Exploring the Life and Work of
Nathaniel Bowditch
NHA University Webinar TONIGHT!

Not Just a Practical Navigator: A New Look at Nathaniel Bowditch, 19th-Century Numbers Man with Tamara Plakins
Tuesday, April 20, at 5:30pm EST
Held via Zoom
Free for Members
$5 for Non-Members

In an illustrated talk, historian and biographer Tamara Plakins Thornton offers a fresh look at the life and work of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), the author of the New American Practical Navigator, for decades the must-have manual for America’s sailors. Thomas Jefferson celebrated the Salem-born astronomer as “a meteor of the hemisphere,” but Bowditch was also a prominent business executive whose devotion to systems that ran with clockwork regularity shaped the faceless bureaucracies of modern life. Meet this peppery Yankee, who voyaged around the globe, became a Fellow of London’s Royal Society, pioneered the modern trust, and even shook up Harvard.
Artifact Highlight

Hadley Quadrant
Gift of Mrs. Maria T. Swain, 1896.37.2

What is an octant, also known as a reflecting quadrant? A measuring instrument used for navigation.  This portable instrument uses a small mirror to bring two images together--those of the sun and the horizon, for instance--to determine latitude at sea by observing the altitude of celestial bodies. It has an arc of 45o or more that measures angles of 90o or more.

Two men independently developed the octant around 1730: John Hadley (1682–1744), an English mathematician, and Thomas Godfrey (1704–1749), a glazier in Philadelphia. While both have a legitimate and equal claim to the invention, Hadley generally gets the greater share of the credit.

Two others who created octants during this period were Caleb Smith, an English insurance broker with a strong interest in astronomy (in 1734), and Jean-Paul Fouchy, a mathematics professor and astronomer in France (in 1732).
Nantucket Island Maps over Time, 1636 - 1946
Map Collection Highlight
Pascaert van Nieu Nederland...,1675 Arent Roggeveen  
Ink on paper, 16 1/4” x 20 1/8” plus margins 
Gift of the Friends of the NHA, RL2020.8 

This chart predates by a hundred years the next-oldest navigational chart in the NHA collection, and the condition is as nearly perfect as a 345-year-old chart can be.

Arent Roggeveen, born in 1628 in the Netherlands, was steward of navigational charts and documents for the Dutch East and West India Companies. He compiled the first series of large-scale charts of North America’s coastlines, a landmark, as many had never been mapped in such detail.
Nantucket Historical Association | 508.228.1894 | NHA.org