New book shows Nathaniel Bowditch as business innovator

June 09--Nathaniel Bowditch is best known as the author of "The American Practical Navigator," and for good reason.

"'The 'Navigator' was hugely important in the 19th century," said Tamara Thornton, a professor of history at State University of New York, Buffalo. "Every American vessel was going to have this book on board. It was really useful in an age of celestial navigation."

But Thornton's new biography, "Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers," reveals that the Salem native had an even bigger impact in the world of American business.

"He brought his love for system and number to the business world, which in an earlier era was unrecognizable to us because it was so informal," Thornton said. "It was all about personal connections."

Bowditch was born in Salem in 1773, and relatives helped him get started in the seagoing business of trade, where he succeeded by virtue of his skill with numbers and navigation.

After serving on several voyages across the globe, Bowditch was appointed president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company, at a time when business corporations of any kind were new in America.

But it was after joining the East India Marine Society, a group of "Salem's maritime elite," that Bowditch started to make his mark.

By asking captains to keep their logs in blank, printed forms, he led them to record more accurate and useful information about their voyages, which benefited other merchants in the society.

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"The forms included pre-ruled columns with printed headings for the various categories of nautical data," Thornton writes. "Separate pages at the end were reserved for such commercially valuable information as weights, measures, currencies" and more.

We take such devices for granted today, but they changed the way people thought about their work, and Bowditch introduced similar forms and methods wherever he went.

The revolutionary nature of such methods can be measured by the impact they had when Bowditch ran the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, where he sent form letters to collect mortgage payments that almost caused an uprising among farmers in western Massachusetts.

In addition to serving as a biography of Bowditch, Thornton's book is a portrait of Salem during its golden age, which started to dissolve around the same time that Bowditch left for Boston in 1823.

"What strikes me about Salem in this period is it's a small town of a few thousand people," Thornton said. "Their world is very Salem-centric -- except for the rest of the globe.

"Because it's so maritime, at once it's a very provincial place, but at the same time people are aware of the Indian Ocean and the people that come from there."

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