Carry On, Mr. Bowditch

Nathaniel Bowditch grows up in Salem, Massachusetts, in the years after the Revolutionary War, the smallest and physically weakest of a large seafaring family but gifted with a mathematical mind far beyond his years. His hopes of attending Harvard collapse under his family's finances, and he is bound instead into an indenture, first briefly in his father's cooperage trade and then for nine years at a ship chandlery, work that leaves him little free time and no formal schooling at all. Nat teaches himself anyway, working through trigonometry, calculus, Latin and French on his own in whatever hours the indenture leaves him, and once his term of service ends he goes to sea, first as a surveyor and then as an officer and supercargo aboard merchant vessels making long ocean voyages. At sea Bowditch discovers that the standard navigational tables sailors of the era relied on are full of dangerous errors, miscalculations that had cost real ships and real lives, and he sets out methodically to recompute and correct them, eventually compiling his own book of navigational data written so clearly that even a poorly educated sailor could use it safely. The novel follows him up through his own eventual command of a ship, closing on the moment his self taught expertise is put to its hardest real test at sea and holds.

It is a straightforward, encouraging account of persistence rewarded, aimed squarely at readers who like their heroes real and their obstacles concrete, schooling denied, work demanded, knowledge won anyway through sheer discipline.