Carry On, Mr. Bowditch Study Guide

Jean Lee Latham was born and grew up in West Virginia, and she attended West Virginia Wesleyan University. After her graduation in 1925, she went to New York and completed a master’s degree at Cornell University. During her college education and beyond, she wrote plays and taught English and drama classes. After earning her master’s degree, she moved to Chicago, where she set her sights on becoming a radio writer. When World War II began, she joined the U.S. Signal Corps Inspection Agency. Following the end of the conflict, Latham turned to writing fiction for children. Her first book provided the biography of American inventor, Eli Whitney. She eventually wrote more than 40 plays and dozens of books, mostly biographies of notable persons for children and adolescents. She would often use her extensive research on a historical figure and write both a simpler children’s book and a more complex young adult book about the same person. She won the Newberry Award in 1956 for Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. She passed away in 1995 at the age of 93.

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is set against the backdrop of a period of social and political upheaval that included the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), during which the 13 colonies of North America declared and won their independence from Great Britain; the French Revolution (1789–1799), during which the French people rose up and overthrew the monarchy and aristocracy; and the Napoleonic Wars (1800–1815) during which Napoleon Bonaparte led the French in an attempt to conquer much of Europe. This time was characterized by shifting alliances among the European powers; the birth of modern democracies; and America’s attempts to establish itself as an independent nation and a global player in trade. The international shipping trade based out of Salem, Massachusetts, made key contributions to this latter effort, especially in the decades following the Revolutionary War. By 1790, Salem had become the sixth-largest city in the new country. It dominated sea trade, especially the particularly lucrative spice trade that saw ships on sometimes multi-year voyages between the United States and China, the Malay Peninsula, and the islands of present-day Indonesian Archipelago. The first successful voyage to import expensive pepper from the Malay Peninsula left from and returned to Salem 1795–97.

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch bears several similarities to Esther Forbes’s 1943 Johnny Tremain. Both are coming-of-age story that centers on the period surrounding the American Revolutionary War; both feature boys who must make their own way in the world after family or personal tragedies; both won Newberry Awards. Other books that feature similar protagonists or settings include Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Gary Paulsen’s more recent Woods Runner. Because its protagonist, Nat, spends much of his early adult life at sea, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch contributes to a long line of British and American novels about the romance (and danger) of a life at sea including James Fennimore Cooper’s The Pilot and The Red Rover, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, and Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander and its 20 sequels.