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.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary “A Simple Matter of Mathematics”
When they finally come out the other side of Sunda Strait, Captain Prince asks Nat what he thinks of the East Indies. Nat is astounded by the immensity of the islands. There are over 3,000 islands in the archipelago. The total land mass is more than 700,000 square miles. Captain Prince is amused by his answer.
At Manila, the captain of another American ship comes aboard and is astonished to learn that they made their way from Sunda Strait to Manila in only fifteen days. They spend a few weeks at Manila, then start for home. The ship springs a leak. For weeks, the crew works the pumps night and day to keep the ship afloat. Finally, they reach Block island off the coast of Rhode Island. They still have hundreds of miles to travel first east past Nantucket Island, then north around Cape Cod. They pass one landmark after another—Baker’s Island, Coney Island, Bowditch’s Ledge, finally around Marblehead then South by Southwest into Salem Harbor and home.
Nat finds Elizabeth Boardman awaiting him on the dock, but with her is David Farrell, a young man closer to Elizabeth’s age than Nat. Nat is disappointed and feels foolish for thinking that Elizabeth cared for him.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Lunars and Moonlight”
Nat and Captain Prince go to Elias Derby's office where they discuss the ship's success and President Washington's war threat. Mr. Blunt, the publisher of Moore’s Navigator, arrives. He has been speaking to the first mate, Mr. Collins, who told him that Nat found errors in Moore’s Navigator. Nat replies that there were actually several errors. Mr. Blunt says that he wants to include Nat’s corrections in the next printing of Moore, and he wants to include Nat’s new method of taking lunars as well.
During the next few weeks, Nat doesn’t see Elizabeth. She is busy going to parties in Boston with David Farrell. In the autumn, he finally gets a letter from Elizabeth inviting him to a husking bee (a party at which neighbors gather to help a farm family husk the corn they have harvested to prepare it for storage).
At the party as they are husking the corn, David Farrell complains that he hasn’t found a red ear (an ear of corn in which the kernels have turned red from an imbalance of sugar). He wishes he had a dozen so that he could kiss Elizabeth (traditionally, anyone who found a red ear was entitled to a kiss). At that moment, Nat picks up an ear, peels back the husk and sees it is red. Embarrassed, he turns to Elizabeth and says, “I love you, Elizabeth. I’ve always loved you since you were…” and he kisses her (167).
They are married in March and live together for two months before Captain Prince asks him to sign on as supercargo on his next trip. After dinner that day, Lem Harvey comes to see Nat along with his wife and his brother-in-law, Zack Selby. Lem’s wife Amanda thanks Nat for what he did for Lem. Lem has just signed on the Betsy as second mate because he knows navigation.
Zack Selby sneers at anyone who sails by books. A real sailor can make his way by log, lead, and lookout. Nat points out that a lot of people sailing by log, lead, and lookout don’t make it home, so what’s wrong with sailing by the book if it makes them safer?
On the August morning when Astrea is about to sail, Elizabeth says goodbye to Nat. He tells her the French say it better: au revoir—it means until I see you again. Elizabeth says that if this were goodbye, she wants him to know that since she married him, she’s been the happiest girl in the world.
Chapter 18 Summary: "Astrea to the Rescue"
Nate brings aboard an entire chest full of books and charts, which he will use to check every figure in every table in every book just to see how many errors there are. Captain Prince thinks he is crazy. It will take him forever, but to Nat it is important that the numbers must be right.
A month later, they reach Spain and find a blockade of British ships between them and the harbor of Cadiz. The British let them through but warn them to watch out for French spies. They had found one on one of their ships and recognized him by his pronunciation. When Nat and Captain Prince return to their ship, Nat explains to the crew how they can recognize a Frenchman by his accent. Now Nat is glad that he learned to speak French as well as read it.
Sometime later, Nat comes across the cabin boy Charlie Waldo. He notices that the boy has been crying and realizes Charlie is homesick. He asks Charlie to help him with a navigation problem he is working on; if he can explain it to Charlie, Nat will know he’s got it right. By the time Charlie has learned what Nat is trying to teach them, he has forgotten his homesickness. He thanks Nat, saying, “You don’t know, but you helped me, too!” (177)
They are still in port in Cadiz when they hear cannons firing. The British Admiral Nelson has defeated Napoleon’s fleet in the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt. There are still French privateers in the Mediterranean, however, so the Astrea and 400 other vessels leave in a convoy guarded by the British warships.
