B chapter.indd - Charles Babbage Institute - University of Minnesota

Erwin Tomash Library
Bowditch, Charles Pickering Bowditch, Nathaniel
Collation: π 9 (-π10)1–20 8 21 6 22 7 (-22 8 )[23] 19 (-23 20 )
Size: 253x165 mm
Charles P. Bowditch was the man who founded the
Maya collections of the Peabody Museum at Harvard
University and the person after whom their Bowditch
professorship is named.
The system of numeration used by a civilization is not
a machine, but it certainly is machinery. Without it very
little could be accomplished in the way of numeration
or, especially, arithmetic; because of this, works on
numeration are of particular interest to this collection.
This work was one of the first attempts to systematically
set forth the numeration and calendar systems of the
Maya. It not only explains them but also examines all
extant Maya material for examples of the glyphs used
and their interpretation.
Illustrations available:
Title page
Examples of Maya numeration
Maya numeration, B 215
B 215
B 216
Bowditch, Nathaniel (1773–1838)
The new American practical navigator
Year: 1802
Place: Newburyport, MA
Publisher: Edmund M. Blount for Brown & Stansbury, New
York
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Figures: 1 engraved folding frontispiece chart, 7 engraved
plates (1 tinted)
Binding: contemporary leather; rebacked; red leather label
Pagination: pp. 246, [274], 533–589, [15]
Collation: A–2H 4 A–B 4 (A)–(2S) 4
Size: 224x133 mm
Reference: Glais RCMT, p. 89; not in Karp MWPA
Nathaniel Bowditch was a self-educated seaman and
mathematician who had only three years of schooling
when he began working in his father’s cooper’s shop at
the age of ten. Later he was apprenticed to a firm of ship’s
chandlers who encouraged his mathematical interests. At
the age of twenty-two he became a seaman and spent the
next nine years aboard ship, sailing on long voyages to
the Caribbean, Portugal and the East Indies.
In the course of these voyages, Bowditch became
celebrated as a skilled navigator and found himself
spending long hours correcting the navigational tables
then in use. He then turned his attention to the standard
navigational text of his time, John Hamilton Moore’s The
practical navigator and seaman’s new daily assistant,
London, 1772. He completely reworked and extended
Moore’s book and decided to publish his revised version
as The new American practical navigator, a title clearly
reflecting its heritage. This work is much more than an
improved set of navigational tables, for it also contains
useful sections ranging from a short dictionary of sea
terms to explanations of the parts of a ship (see the
illustration of the colored plate and its text). Also included
are standard forms for various contracts for freight and
charters and other financial and legal documents.
Bowditch found and corrected some eight thousand
errors in the Moore version of the tables. Most were of
little consequence, but some were quite significant. For
example, Moore’s incorrect identification of 1800 as a
leap year introduced a twenty-three mile error in some
results and caused the loss of both ships and men.
Bowditch’s reputation as a legendary navigator was
reinforced when Harvard University awarded him an
honorary M.A. degree. He knew nothing of this honor,
but being stranded in the port of Boston by adverse winds,
he serendipitously decided to visit Harvard. Finding its
graduation ceremonies in progress, he sat in the audience
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