CLT Practice Test 15

Historical Profile

¹This passage is an original essay written for PrepBanq practice.

²Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1773, [1] school ended early for Nathaniel Bowditch. His family was poor, and by the age of ten he was working in his father’s cooper shop, where barrels were made. At twelve he was bound as an apprentice to a ship chandler, a merchant [2] whom supplied rope, canvas, and instruments to the vessels crowding Salem’s harbor. He would never attend college.

³The hours were long and the pay was meager. [3] For example, the shop gave Bowditch something no classroom had offered him: quiet stretches between customers and the freedom to fill them as he liked. He borrowed books wherever he could [4] find them, he even taught himself Latin so that he could read Isaac Newton’s Principia in the original. When a passage in a book was beyond him, he copied it out by hand and returned to it until it made sense.

⁴[5] When he finally went to sea in 1795, he sailed on five voyages in total, and on the last of these five voyages he served as the captain of the ship, the master in command of the vessel. On those long passages he checked the standard guide of the day, John Hamilton Moore’s The Practical Navigator, and found thousands of errors in its tables, mistakes that could [6] imperil a ship and every sailor aboard it.

⁵In 1802 Bowditch published The New American Practical Navigator, a guide that corrected those errors and explained its methods in plain language. Its pages assumed no formal schooling, only patience and care. Neither its corrected tables nor its simpler method for finding longitude from observations of the moon [7] were beyond the reach of an ordinary seaman. According to a story often told about him, he once taught every member of a crew, down to the cook, to work these calculations. [8] Salem was also the home of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born there in 1804. The book soon became the standard guide for American sailors.

⁶Bowditch’s fame grew. [9] Lo, though the groves of academe beckoned him with honeyed entreaties, the sage of Salem spurned their siren song. He spent his later career working in the insurance business in Salem and Boston. In his spare hours he took on his greatest scholarly labor: a translation of [10] the French mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Mécanique céleste, a vast treatise on the motions of the planets and the moon. He added extensive commentary of his own and paid to print the four volumes himself; the last of them appeared in 1839, a year after his death.

⁷Revised many times since, The New American Practical Navigator is still published by the United States government. To generations of sailors, it has been known simply as “Bowditch.” Few books written by a self-taught apprentice have been trusted with so many lives.