decidedly provincial credentials-an honorary degree from H arvard, then far from a world-class institution, and membership in a Boston scientific society with a reputation that barely extended beyond New England. Bowditch had to wait for the second edition of his Navigator-three long yea rs-before he could take on Mackay, and even then he faced a big problem. Mackay was actually right. There was nothing wrong with the American first edition, but Bowditch 's Newburyport publisher had sold the rights to a London edition, and that imprint, by fault of either the publisher or the printer (or both) , contained the errors Mackay had spotted. Bowditch decided the thing to do was to turn the tables on Mackay-literally: "The remark made by Doctor Mackay in the preface of his work, that, 'the case of the seaman who has to trust to such [my] tables ... is truly lamentable,"' he wrote, "might in many instances apply with equal justness to his own table." 7 Go after Bowditch where it hurt-his numbersand he would take aim at you with mathematical precision. Mind you, Bowditch wasn't just talented with numbers. He delighted in them. He loved their precision and certainty. As a young man seeking knowledge, wrote an early mentor, Nathaniel "found too much of opinion" in literature, but when he turned to mathematics, "he found from the power of numbers," at last, "something sure." 8 In giving mariners the unprecedentIn this 1835 portrait by Charles Osgood, Bowditch sits with the first two volumes ofhis Mecanique Celeste translation, as a bust ofLaplace looks on.
ed ability to pinpoint their positions at sea, the practice of celestial navigation only reinforced his appreciation of that power. And because the navigational technique known as "working lunars" works only because the movement of celestial bodies is m athem atically predictable, it also gave Bowditch a keen appreciation of order,
regularity, and system. That appreciation only intensified in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Bowditch quit the sea and undertook what he considered far more important than his Navigator, the translation and annotation of Pierre Simon de Laplace's Mecanique Celeste. For a man as enthralled with number and system as
Scotsman Andrew Mackay published The Theory and Practice of finding the Longitude at Sea or on Land: to which are added various Methods of D etermining the Latitude of a Place by Variation of the Compass: with new Tables in 1793. Two more editions followed in 1801 and 1810, fo r which he received accolades from the boards oflongitude ofEngland and France. His 1804 release of The Complete Navigator came two years after the publication ofBowditch's The New American Practical Navigator.
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