1956: CARRY ON, MR. BOWDITCH by Jean Lee Latham, with illustrations by John O'Hara Cosgrave II
Nat lay very still in the dark, trying to stay awake until his big brother, Hab, went to sleep.
Nathaniel Bowditch was a real guy. He was a former indentured servant from Salem, Massachusetts, who taught himself mathematics up through calculus, taught himself Latin so he could read Isaac Newton, and got jobs clerking on merchant ships, during which he not only taught himself the basics of navigation, but basically invented all of the conventions of modern maritime navigation, to the extent that a print copy of his eventual magnum opus The New American Practical Navigator is required to be kept on every active US Navy vessel today. Jean Lee Latham’s fictionalized biography of the boy who dreamed of going to Harvard, never had the chance to begin formal schooling, and ended up becoming the best mind in American seafaring, is a good, readable story that captures the jaw-dropping achievement of what Bowditch actually did with his life, and the enthusiasm with which he taught it to the other men with whom he sailed. Not that people picked up everything that Bowditch put down right away; Latham’s book has plenty of scenes where grizzled sailors chafe against the concept of “book sailing”, and here’s one soliloquy from Bowditch which uses an analogy that is, of course, completely dated and irrelevant to our own era:
“‘You can’t remember, Polly, when we first started inoculating for smallpox.’ He [Bowditch] shook his head. ‘Wonder to me I wasn’t lynched. Inoculation was risky - but not as bad as the epidemics of smallpox. Then vaccination came along. It was safer, but people raised almost as much fuss. All my life, I’ve felt as though I made three steps forward with science, and got dragged back two steps by the ignorance and superstitions of mankind. And every time a doctor ‘loses’ a patient, no matter why, it gives science another setback. And every time a ship is lost, it gives scientific navigation a setback, too. Men blame the books.”
Aside from the awful feeling I had reading this particular passage, I largely enjoyed Bowditch, and I do think that any children who are interested in the general fiction genre of “Boat” will as well. But let’s be specific about what “Boat”, exactly, entails.
The extremely funny and sharp podcast If Books Could Kill, hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri, uses each episode to cover a different “airport bestseller” book that poisoned American culture: these idiotic pop-sociology books with bizarre anecdotes and selective statistics and misleading conclusions. Malcolm Gladwell explaining why Korean people are genetically bad at flying planes. David Brooks explaining why poor people are scared of Red Lobster. Countless “centrist” pundits explaining how “wokeism” is destroying America. As the duo has dragged themselves through increasingly awful social hypotheses by increasingly awful op-ed columnists, Shamshiri in particular has started to embrace what he calls the “one book theory”: that is, there is not a wide range of airport bestsellers, there is only one book that airport newsstands sell, and while the cover art and titles may vary from year to year, you’re ultimately just reading the same book over and over again, in terms of structure, “research” approach, and overall takeaway. The content of Freakonomics and Outliers and Nudge and Bobos In Paradise and The Identity Trap and The World Is Flat are all basically interchangeable. In a late-2023 episode on the late-2023 book The Identity Trap, Shamshiri basically predicted the argument of the book chapter-by-chapter, down to a correct guess that the book opened with a misleading anecdote about a teacher trying to do a “woke” thing but actually being reverse racist.
Newburied does not subscribe to a one-book theory. We are looking at 103 years of children’s literature, spanning authors and genres and formats and backgrounds and look where I’m going with all of this is that I’ve narrowed it down to a three-book theory. There are definitely exceptions that I can’t really fit into the theory, particularly when you look at the small number of nonfiction medalists, but ultimately, I think we’re getting to three types of literary children’s novels: Dog, Horse, and Boat. Shiloh is Dog. King Of The Wind is Horse. Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is Boat. Now, to clarify, I’ve haven’t classed those books into those categories because Shiloh has a dog and King Of The Wind has a horse and Bowditch has a boat, although all of that is true. And yes, I think out of the set of Newbery medalists, you’re going to find a lot of literal dogs, horses, and boats in these pages. But I’m using these terms as shorthand for the specific relationship on which the plot focuses.
Dog, which includes Shiloh, prioritizes the relationship between two characters (or some other small set of characters) over the actual setting of the novel. So Shiloh is an archetypical Dog novel, not because there is a dog in it (although there is a dog in it), but because the focus of the novel is the relationship between Marty and Shiloh, and it doesn’t really matter where or when Marty and Shiloh are. They actually live in Depression-era West Virginia, and the novel is based on an experience that the author had when she came across an abused dog in 1989 West Virginia. There’s no reason that Shiloh couldn’t have been set in 1989; the novel would have been almost exactly the same except for a few specifics and maybe some tweaks to Marty’s dialect. There’s also no reason that Shiloh couldn’t be set in California, or Florida, or Hawai’i. The setting isn’t very directly important to what happens in the novel, which is not a critique of Naylor’s writing; I like Shiloh a lot. My point, though, is that the bulk of the novel is spent building this relationship between Marty and Shiloh - as well as Marty and himself, and Marty and his parents, and Marty and Judd - rather than building out the world.
