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.
Symbols & Motifs
Celestial Navigation
Nat navigates his life by the celestial bodies, e.g., the moon, stars, and sun. The very first scene in the story shows Nat hoping to use the moon in a good luck charm. However, he finds that the moon is a tricky thing to rely on. It waxes and wanes and hides behind clouds. As an adult, Nat will figure out a way to use the moon as a more reliable guide.
When Nat first learns that he won’t be able to go back to school, his mother sees how deeply disappointed he is and takes him outside and shows him the stars. She teaches him how to find the north star and use it to tell the time. It is another way that he learns to use the sky as a guide. His mother also shows him how to use the stars to comfort himself when life doesn’t go his way. She shows him that looking up at the stars makes earthly troubles seem less crushing.
Later, Nat will do for other people what his mother did for him that night. When Elizabeth Boardman is brokenhearted over her father’s death, Nat comforts her by teaching her how to tell the time by the north star. When his ship’s crews are out of sorts, Nat manages them by teaching them navigation. From Nat, they learn that looking up from their earthly troubles helps them find their way through life.
Books
Most people didn’t own books because they were expensive and not widely available. There were lending libraries, but one had to pay an annual subscription fee in order being to be able to borrow books. In Nat the Navigator, Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch mentions that the family owned at least a Bible and a Prayer Book. There must, however, have been other books in the house because his mother sometimes had to take books away from him when she felt he needed to get up and exercise (Nat the Navigator).
Books enter Nat’s life in another way when he goes to work at the chandlery. On his first day, Mr. Hodges gives him a notebook in which to write down anything Sam Smith tells him that he wants to remember. Mr. Hodges must have been generous with notebooks because Nat filled scores of them over the next nine years. He had no books of his own, but according to Nat the Navigator, Mr. Ropes lived with his father, who had an extensive library (including the encyclopedia in which Nat researched surveying). Nat was allowed to borrow books from that library any time he wished. Later, Doctor Bentley, Doctor Prince and Mr. Read give him access to the town’s “philosophical library,” a collection of science books. Nat would often copy those books into his own notebooks, creating for himself a personal library.
The book motif culminates with the creation of the book for which Nathaniel Bowditch is best known: the American Practical Navigator which is often called simply Bowditch by mariners. In that way, Nat paid back the generosity of the people who gave him access to books by giving a valuable book to the world.
Harvard
At the beginning of the story, when Nat thinks about what he will do when he grows up, he pictures going to Harvard. When becoming a Harvard man seems like an impossibility, Nat feels lost and depressed. Part of him feels like giving up and being becalmed like Ben Meeker. However, instead of receiving his figurative certificate of adulthood from a university, he decides to figure it out for himself.
The Harvard motif returns when Mr. Morris tells Nat that if he is ever let out of his indenture, Mr. Morris will hire him as a tutor. When Ropes and Hodges sell the chandlery, Nat imagines again that his dream of Harvard may come true. Then his hopes are dashed again.
Years later, when Nat has already found his own way to being an adult, he goes to see the commencement ceremony at Harvard where the new graduates receive their degrees. Seeing his childhood dream being granted to other people makes Nat sad, reminding him of his own disappointment. Then the school grants Nat an honorary degree. Nat feels that he has been validated, yet the school is only acknowledging what Nat did for himself.
