294 THE OCEAN RIVER 



. . . the passage of a ship through the Gulf Stream, and from 

 deep water into soundings, may be discovered in time to 

 avoid danger." 



Meanwhile in Boston John and William Norman were pub- 

 lishing The American Pilot from 1791 to 1794. In 1796 Ed- 

 mund Blunt of Newburyport issued The American Coast 

 Piloty edited by a Captain Lawrence Furlong. In 1800 Blunt 

 brought out John Hamilton Moore's New Practical Navigator. 

 The interesting thing about this book was the editor, a 

 young Salem sea captain, Nathaniel Bowditch, who made 

 several hundred corrections in the text. When a later and 

 fully corrected issue came out in 1802 Bowditch had prac- 

 tically rewritten the book, correcting over eight thousand 

 earlier errors and enlarging the chapters on astronomy, mathe- 

 matics, and sailing directions. 



Here at last, through the natural genius of Bowditch, the 

 sum of navigational knowledge collected laboriously during 

 the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries — par- 

 ticularly of course the eighteenth — was brought together and 

 amplified into what has truly been regarded as a new master- 

 work. With Bowditch at hand and the later addition of the 

 British Admiralty compass in 1840, together with the chro- 

 nometer based on Greenwich time, modern conquest of the 

 Atlantic and the mastery of the great waters of the Ocean 

 River had come to pass. An exact reckoning of longitude and 

 the ability to sail at night were now possible. Commerce 

 could hold to advertised schedules. 



With the nineteenth century the seaborne conquest of the 

 oceanic western frontier along the courses of the Gulf Stream 

 assumed for the most part its modern form. Slavery was on 

 the way out, independence from European domination was 

 largely accomplished; a world commerce free from piracy 

 was established, and the economic, political, and social prob- 

 lems of the Americas had a western land pull that for the next 