Bridge To Terabithia, which does not have a dog in it, is also Dog. I think Bridge To Terabithia is great, but you could also set it in present-day Chicago and not miss anything; we’ve got faulty rope swings over here, too. Jess and Leslie are the story, not when and where they are. Dear Mr. Henshaw does not have a dog in it - although Leigh does get a dog in Cleary’s sequel to Henshaw - and guess what, it’s also Dog. Leigh lives in Bakersfield, but his relationship to his writing - and to his mother, and to Boyd Henshaw - is what the story is about. I didn’t even realize the story was set in Bakersfield until I read it again for the newsletter; it’s one of Cleary’s only novels that isn’t set in Portland, and it doesn’t matter. Most of Beverly Cleary’s books are Dog, after all; the Ramona Quimby novels don’t showcase the history and scenery of Portland, they’re about this girl and her sister and her parents and the dawnzer’s lee light.
But what happens when a novel goes the other way? When the characters and relationships feel interchangeable, but the setting is completely indispensable from the content of the book? That is what we call Horse. Horse includes King Of The Wind, which is literally about a horse, the legendary racing sire Godolphin Arabian, but Godolphin Arabian isn’t a particularly compelling character, nor does the story really focus on his relationship to another character or characters. The actual reason you read King Of The Wind is not to follow the horse as a character, it’s to learn about the birth of thoroughbred horse racing in the eighteenth century, across Yemen, France, and England. It’s the history and setting, not a relationship, that takes center stage. Obviously, you will find a lot of Horse books in the historical fiction genre, by far the most common genre of Newbery medalist. Adam Of The Road is Horse, because I read the book and I can’t remember a single thing about Adam, but there’s plenty that I can tell you about the road. You can swap any generic character in for Adam and not miss anything, but you can’t swap in another setting, because the entire point of the novel is to showcase what being a traveling minstrel in medieval England would have been like. The Trumpeter Of Krakow is right on the line between Horse and Boat, but I think it skews a little more towards Horse as the real subject is Krakow - you can swap out the family at the center of the story, but you can’t swap out the city - and as Kelly’s writing really shines in the descriptions of the city over the dialogue or development of the protagonist. Call It Courage is also Horse, and I know that’s confusing because Call It Courage contains no horses and actually rather prominently features a boat, so you’d think it would be Boat, but it’s Horse. The point of Call It Courage is to show us the religious and social customs of Polynesian society; Mafatu flies solo for most of the novel, so again, we’re not focusing on the relationship as much as we’re focusing on the setting. You can swap out Mafatu with another character, you can’t swap out Polynesia for another place and time. If you’re one of those people who thinks “New York is a character in Sex And The City!” then you think Sex And The City is also Horse1.
But then there’s Boat, of which Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is an entry, as is The Witch Of Blackbird Pond (which contains a boat), as is I, Juan de Pareja (boats not central), as is Johnny Tremain (there’s a boat but they mainly use it to dump crates of tea into the Boston Harbor), as is The Bronze Bow (no boat, and one of the central characters does not need a boat as he can walk on water), as is Bud, Not Buddy (no boat), as is Number The Stars (there’s a boat, but not till the very end). Boat books are about the relationship between a single character and the setting. You can’t swap out the lead character - navigation prodigy Nat Bowditch - and you can’t swap out the setting - the Revolutionary-era start of modern seafaring and navigation, both are indispensable to what actually happens in the story, and both shape each other as the story goes on. Johnny Tremain doesn’t work if you don’t have the great character of Johnny in the lead role, and it’s also not a story you could exactly set in present-day Chicago. Dog and Horse each skew in opposite directions, Boat strikes the balance, and it’s called Boat because one of the easiest ways to take a character and expose it to a specific era and region of the world is to send them on a literal voyage, or in the case of Nat Bowditch, voyages.
You may put together an implication of quality from all of this, that I think Boat books are superior to Dog and Horse because of the balance between character and setting, but that’s absolutely not true. There are great books in all three genres - I love Bridge To Terabithia or The Trumpeter Of Krakow - and there are times and places when I want to read one or the other or the other. I like movies where things blow up for the entire runtime, but I also like She’s All That and Michael Clayton2, because I contain multitudes. But as I’ve said before, the best novels, and especially the best children’s literary novels, show us that the world is bigger than we think, and we’re not alone in it. Horse shows us how big the world is, Dog shows us how not-alone we are. Boat, in children’s literature, strikes me as the best genre for getting the full message across all at once. And Bowditch is a fascinating story about a fascinating man that pulls off everything a Boat book should.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1964 medalist, It’s Like This, Cat by Emly Neville.
To be fair, one thing blows up in the latter.