'Carry On, Mr Bowditch' by Jean Lee Latham

MY THOUGHTS:

 I've seen this Newbery Award winner from 1956 being recommended by decades of readers, including homeschoolers. I finally discovered I could borrow an internet archive copy. It's a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, the young mathematician and astronomer who noticed a dire need for a comprehensive, potentially life-saving encyclopedia of navigation, so went ahead and wrote one. 

Instead of fulfilling his dream to become a Harvard graduate, young Nat (born in 1773) is shaped by the school of hard knocks. Family hardship requires him to help in his father's cooperage business, and then he's indentured as a clerk in a chandlery. During his early twenties, Nat Bowditch sails on several merchant ships and discovers, to his horror, that Moore's Navigation, the standard resource for seafarers, is riddled with errors. 

Young Nat gets hopping mad. 'It's criminal to have mistakes in a book like this. Men's lives depend on the accuracy of the tables! When you depend on a book with mistakes, it would be safer not to depend on it.' His only viable solution is to replace it by writing a huge tome of his own, and luckily for all sailors, Nat has the brainpower to pull it off. It's a monumental feat for a young, self-taught man, which deserves far more acclaim than he possibly gets in the 21st century.

Nat Bowditch also educates other crew members in navigation, and eventually becomes a captain himself.

There is a lot to wrap our heads around. I won't even begin to delve into the historical backdrop, with America's War for Independence followed by the Napoleonic Wars, even though they're fascinating in the context of Nat's life. (Suffice to say that having won that first war, America must fight for her rights on the High Sea, which makes British vessels look like ultimate sore losers.) Rather than letting this review blow out into something huge, I'll list off the main points that struck me.

1) Who needs Harvard! Not highly motivated geniuses anyway. Study is what teenage Nat does in his downtime for fun. He teaches himself Latin so that he can understand 'Principia' by Isaac Newton. Interesting that we modern folk consider Latin to be a dead language, yet in the late 18th century it was the cutting edge language of scholars and scientists. Who killed it? Next, he teaches himself French, Spanish, and German too. 

2) Bowditch's life was incredibly tragic. Sure, this novel condenses it within 300 or so pages, but there is so often a fresh announcement of some heartbreaking death. The line, 'I'm sorry to tell you, Nat, I have some very bad news,' becomes a major motif. His second young wife, Polly Ingersoll, must have been reckless to have married him, having seen firsthand what happens to people Nathaniel Bowditch grows fond of. I see that several other reviewers decided to give this novel less than five stars solely because of all the deaths. I understand their decision, even though it's not Latham's fault. She didn't make all this crazy, sad stuff up. Maybe giving her book a lower ranking is a case of, 'Don't shoot the messenger,' yet it's still problematic having a book aimed at juvenile readers which a huge percentage of them may be too sensitive to read.

3) I appreciate Nat Bowditch's acquired patience. One of his love interests points out that his brain works so fast, he 'stumbles over other people's dumbness.' Eventually Nat makes a point of noticing the exact moment when the people he tutors twig, so that he can write his 'dumbed-down' explanations in his notebook, for they must be the most effective teaching tools. I always imagined it must be cool to be a genius, but they evidently suffer the downside of finding 99% of people have puny mental scopes, compared to their own. Small talk must get tedious. 

4) I was awed by the brilliance and dedication of Jean Lee Latham herself, for she obviously put everything she had into writing this book. The flyleaf of the version I borrowed tells us that before making a start on the story, she studied Mathematics, Astronomy, Oceanography and Seamanship to familiarize herself with Bowditch's work. Wow, that takes fandom to a whole new level, and it shows in the story. I didn't miss noticing the painstaking detail.

On the strength of that, I wish I could give this book 5 stars myself, but nope. Along with all the deaths, I thought Latham compresses so much detail and time frame within a comparatively short word count, it gets a bit bogged down at times. It's almost enough to blow the brain gaskets of readers who aren't as cluey as either Nathaniel Bowditch or herself.

Still, I've got to say it definitely encourages us to smarten up our own work ethics. Sure we might never be able to write major scientific encyclopedias or even the bios of those who do, yet we can devote ourselves to the projects which ignite our imaginations and seem worthy, even when the going gets tough. One of my favourite lines in the story is when teenage Nat learns Latin with the intent to read Isaac Newton. He says, 'First I have to figure out what it means in English, and then I have to figure out what it means.' 

I'm inspired by such painstaking and compelling enthusiasm. 

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