NEW AMERICAN PRACTICAL NAVIGATOR: Being An Epitome Of Navigation; Containing All The Tables Necessary To Be Used With The Nautical Almanac Determining The Latitude, And The Longitude By Lunar Observations, And Keeping A Complete Reckoning At Sea; Illustrated By Proper Rules And Examples: The Whole Exemplified In A Journal, Kept From Boston To Madeira, In Which All The Rules Of Navigation Are Introduced: Also, The Demonstration Or The Most Useful Rules Of Trigonometry: With Many Useful Problems In Mensuration, Surveying, And Gauging: Dictionary Of Sea Terms: And The Manner Of Performing The Most Useful Evolutions At Sea : To Which Are Added…. by Bowditch Nathaniel - 1807

Newburyport, MA.: Edmund M. Blunt, 1807. Second Edition, expanded and with many improvements over the first, including additional plates and over 100 additional pages of text. With a large folding copper-engraved chart of the Atlantic Ocean and the adjacent lands, ten other engraved plates, countless tables, diagrams and illustrations within the text, complete as called for. Royal, thick 8vo, handsomely bound in full calf to style, the spine with bands double-ruled in gilt and with a red morocco label double-ruled and lettered in gilt. xiv, 679, [1] ad pp. A very handsome, complete, sturdy and quite fresh copy, the binding in excellent order and still very fresh. The book is generally found well used, very browned and spotted and with evidence of extreme use, but this copy remains in very good order with only light toning or age evidence, a bit of the spotting occasional to the text block and a bit of the typical offsetting to the plates. A quite excellent copy. Rarely found this well preserved, and quite rare thus. “THE GREATEST BOOK IN ALL THE HISTORY OF NAVIGATION”. “THE BOWDITCH”, AN AMERICAN NAUTICAL INSTITUTION, A BEAUTIFULLY PRESERVED COPY OF THE SECOND ISSUANCE, THE 1807 IMPROVED EDITION.
Bowditch, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, shipped out in 1795 on the first of five voyages to the East Indies. Much of his time at sea was spent pouring over the standard navigational tables prepared by John Hamilton Moore of England. Moore's 'The Practical Navigator' was the most popular navigational text of the late 18th century. Bowditch, a self-taught expert in mathematics, science and astronomy, found and corrected over 8,000 errors. He contacted the US publisher of the work, Edmund March Blunt, who asked Bowditch to correct and revise the third edition during his fifth voyage. The task was so extensive that Bowditch decided to write his own book, and to "put down in the book nothing I can't teach the crew." On that trip, it is said that every man of the crew of 12, including the ship's cook, became competent in measuring and calculating lunar observations and to plot the correct position of the ship while at sea. The New Practical Navigator was published in 1799. By 1802, when Blunt was ready to publish a third edition, Nathaniel Bowditch and others had corrected so many errors in Moore's work that Blunt decided to publish it as the first edition of an entirely new work, so the corrected tables were included in Bowditch's New American Practical Navigator, published in both England and America in 1802. Howes calls this the "First accurate navigator's guide." This volume also includes information on navigational law, measurement, and terminology. The book was easily understood by sailors with limited education. It became, along with "a Bible, a chest of clothes and mother's blessing", an essential part of every seaman's gear.
The full value of Bowditch’s work goes well beyond the tables, it is in fact an encyclopedia of navigation. It served, and still does, as a valuable handbook on oceanography and meteorology, and contains useful tables and a maritime glossary. A book of such importance that in 1867, a full sixty five years after the initial publication, the copyright and plates were bought by the Hydrographic Office of the United States Navy, and for use as a U.S. Government publication. It is still available to this day. It is not only a cornerstone work, but is considered one of America's true nautical institutions.