,” that still–even after hundreds of years–serves as an invaluable handbook on oceanography and meteorology, with useful tables and a maritime glossary.
To download the 2019 edition of Bowditch from the U.S. Coast Guard, click HERE.
The National Maritime Historical Society explains that, by the time Nathaniel Bowditch went to sea, most mariners used a book called The Practical Navigator that had printed tables of celestial star positions and tides to calculate their location at sea. When Bowditch began making his own calculations, he discovered thousands of errors in this book and began recalculating all of the equations and tables. By the time he was finished, he had redone just about everything and added so much new information that he ended up publishing it as a new book, The New American Practical Navigator, in 1802.
The American Practical Navigator is a comprehensive and evolving encyclopedia of marine navigation that covers piloting, celestial navigation, electronic systems, oceanography, and meteorology, and includes essential tables for calculations, serving as a standard reference for mariners, including the U.S. Navy. The U.S. government’s Hydrographic Office (now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) took over publication in 1867, and it remains a vital, updated handbook available for free online and in print.
Bowditch is continuously updated to incorporate new technologies and scientific understanding, with recent editions available in two volumes.
To read the National Maritime Historical Society biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, click HERE.
To read a U.S. Naval Institute biography of Nathaniel Bowditch written in 1937 by a Navy Commodore, click HERE.
When Bowditch died in 1838, Dr. William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City writes ” . . . his friends and the public commissioned a memorial statue from Robert Ball Hughes, which was completed and erected in the Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. It is supposedly the first life-size bronze cast in the United States: which puts Jacksonian America about 400 years behind Donatello and the Italian Renaissance. The book that Bowditch is clutching to his breast is not the New American Navigator, but Laplace’s Mécanique céleste.”
