1. Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838) was the son of a cooper in Salem, Massachusetts, and he was apprenticed in a ship chandlery. He supplemented his self-education with observations made in the course of his voyages after 1795 and in 1799 prepared The New American Practical Navigator, a work which was to go through ten editions during his lifetime and several more thereafter. Between 1804 and 1823 he was president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company, and he published many papers in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also translated and published the works of the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (Robert E. Berry, Yankee Stargazer: The Life of Nathaniel Bowditch [New York, 1941], pp. 6, 20–21, 111–22, 143, 180–81, 210–11, 221–22).

2. Dearborn enclosed a printed circular entitled “The Comet,” a series of calculations of the “geocentric longitudes and latitudes of the Comet,” based on observations taken at Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts (1 p.).

3. In a postscript to his circular Bowditch stated that he wished to make “a complete collection of the observations of the Eclipse” and requested that information on such observations, including the latitudes and longitudes where they were recorded, be sent to him.

4. Henry Alexander Scammel Dearborn (1783–1851), the son of JM’s former cabinet colleague Henry Dearborn, had attended Williams College and the College of William and Mary. When Henry Dearborn took up his position of major general in the U.S. Army in 1812, JM appointed his son to be collector for the district of Boston and Charlestown, a position he held until 1829 (Senate Exec. Proceedings description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America (3 vols.; Washington, 1828). description ends , 2:278).