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Jim,

On your page, you have:

"Sumner was born in Boston on March 20,1807 [...]  He was the son of
architect Thomas Waldron Sumner [...]  He entered Harvard at the young
age of 15, studied advanced mathematics and astronomy under Professor
John Farrar, and graduated in 1826 with a Bachelor of Arts at age 19.
That year he ran off with a woman. He married her, but they divorced 3
years later.  He then shipped out as a common sailor on the China trade,
rising to captain in 8 years."

I wonder. It would have been unthinkable for a graduate of Oxford or
Cambridge to ship as a common seaman in that era. [It would have been
unthinkable for any British merchant ship owner to take university
graduates as trainee officers, on anything like a regular basis, until
almost the very end. When I graduated, in 1977, there was one shipping
company recruiting graduates as cadets but even that was very odd for
the industry. To the best of my knowledge, the first educated man to
sail before the mast in a British merchant ship was Basil Lubbock, not
long before 1900, and that was very aberrant behaviour for his time.]
Granted that Harvard College in 1826 had not yet earned a reputation to
rival the older English universities, while Sumner studied there at an
age closer to modern high school than university. Still, it is all a bit
odd.

Was Sumner disgraced by his divorce, so that he had to leave polite
Boston society? He might then have dropped to the social nadir of a
forecastle berth, only to work his way back by means of earning a place
on the quarterdeck. In that case, we have his marital problems to thank
for putting a trained mathematician and astronomer into a position to
discover the celestial LOP.

Or did he actually ship out with the functional role of apprentice, or
perhaps supercargo, albeit with a rating on paper of "seaman"? (I do not
know when, if ever, New England merchant vessels started carrying
apprentices as a distinct rating. I think it came a lot later than 1830
in British practice though it was well established by the 1890s.) That
would still not be something that an Oxford graduate would have done but
it seems that the New England merchant community sent its sons to sea to
learn that side of the business before they took over their fathers'
operations in Boston. (I have never seen a study of that practice but I
have seen various reports that are consistent with it.) Sumner was not a
scion of a merchant house but he may have come from a social group in
which training as a master mariner was considered appropriate for an
educated young man, and he may have shipped out to China with the
expectation that he was on track to a captain's berth (even though he
started in the forecastle like everyone else).

If the latter is what really happened, we ultimately owe the Celestial
LOP to the socially-mobile society of New England, where a man could
train his mind and yet still make a living by getting his hands dirty on
a merchant sailing ship -- which would have been unthinkable in
contemporary Old England.


Trevor Kenchington



Jim Thompson wrote:

> I added Richardson's biographical information on Sumner to:
> http://jimthompson.net/boating/CelestialNav/SumnerTrip.htm




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Trevor J. Kenchington PhD                         Gadus@iStar.ca
Gadus Associates,                                 Office(902) 889-9250
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