“Pathfinder of the Seas”
29 JUNE 1842
“PATHFINDER OF THE SEAS”
Matthew Fontaine Maury was born in a woodland cabin near Chancellorsville, Virginia, on 14 January 1806. At age 5 his family moved to Franklin, Tennessee, where Matthew attended the Harpeth Academy for teachers. On 1 February 1825 Tennessee Congressman Sam Houston (later of Texas fame) arranged an appointment for Maury as a midshipman. There being no Naval Academy yet, Maury reported for training aboard USS BRANDYWINE, 44. There he became disenchanted with the navigation text of the day, Nathaniel Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator. Transferring to the sloop VINCENNES, 18, Maury was aboard for our Navy’s first circumnavigation of the globe. He kept copious notes on winds, currents, and lunar changes during the cruise. On 3 March 1831 Maury sat for the midshipman’s exam, where, to a question on navigation he used his own method of spherical trigonometry. Though he answered correctly, because he failed to use Bowditch’s accepted method he was not passed.
Maury next reported to the sloop-of-war FALMOUTH, 24, and upon reaching Cape Horn correctly deduced the location of favorable winds. FALMOUTH navigated the Horn days ahead of another warship using conventional charts, prompting Maury to publish On the Navigation of Cape Horn in the American Journal of Science and Arts later that decade. After service on DOLPHIN, 11, and POTOMAC, 50, Maury returned to shore duty in May of 1834. He used the time to write A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation, a replacement text for Bowditch–a work that was praised by Bowditch! In 1838-39 he served as astronomer and hydrographer on the US Exploring Expedition to the South Seas. But in a stagecoach accident on 17 October 1839, Maury sustained a leg fracture that left him with a permanent limp and precluded any further sea duty.
Ashore, Maury lobbied for the creation of a Naval Academy and criticized graft. At the time, ship repair contracts were being let for amounts greater than the original cost of construction! On this date the Lieutenant was appointed to head the newly established Depot of Charts and Instruments, an assignment his superiors thought would sideline the bothersome officer. Upon the establishment of the Naval Observatory in 1844, Maury became its first Superintendent. Collating volumes of accumulated oceanographic data, he published Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions in 1847. In 1848 the clipper ship W.H.D.C. Wright used these pamphlets to successfully avoid the equatorial doldrums to reach Rio de Janeiro from Baltimore in a record 38 days and return in 37 days! Maury earned the abiding respect of all mariners as the “Pathfinder of the Seas.”
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 5 JUL 23
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 4 “L-M”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1969, p. 278.
“Matthew Fontaine Maury.” AT: www.eraoftheclippership.com/ page14web.html. 20 May 2006.
Site visit. Maury birthplace, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial, Chancellorsville, VA, 16 February 2002.
Sweetman, Jack. American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3rd ed. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, p. 44.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: In 1855 Maury published The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first textbook of oceanography, and a text that was employed for decades at the Naval Academy. During the Civil War he sided with his birth-state, Virginia, serving as a CDR in the Confederate States Navy and an agent for shipbuilding in England. He died on 1 February 1873 and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. The site of his birth is preserved in the National Park Service’s Chancellorsville Battlefield historical site.
Maury Hall, at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Virginia, remembers Matthew Fontaine Maury, as does the US Navy destroyers, DD-100 and DD-401, and the oceanographic survey ship AGS-16. However, as a Confederate officer, modern political correctness dictated that Maury Hall aboard the US Naval Academy be renamed. The former Maury Hall is now Carter Hall, after Navy veteran and US President Jimmy Carter.
