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 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “Strange Sailing Orders”
Nat thought he had learned to deal with his grief until he sees Cape Ann and realizes that in a few hours he will be home. Polly is waiting for him on the dock. She tells him Elizabeth died of consumption (tuberculosis). She remarks that the disease kills more people than accidents at sea. She wonders if they will ever find cure the way they discovered a vaccination for smallpox.
Elizabeth’s mother asks Nat to stay with her. When he goes to the room he shared with Elizabeth, he stands outside the door, unable to bring himself to go in alone. Polly tells him she prepared another bedroom for him so he wouldn’t have to sleep in his old room.
Captain Prince comes to see Nat; the Astrea’s new owners want Prince and Nat to sail her to Batavia to buy coffee. The only problem is the crew. Their old crew has broken up and are serving on other ships. They will have to find a better crew in Boston.
Nat and Captain Prince go to Boston where they find the Astrea deserted. The owners had hired a crew and given them a month’s pay in advance (which was common practice). Once they had the money, the crew deserted. Nat and Captain Prince try to assemble a new crew but have to settle for inexperienced and incompetent men.
Once the new crew is on the ship, Captain Prince move the ship out into open water. He tells the crew they are too far out to get back to shore. The men are angry. They had planned to do the same as the last crew—take their month’s pay in advance and jump ship. Now they have no choice but to work.
Chapter 20 Summary: "Book Sailing"
A month later, a sullen mood still hangs over the ship. One night, one of the crew, Lupe, approaches Nat and asks Nat to teach him navigation. Lupe can only add and subtract, and navigation requires trigonometry and calculus. Nat realizes that if Lupe had the right mathematical tables, addition and subtraction would be all he needed. Nat tells Captain Prince that he means to write a book that will contain all the mathematical tables an ordinary seaman needs in to navigate. He will make sure that the tables are accurate, and he will include everything anyone needs to know about sailing a ship in language any lubber can understand.
By the time the Astrea reaches Sunda Strait, everyone on the ship can work a lunar. When they arrive at Batavia, there is no coffee. Prince decides to try for Manila and see what they can find to buy there. The problem is that it is monsoon season, and they would have to sail against the wind, tacking back and forth—which will require meticulous navigation.
In Manila, there is a ship from Boston at anchor, the Phoebe. Captain Hudson from the Phoebe asks how it was coming around Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America). Prince answers that they came by the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia and from there to Manila. Hudson is surprised they managed to navigate into the monsoon. They would have to have someone on board who could work lunars. Captain Prince answers that every man in his crew can work a lunar.
When they get back to Boston, Nat declares that he has “swallowed the anchor” (206), meaning he plans never to go to sea again. Returning to Salem, they encounter Zack Selby and learn that Lem’s ship went aground due to an error in Moore’s tables and Lem drowned. Then Nash learns that his brothers Hab and William’s ship went down, and they dead as well.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Sealing is Safer”
Nat goes home to his little room at Elizabeth’s mother’s house. Polly is not there, but Mrs. Boardman hopes she might visit soon. Nat begins to work on his book. He uses the work to numb his new grief over Lem and his brothers.
Mrs. Boardman worries about Nat working so hard and tries to get him to take more rest. Polly comes from Danvers for a visit, and Mrs. Boardman tells her Nat is working too hard. Polly answers that if a ship was aground, every man in the town would work night and day and risk his own life to save the men. That is what Nat is doing. He is working to save every sailor in the world from the fate that took Lem and his brothers; if anybody can do it, Nat can.
Polly makes sure Nat has everything he needs to finish his book. She brings him food and listens when he talks about his work. One day, she tells Nat she is going home to Danvers. Nat protests that she can’t go. He asks her to marry him.
After their marriage, they plan to take a honeymoon. They visit the house in Danvers where Nat lived before his family moved back to Salem. He looks up at the moon and remembers his good luck charm. Polly asks him for a bit of silver to jingle in her pocket. Then she tells Nat they can finish their honeymoon after he finishes his book. They go back to Salem.
