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The
Navigator of the United States Navy does not mess around. Addressing a
bow-tie-speckled crowd of New England yachtsmen and nautical history buffs,
Rear Admiral Richard West passionately describes the “technological
explosion” that is blowing apart the grand traditions of marine
navigation and affirms his commitment to an all-digital future. When asked
the inevitable question about paper charts, he grins mischievously and
says, “We’re going to throw them all overboard!”
This
is radical talk, particularly given the context of the Admiral’s
presentation. The occasion was the 227th birthday party for Nathaniel
Bowditch, arguably our nation’s greatest navigator, and was held
in his ultra-historic hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. The party kicked
off the Bowditch Bicentennial, a yearlong celebration of the man and his
signature work, The American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802.
(See www.nathanielbowditch.org
for more information.) The book, usually just called Bowditch and continuously
updated through more than 75 editions, is considered the ultimate authority
on matters of navigation aboard most ships and many yachts.
Nathaniel
Bowditch was truly remarkable. By the time he went to sea at the age of
21, he had taught himself advanced mathematics and astronomy, along with
at least a dozen languages needed to satisfy his voracious intellectual
appetite. He already understood the era’s intensely complex methods
of navigation, and on his first voyage he was finding mistakes in the
standard British tables. By 1802 he had developed a “simplified”
technique for taking “lunar distances,” then the best system
for determining longitude before accurate chronometers were affordable
aboard merchant vessels. Even simplified lunars make regular celestial
navigation look like first-grade arithmetic. Nonetheless, Bowditch vowed
to “put down in the book nothing I can’t teach the crew,”
and supposedly every member of that crew, including his cook, could take
a lunar observation and plot the ship’s position.
In an
age when lives and cargos were commonly lost due to navigation errors,
Bowditch’s genius and ability to express himself had a significant
impact on the safety of sailors and the economic development of our nation.
The value of his work did not go unnoticed, and the first U.S. Naval Hydrographic
Office purchased the copyright to The American Practical Navigator in
1868. That organization, now called the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency (NIMA), continues to update its text and will debut
the 2002 edition at the Salem Maritime Festival in July. The latest Bowditch
will encompass about 1,000 pages and include a CD-ROM; no doubt, it will
thoroughly cover the science of marine navigation, with emphasis on traditional
techniques and tools to practice them.
In fact,
Bowditch is virtually required equipment aboard all U.S. Navy and Coast
Guard vessels, and West is intimately familiar with its pages from his
many years as a navigator and captain aboard surface ships. In part, that’s
why so many traditional sailors are a bit startled by his enthusiasm for
the most modern of tools. And I’m not just referring to the history
buffs gathered in Salem; apparently a common reaction to West around the
fleets is, “Go to sea without paper charts? Are you crazy?”
Mind you that despite rumors to the contrary, celestial navigation is
still actively practiced in the Navy, and lunars weren’t actually
dropped until the early 1900s. A cautious, traditional approach to new
navigation technologies has always served well.
Of course,
West is not crazy. His position as Navigator of the Navy is a serious
mandate, not an honorary title; it was created just a couple of years
ago when the service realized that many of its parts were independently
developing electronic charting systems and sought an overseer. West was
already, and remains, Oceanographer of the Navy, responsible for nearly
4,000 personnel who collect and disseminate massive amounts of cartographic,
meteorological, and other data. His understanding of geospatial information
and services (GIS) made him an obvious choice to lead the transition to
digital navigation.
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