Before long, the lookouts notice some of the smaller ships lagging behind. They are American vessels, so Captain Prince orders the Astrea back to protect them with her guns. Astoria had been escorting the smaller ships for two days when they spot three French ships are bearing down on the little flotilla. The crew rushes to get the guns ready. Nat offers to handle the powder room, handing gunpowder up to the men on the guns.
While Nat is waiting for action, he decides to work on a math problem. He has been there for three hours when Captain Prince startles him with a bellow. While he was working on his math problem, the French ships got a good look at Astrea’s guns and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. That was three hours ago. Nat was so busy with his math problem, he lost track of time, and everyone else had forgotten he was down there. Nat himself had forgotten that he was surrounded by gunpowder. The slightest spark could have blown him to kingdom come, and he was happily doing math.
They have been anchored at Alicante for about a week when the captain of another Salem ship comes aboard. He brings that the news that Elizabeth is dead. Nat is in shock. He stands at the bow for a long time, watching the moon rise. Charlie Waldo comes to him and asks him to help with a navigation problem. Nat works with Charlie until he understands the problem. Charlie thanks him, and Nat says, “Thank you, Charlie Waldo. You may not know, but you helped me, too.” (183)
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
The author introduces a new antagonist with Zack Selby. Zack embodies arguments against the book Nat wants to write, that the old way of doing things is good enough and sailing by math doesn’t make sense. Every time a ship goes down, Zack will blame it on “book sailing,” implying that Nat’s ideas are killing people.
In Chapter 12, Captain Prince was doubtful when Nat told him they were closer to Bourbon than Prince thought based on dead reckoning. Nat’s lunar calculation turned out to be right. This time, when Nat gives an estimate of their arrival based on his own measurements, Captain Prince shows his confidence in Nat by saying that he’d better lay out his go-ashore clothes. Captain Prince’s answer is full of subtext. Like their unspoken conversation about Lem in Chapter 15, the words on the surface are only a fraction of what the men are really saying to each other. Here, Prince is saying, “I have come to respect you enough to recognize that you are never wrong about these things.”
Nat isn’t always very good with subtext, however. He doesn’t even notice the complement. He responds literally, as he did many years ago when Mr. Ropes sent him to find out where the science of surveying originated, and instead, he tried to find out where the science itself begins. When Prince asks Nat what he thinks of the East Indies, he expects an emotional reaction to the experience of passing through the Strait. Instead, Nat’s answer is quantitative rather than qualitative; he notes the number of islands and the size of the landmass.
The East Indies, now known as the Malay Archipelago, is an archipelagic state—a nation made up of a string of islands (an archipelago)—stretching from northern Australia to southern India. The dry land mass is about the size of Mexico while the total surface area including water is close to that of India or Australia. Parts of the region have been controlled at one time or another by the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. The Battle of the Nile in which Admiral Nelson defeated Napoleon’s fleet took place in 1798, six years into the French revolutionary wars, which would overlap into the Napoleonic. The Napoleonic wars would continue until 1815, so the British officer is seventeen years early in declaring Napoleon defeated.
The scene in which Nat helps Charlie over his homesickness is significant because it reverses at the end of the chapter when Charlie, seeing his superior officer’s distress, returns the kindness that Nat did for him. It is another instance like that of Lem Harvey in which men engage in a kind of unspoken relationship in which they meet each other’s emotional needs and engage in complex social negotiations without verbally acknowledging what is happening. The interactions are no less meaningful for being unspoken.
Later, when Prince finds himself saying, “It’s just a simple matter of mathematics,” he glares at Nat because he is starting to pick up Nat’s quirks. He has occasionally been exasperated with Nat’s fixation on numbers. In some ways, that focus on math separates Nat from relationships with ordinary people. Now Captain Prince finds himself doing the very thing that exasperates him when Nat does it.
