Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas

by Charles Lee Lewis

In 1851, at the request of the Secretary of the Navy, Maury wrote a report on “Fortifications” to be referred to the House Committee on Military Affairs. In this report he advocated for coast defense what he called “a locomotive battery or flying artillery” to protect cities from the “Great Guns of Big Ships”; heavy fortifications at Key West, on the Dry Tortugas, and perhaps on Ship and Cat Islands; and the completion of railroad connection with the Pacific and the beginning there of the nucleus of a navy. He was opposed to floating batteries, but favored twenty or twenty-five steam men-of-war as a home squadron and thought some provision should be made against surprise on the Lakes. In closing, he declared, “The ocean front of the United States alone is greater in extent than the ocean front of the whole of Europe; therefore, like action to the orator, a navy to us is the first, second, and third chief requisite to any effective system of national defense”.

The same year Maury turned again to the “Commercial Prospects of the South”, which he made the subject of an address before the Virginia Mercantile Convention at Richmond. In this he called attention to what might have happened if Norfolk had become the terminus of a French line of steam packets to Havre, as he had suggested some dozen years before. Now, he said, the South must look toward the south; in view of the importance of “our Mediterranean” into which big rivers flow that are the arteries of much commerce, and because of the potential riches of the Amazon which will be vastly increased by the construction of a canal or railroad across the Isthmus, a line of steamers from Norfolk, Charleston, or Savannah to the mouth of the Amazon should at once be established. This enterprise, together with the need for building railroads in the South, was constantly in Maury’s mind and often became a subject of correspondence down to the beginning of the Civil War.

Maury seems to have become almost as ready a speaker as he was a writer, and as his fame grew he was frequently called upon to speak on scientific questions and large problems of a commercial nature. In 1846, he addressed the Philodemic Society at the commencement exercises of Georgetown College in Washington. In the course of his speech he lauded the study of science in this fashion: “Beauties far more lovely, poetry far more sublime, lessons inexpressibly more eloquent and instructive than any which the classic lore of ancient Greece or Rome ever afforded are now to be seen and gathered in the walks of science”. In 1855 he spoke to the Jefferson and Washington Literary Societies of the University of Virginia, beginning with what he referred to as “sailing directions”. “There are some here”, he declared, “who though not seamen are nevertheless about to become masters of their own acts, and who are about to try the voyage of life upon a troubled sea. I have been some little time on that voyage; and it is so that, whenever I see a young man relying upon his own resources and setting out alone upon this long voyage, my heart warms towards him. I always desire to range up alongside of him, to speak to him kindly, and whisper words of encouragement in his ear”.

Then he told the young men that they should have ambition to do even better than their fathers had done; that they should not lose sight of the welfare of the community and the prosperity of the commonwealth; and that they should give Virginia again her place of leadership among the states, and take away from the South the allegation that she is wanting in enterprise. He closed with the following rules of conduct: “Whatever may be the degree of success that I have met with in life, I attribute it, in a great measure, to the adoption of such rules. One was never to let the mind be idle for want of useful occupation, but always to have in reserve subjects of thought or study for the leisure moments and quiet hours of the night. When you read a book, let it be with the view to special information. The habits of mind to be thus attained are good, and the information useful. It is surprising how difficult one who attempts this rule finds it at first to provide himself with subjects for thought—to think of something that he does not know. In our ignorance our horizon is very contracted: mists, clouds, and darkness hang upon it, and self fills almost the entire view around, above, and below to the utmost verge. But as we study the laws of nature, and begin to understand about our own ignorance, we find light breaking through, the horizon expanding, and self getting smaller and smaller. It is like climbing a mountain: every fact or fresh discovery is a step upward with an enlargement of the view, until the unknown and the mysterious become boundless—self infinitely small; and the conviction comes upon us with a mighty force that we know nothing—that human knowledge is only a longing desire.” In conclusion, he warned them against believing that they had finished their education on leaving the University, for they had merely cleared away the rubbish and prepared the foundations. If they ceased to study, they soon would forget what they had learned and mental retrogression would begin; for just as movement and progress were necessary aspects of life in the physical world so were rest and decay correlative terms in the mental and moral realms.

