292 THE OCEAN RIVER 



land, Irish came down into Boston from the maritime prov- 

 inces of Canada; and after the War of 1812 various waves 

 of a new German immigration poured in from the Rhineland, 

 due to hard times in Europe. The ScotchTrish, following the 

 flax trade, came into western Pennsylvania. In brief, the pull 

 of the Atlantic world made the west a land of opportunity 

 for the harassed and surplus populations of western Europe 

 prior to the Civil War. Free land in the west was largely 

 the impetus at this time, just as industrial development and 

 the black prairie soil later brought in new groups of immi- 

 grants from Europe and the Mediterranean. 



Until the nineteenth century the collection of information 

 and the study of the Ocean River that so greatly affected 

 sailing the Atlantic was slow and almost casual. We have seen 

 how Franklin got the Stream mapped in 1769 from informa- 

 tion gathered by Folger and other whaling captains of Nan- 

 tucket. He then interested younger men in following up the 

 thermal charting of the great Stream at America's front door. 

 In fact, the thermometer was often of more use in navigation 

 to the American captains, even into the early nineteenth 

 century, than the chronometer, which they regarded as too 

 expensive. But even before Franklin, a few scattered indi- 

 viduals were laying the foundation of navigational studies in 

 America. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Benja- 

 min Hubbard of Charlestown, Mass., published Orthodoxal 

 Navigation — ignored at the time, but the first attempt to 

 chart a great circle course across the Atlantic. Lawrence 

 Wroth, in his pamphlet Some American Contributions to the 

 Art of Navigation, writes: ''Hubbard's chief contribution to 

 the practice of sailing upon the great circle course was the 

 construction of a chart which he called a new and true Para- 

 doxal Chart. That chart represented the superficies of a 

 spherical triangle embodying one eighth of the surface of the 

 earth. Upon the chart thus constructed he laid down eighteen 



