73 pages • 2 hours read
Jean Lee LathamCarry On, Mr. Bowditch
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Class, Poverty, and Education
Nat’s story illustrates the relationship between poverty, social class, and education. Nat’s family didn’t have enough money for basic needs such as food and clothing. For example, Nat sometimes didn’t have winter clothing, and the family often ate only potatoes for days on end. Being hungry or cold makes it hard to concentrate on learning and worrying about family finances can leave children feeling too tired and anxious to learn. However, Nat had some advantages that most children living in poverty don’t. First, learning came extremely easily to him. He was noted for his ability to remember effortlessly things that other children had to work hard at. Because learning came so easily to him, he enjoyed it. He engaged in study the way modern children might watch television or play video games.
Second, Nat’s mother and grandmother encouraged Nat’s enthusiasm for learning. In fact, Nat’s family seem to have thought learning was as important as food and clothing, since they spent money for their children to attend school rather than buying winter clothes or better food. They made their home an environment that fostered learning. For example, Memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch contains a description of Nat’s grandmother laying the family Bible open on her bed. Nat and his brothers would entertain themselves for hours tracing the route of the Israelites in their forty years wandering the desert.
Third, although Nat’s family had fallen on hard times, they had recently been solidly middle-class. According to Memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch, Habakkuk Bowditch, in addition to losing his ship, had lent his life savings to his father in a business venture. The venture failed, leaving Habakkuk and his family in dire straits. Both of Nat’s parents had a middle-class education for the time, so they were in the habit of encouraging education in their children and promoting an environment that fostered learning.
Education is an important tool for empowering individuals and providing opportunity. The text suggests that Nat should be admired for his tenacity in educating himself, but he should be admired more for the way he helped other people gain the education they needed to improve their lives. American Practical Navigator, the book he wrote to teach navigation, has never been out of print. It has sold roughly a million copies, and it is still considered the essential book for navigators. Nat didn’t teach only himself; he taught millions.
Overcoming Pain
When confronted with adversity, Nat uses his intellect to overcome fear, loneliness, grief, and disappointment. He learns to focus on things that occupy his mind like math and language, rather than letting his emotions drive his actions. Nat finds that learning makes him feel more in control of his life. Like many other people, Nat discovers that solving a problem or completing a task feels good and makes people feel more in control of their lives. Even when Nat’s problem has no solution—like his grief over his loved ones deaths—focusing his mind on a task like copying something into his notebooks gradually eases his pain and helps him deal with it.
Nat is intrigued by the idea of sailing by ash breeze. The trick of moving a becalmed ship seems laborious, but at bottom, that is how most problems get solved. When a math problem seems overwhelming, the solution is to break it up into smaller pieces and solve them one at a time. Learning Latin starts with one word at a time, gradually adding words until you can understand a sentence or a paragraph or a page. Elizabeth Boardman compares Nat’s obsession with math and Latin to her own experience with needlework. Every stitch is a tiny problem solved, and all those stitches add up to a big picture. Nat’s sister Mary probably has a similar experience with spinning. Every length of thread is a new problem to solve, adding up over time to enough thread to make a sail.
When Nat begins teaching navigation to the crewmen, he finds that the mental activity of learning to solve new problems makes them feel happier and more in control the same way it did for him. One of the reasons that teaching navigation was so effective was because the ship’s captain and superior officers had to understand navigation, so Nat was helping the sailors gain skills that they knew could make them more successful. He gave them hope for a better future along with the immediate satisfaction of problem-solving.
Nat had good reasons for feeling lonely and disappointed when he learned that he would not be going to school, but if Nat had allowed those feelings to overwhelm him, he would have been like Ben Meeker, always complaining and never doing anything about it. Nat offers a good example for readers to follow; when a problem seems too big to solve all at once, start with the smallest piece of the problem and solve that. Then move onto the next piece. Eventually, even the biggest problems can be whittled away.
Masculinity
Even as a child, Nat is learning from his father and older brother what it means to be a man. For example, Hab tells him that boys don’t cry and that being a man means never admitting weakness. As a result, when other boys tease Nat about not having a winter coat, he shrugs and tells them he is too tough to get cold. In Nat the Navigator, Nathaniel’s son Henry will say that Nat knew that complaining of being cold would distress his beloved mother, which he could never have brought himself to do.
Nat’s father tells him that men take care of women and girls and don’t let them worry. When Nat first learns that he is going to be apprenticed rather than going to college, he looks at his sister Mary’s worried face and does the only thing he can do to take care of his sisters and younger brothers—he not only agrees to be indentured, but he also makes a joke about it and hides his disappointment. The rules Nat learned from his father and brother are old-fashioned; modern readers are more likely to be comfortable with the idea that it is not only permissible but necessary for men to admit their vulnerabilities. However, the text doesn’t present Nat as oblivious of his pains or shortcomings, but someone who has internalized the importance of being strong for others.
Apprenticeship was often a boy’s first step into the world of adult men. It was a rite of passage signaling that a young man was ready to begin learning a trade. He was entering into a world where he would be surrounded mostly by other men in an area of public life that wasn’t open to women and girls. Nat’s brothers would have a similar experience when they went to sea. During his apprenticeship, Nat is surrounded by older men. Once he has earned their respect by demonstrating the strength and determination, they take him under their wing and act as mentors, advising and guiding him until he is ready to go out in the world and share what they have taught him—which he does almost as soon as he comes of age, beginning almost immediately to teach the crew of the Henry.
