Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas

by Charles Lee Lewis

In September, Maury had had the good fortune to be appointed “Astronomer” for the expedition with $1000 additional pay, and also as assistant to the “Hydrographer”, Lieutenant James Glynn. To prepare himself for these duties he went to Philadelphia, where in a little observatory in Rittenhouse Square he soon familiarized himself with the use of astronomical instruments. The expedition, however, still delayed to set sail, and the vexatious interference with his command so affected Captain Jones’s health as to give the Secretary of the Navy an excuse for removing him from his position. Matters had by this time come to such a pass that several officers declined the command when it was offered them; namely, Captains Shubrick, Kearny, Perry, and Gregory. Finally, in April, 1838, a junior officer, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, though there were eighty lieutenants above his grade, was selected, and he accepted the appointment.

The sloops of war Vincennes and Peacock and two smaller vessels were chosen instead of those originally prepared, and it became necessary to reorganize the personnel of the expedition. Maury had sympathized with Captain Jones in the unjust treatment which he had received from the Secretary of the Navy, and besides he had written that Wilkes was the only officer in the navy with whom he would not coöperate provided that he was put in command of the enterprise. He therefore asked to be detached from the expedition.

Maury might possibly have had the honor of commanding the exploring expedition himself, as clearly indicated by the following letter which he wrote years afterwards: “The expedition had been taken away from the Secretary of the Navy and transferred to Poinsett, Secretary of War. I was ordered to fetch the instruments to Washington and report myself to Poinsett. He received me with open arms, took me into his bosom, and asked me to give him the names of the officers without regard to rank that I thought best qualified for the expedition. I afterwards had reason to suppose that he expected me to name myself and intended to put me in command of it, as really I was the most important personage in it—Hydrographer and Astronomer. But I asked myself, what right have I to draw distinctions among brother officers? So I gave him a list of the officers belonging to the expedition; myself, the youngest lieutenant in the navy, at the bottom of the list. He froze up with disgust, ordered Wilkes home, and gave him the command, and so I was the gainer, for I preserved mine integrity”.

Maury was next assigned to the duty of surveying Southern harbors, relative to the establishment of a navy yard in the South. In this work he assisted Lieutenant James Glynn, in the schooner Experiment and the steamboat Engineer, in the examination and survey of the harbors of Beaufort and Wilmington, and the inlets Sapelo and Doboy on the coast of Georgia. Early in the month of August, 1839, Maury was detached from the Engineer at Norfolk with leave for one month, and he set out very soon thereafter from his home in Fredericksburg to visit his parents in Tennessee to look after some business affairs for his father who had become old and infirm, and also to make arrangements for conveying them to Virginia where they were to make their home with him.

Maury had written in vain, in February and again in August, 1839, to F. R. Hassler of the United States Coast Survey offering his services as head of a triangulation party. This was one of the several attempts he made at different times to find work of such a nature as to justify his resignation from the navy. By such small threads often hangs a man’s destiny. If Hassler had accepted Maury’s services, his whole future would probably have been different from what it became, for an event was soon to happen to him which, though apparently at first most unfortunate, was indirectly to place him on that flood tide which led him on to fortune.

Under orders to join the brig Consort at New York and continue the surveying of Southern harbors, Maury left his father’s home in Tennessee by stage coach to join his ship. He went by the northern route, and near Somerset, Ohio, on a rainy night about one o’clock in the morning, an embankment gave way and the coach was upset. Maury, having given his seat inside to a woman with a baby in arms, was riding on the seat with the coachman, and was the only person seriously injured. There were twelve other passengers; Maury, the thirteenth, had his right knee-joint transversely dislocated and the thigh-bone longitudinally fractured.

His recovery from the injury was slow and painful. The leg was improperly set, and at a time when the use of anesthetics was unknown it had to be reset with great pain to the unfortunate officer. During the three months of his confinement at the Hotel Phoenix in Somerset he managed to keep up his spirits in spite of the suffering and loneliness, and to break the tedium of the dull days he commenced the study of French without the aid of either grammar or dictionary. At last, in January, 1840, he thought himself strong enough to proceed to New York; but it was in the midst of winter and he had to be driven in a sleigh over the Alleghany Mountains. This occasioned considerable delay, and when he at length arrived at his destination he found that his ship had already sailed. He then made his way to his home in Virginia to recuperate his health and strength under the apprehension that his injury might be so serious as to incapacitate him for further active service in the navy.

During the long weeks in Ohio he had been greatly troubled with these fears and had considered gravely what he might do in the future. He had begun then to think seriously of resorting to the pen, and after his return home this notion “to take to books and be learned” began to take more definite shape in his mind, though he was greatly discouraged at his ignorance and confused by the wilderness of subjects from which to choose. He did not, however, wish to give the impression that he was shirking active service; so he made application on March 14, 1840 to Secretary of the Navy Paulding for any duty which he could perform in his present condition, “service on crutches” as he expressed it. This, of course, was not granted him, and thus relieved temporarily from active service, he began the writing of his “Scraps from the Lucky Bag”, a series of magazine articles which were soon to make his name very widely known.

In the summer of 1838, Maury had written five articles for the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser under the nom de plume of “Harry Bluff, U.S. Navy”. His feelings were at that time raw over the outcome of the Exploring Expedition, and in these fearless, straightforward articles he bitterly criticised the former Secretary of the Navy Dickerson for his inefficiency and called upon his successor, Secretary Paulding, to restore to the navy its former prestige. The appointment of Wilkes to command the expedition was handled without gloves. “There was”, wrote Maury, “a cunning little Jacob who had campaigned in Washington a full term of seven years. More prodigal than Laban, you (Secretary of War, Joel R. Poinsett) gave him, for a single term, both the Rachel and the Leah of his heart. A junior lieutenant with scarcely enough service at sea to make him familiar with the common routine of duty on board a man-of-war, and with one or two short interruptions, a sinecurist on shore for the last fifteen years, he was lifted over the heads of many laborious and meritorious officers, and placed by you in the command of the Exploring Expedition in violation of law”.

Maury wrote, in December of the same year, seven more articles for this newspaper, hiding his identity by inscribing them “From Will Watch to his old messmate Harry Bluff”. In these he went further still into details as to the inefficiency of the administration of the navy, dealing especially with the waste connected with the building and repairing of ships, the need for a system of rules and regulations in the navy, and the advisability of establishing a naval school. As to the latter, he wrote, “There is not, in America, a naval school that deserves the name, or that pretends to teach more than the mere rudiments of navigation.... Why are not steps taken to have our officers educated and fitted for this high responsibility? The idea of a naval academy has been ridiculed. This may be the fault of Congress; I will not lay the censure at the wrong door—but the Department has been equally inattentive to providing the young officers with the proper means of learning even practical seamanship”.