One day, Polly’s father (Captain Ingersoll) and Captain Prince ask Nat to invest with them in a sealing ship. Nat thinks of the shilling he invested in Tom Perry and the $135 he invested in a box of shoes to sell in Bourbon. Now he is part owner of a ship. He says to Polly, “You’ve married a capitalist!” (214)
Nat finishes his book in the spring and takes it to the East India Marine Society of Salem—a private club of shipmasters who had all doubled the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. They are the best qualified men in the world to judge the book. They declare it is the most complete and accurate book of its kind.
Nat spends the next year proofreading the book himself to make sure it is perfect. When he is not proofreading, he is visiting friends in Salem. One of those friends is Doctor Holyoke. Doctor Holyoke happens to be visiting one evening when Zack Selby arrives to announce that Nat’s ship, the John, has sunk. The crew was rescued by another ship, but the vessel is gone. Nat and his partners have lost their investment—thanks to book sailing.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
Zack Selby reenters the story with the news that Lem and William and Hab are all dead, and Zack blames “book-sailing.” He seems to particularly blame Nat because Nat is the one who taught navigation to Lem. Zack’s role in the story is to give words to everything Nat fears: that he might be wrong, that his mistakes could get other people killed the way the mistakes in Moore’s Navigator did, and also that people might refuse to use his book once it is written. Every time another ship goes down—including Nat’s own investment, the John—Zack (and everyone like him) sees it as one more sign that book-sailing is wrong. Zack is not really an antagonist or a villain. He is a personification of Nat’s fear and self-doubt.
Polly remarks that consumption (tuberculosis) takes more people than the sea. At the time, people were unaware that tuberculosis was an infectious disease that could be spread by coughing or breathing. They thought it might be something inherited that ran in families because entire families would sometimes die from it, but often many years apart. That was because some people exposed to it could carry the disease and spread it without having symptoms, or the infection could lie dormant and become active many years later. Both Mary and Lois, Nat’s sisters, would die from tuberculosis years after Carry on, Mr. Bowditch ends. One in ten people who contracted tuberculosis died. The disease usually affects the lungs, but it can affect other organs as well, including the brain. Eventually, antibiotics were discovered, and they are now used effectively to kill the infection. There is also a vaccine that is given to children in countries with a high rate of infection.
All of Nathaniel Bowditch’s biographers describe Polly as being devoted to Nat and his work. We see that when she arranges for him to have a different room from the one he had shared with Elizabeth. She understands that his old room would be too painful for him, so she makes him a place where he can feel comfortable. She also understands his sense of urgency over his book. A different kind of woman, like Elizabeth’s mother, might want to take care of him by making him slow down and rest. Polly takes care of him by making it easier for him to keep working. We see another incident during their honeymoon when Polly demonstrates her sympathy with Nat. They are looking up at the moon and, as if she is reading his mind, Polly asks him for a bit of silver to jingle in her pocket. They are thinking the same thing at the same time.
Afterward, Polly is the one who suggests they go back to Salem so he can finish his book. Nat himself is very willing to put the book aside to spend time with her, but the book is important to her because she sees its value to the whole world, not just to Nat. This scene also closes a circle that opened in Chapter 1 when young Nat plotted to work a good luck charm under a new moon. Now Polly has become his good luck charm.
The East India Marine Society of Salem was established in 1799. Its membership was comprised of ship masters and quartermasters who had doubled either Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. Nat’s father Habakkuk Bowditch was a member and received financial support from the society for several years during Nat’s childhood. One goal of the society was to establish what was called at the time a Cabinet of Curiosities, which is to say a museum. The members donated their own collections of natural and artificial curiosities gathered from their travels around the world. By 1821, the collection contained over 2000 artifacts. By 1840, that number had doubled. The museum is believed to be the inspiration for the collection in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “A Virtuoso’s Collection.”