Among the numerous addresses which he delivered during the decade preceding the Civil War, the most eloquent and significant was the one given on October 10, 1860, at the laying of the corner stone of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. For this occasion there were assembled eight bishops, two hundred presbyters, and five thousand people. In introducing Maury, Bishop Otey, his old teacher and friend, referred to him as a distinguished fellow-citizen, whose labors in the cause of science have crowned his name with honor throughout the world and made him, in a manner, the property of all the nations, for the winds of Heaven and the waves of the sea had been made tributary by him to increasing the facilities of trade to every land and on every sea where commerce spreads her sails.

Maury’s address, which is quoted in its entirety as an example of his oratorical power, was as follows: “Ladies and Gentlemen: This greeting and the terms in which my old preceptor and early friend has brought me into this presence fill me with emotions difficult to utter. I thank you for your goodness.

“Physical geography makes the whole world kin. Of all the departments in the domains of physical science, it is the most Christianizing. Astronomy is grand and sublime; but astronomy overpowers with its infinities, overwhelms with its immensities. Physical geography charms with its wonders, and delights with the benignity of its economy. Astronomy ignores the existence of man; physical geography confesses that existence, and is based on the Biblical doctrine that the earth was made for man. Upon no other theory can it be studied; upon no other theory can its phenomena be reconciled. The astronomer computes an ephemeris for his comets; predicts their return; tells the masses of the planets, and measures by figures the distance of the stars. But whether stars, planets, or comets be peopled or not is in his arguments, theories, and calculations of no consequence whatever. He regards the light and heat of the sun as emanations—forces to guide the planets in their orbits, and light comets in their flight—nothing more. But the physical geographer, when he warms himself by the coal fire in winter, or studies by the light of the gas burner at night, recognizes in the light and heat which he then enjoys the identical light and heat which ages ago came from the sun, and which with provident care and hands benignant have been bottled away in the shape of a mineral and stored in the bowels of the earth for man’s use, thence to be taken at his convenience, and liberated at will for his manifold purposes.

“Here, in the schools which are soon to be opened, within the walls of this institution which we are preparing to establish in this wood, and the corner stone of which has just been laid, the masters of this newly ordained science will teach our sons to regard some of the commonest things as the most important agents in the physical economy of our planet. They are also mighty ministers of the Creator. Take this water” (holding up a glassful) “and ask the student of physical geography to explain a portion only of its multitudinous offices in helping to make the earth fit for man’s habitation. He may recognize in it a drop of the very same which watered the Garden of Eden when Adam was there. Escaping thence through the veins of the earth into the rivers, it reached the sea; passing along its channels of circulation, it was conveyed far away by its currents to those springs in the ocean which feed the winds with vapor for rains among these mountains; taking up the heat in these southern climes, where otherwise it would become excessive, it bottles it away in its own little vesicles. These are invisible; but rendering the heat latent and innocuous, they pass like sightless couriers of the air through their appointed channels, and arrive here in the upper sky. This mountain draws the heat from them; they are formed into clouds and condensed into rain, which, coming to the earth, make it ‘soft with showers’, causing the trees of the field to clap their hands, the valleys to shout, and the mountains to sing. Thus the earth is made to yield her increase, and the heart of man is glad.

“Nor does the office of this cup of water in the physical economy end here. It has brought heat from the sea in the southern hemisphere to be set free here for the regulation of our climates; it has ministered to the green plants, and given meat and drink to man and beast. It has now to cater among the rocks for the fish and insects of the sea. Eating away your mountains, it fills up the valleys, and then, loaded with lime and salts of various minerals, it goes singing and dancing and leaping back to the sea, owning man by the way as a task-master—turning mills, driving machinery, transporting merchandise for him—and finally reaching the ocean. It there joins the currents to be conveyed to its appointed place, which it never fails to reach in due time, with food in due quantities for the inhabitants of the deep, and with materials of the right kind to be elaborated in the workshops of the sea into pearls, corals, and islands—all for man’s use.

“Thus the right-minded student of this science is brought to recognize in the dewdrop the materials of which He who ‘walketh upon the wings of the wind’ maketh His chariot. He also discovers in the raindrop a clue by which the Christian philosopher may be conducted into the very chambers from which the hills are watered.