“The only restrictions placed upon you in this matter are: 1. The enemies of my country are not for any consideration whatever to have the benefits of these improvements. On the contrary, on making them known to others, you are to make them known in confidence and with a clause in the agreement especially providing against publicity and stipulating that the plan shall not be made known to any Yankee or his government. 2. I had already offered to H. I. H. Grand Duke Constantine, as a token of acknowledgment for his great kindness and friendly consideration shown me and mine, when this war broke out, to place all these my discoveries and improvements at his feet and for the use of his government. I have referred him to you as my confidant and friend who is fully prepared to carry out my plans in all their details, or who will explain them in confidence to any person he may appoint. You are to make no charge, therefore, for imparting this information, at his request, and should he or his government think proper to offer me an honorarium, it is not to be shared by you. 3. My friend, Captain M. Jansen of the Dutch Navy who resides at Delft, has assisted me in a part of these experiments. We are as brothers. All that I have done is known to him and he has the authority to use the information acquired for his own government, provided he may be personally benefited thereby. The restriction here is, that should you deem it worth while to bring the subject before the Dutch government you will first confer with Captain Jansen and shape your course accordingly. Should you effect a negotiation there, please turn over to him my share of the Dutch grant. 4. I restrict you also as to Mexico. Leave that to me. Should, however, any negotiation be entered into with that government, I shall refer the authorities to you for the articles such as wire, etc. required.

“Such in substance is our verbal understanding. But as I am about to leave England, it becomes proper, for more reasons than one, that we should make a memorandum of agreement in writing, to the end of making it good in law and binding also upon our heirs and assigns. With this view, this writing is drawn and the following statement is added. The points upon which this system hangs and which give special value to the information imparted to you concerning it are mainly these: 1. A plan for determining by cross bearings when the enemy is in the torpedo field of destruction and for ‘making connections’ among the torpedo wires in a certain way and by which the concurrence of each of two operators becomes necessary for the explosion of any one or more torpedoes. This plan requires each operator to be so placed or stationed that a line drawn straight from them to the place of the torpedoes may intersect as nearly as practicable at right angles. And it requires the connection to be such that each operator may put his station in or out of circuit at will. When the torpedoes are laid, a range for each station is established for every torpedo or group of torpedoes. When either operator observes an enemy in range with any torpedo, he closes his circuit for that torpedo. If the enemy before getting out of this range should enter the range for any torpedo from the other station, the operator there closes his circuit and discharges the igniting spark. Consequently, if the ranges belong to the same torpedo, its explosion takes place. But if not, there will be no explosion. Hence, here is an artifice by which explosion becomes impossible when the enemy is not in the field of destruction and sure when she is. 2. The Electrical Gauge, a contrivance of my own which you perfectly understand and some of which you have already made; by means of it one of the tests which the igniting fuse has to undergo before it is accepted is applied. By means of it, the operators can telegraph through the fuse to each other without risk to the torpedoes and by which the torpedoes may without detriment to their explosibility be tested daily or as often as required. And thus the operators can at all times make sure that all is right. 3. A plan for planting torpedoes where the water is too deep for them to lie on the bottom and explode with effect, by which they will not interfere with the navigation of the channels and by which, when the enemy makes his appearance, they may by the touch of a key be brought instantly into the required position at the required depth. These contrivances are very simple. They are readily understood from verbal description. They require neither models nor drawings for illustration. You understand them all. They are of little or no value except to governments and, as against these letters of patent are of no use, I have not deemed letters patent desirable. I have every confidence in you and therefore intrust the whole secret to your keeping and discretion. Having thus placed myself in your hands, let us make this agreement binding also upon our heirs and assigns, and to this end I propose that the necessary steps be at once taken. Yours truly, M. F. Maury, Confederate Navy. To Nath. J. Holmes, Esq.”

Maury had at this time fully decided to return to the Confederate States in the spring, and was then arranging his affairs in England with that end in view. He hoped to arrive there early enough to make use of his electric mines in the land warfare of the spring campaign. He had recently undergone a surgical operation, and his friends in England were very much opposed to his going home, some of them being of the opinion that by the time he arrived Richmond would have been abandoned and he would have no home to go to. But he conceived it to be his duty to return, as he might be of greater service there than he was abroad.

Before the date he had set for sailing, May 2, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox and Lincoln had been assassinated; still Maury did not change his plans, but sailed on the Royal Mail Steamer Atrato with a quantity of insulated wire, copper tanks, magnetic exploders, etc. for Havana with the hope of being able to keep open Galveston or some other port on the coast of Texas.

He had worried a great deal about the members of his family who were in the Confederate service. “My dreams”, he wrote in January, 1863, “are nightly of death and mutilation of children and friends”. Just four days after this date his son John, who was at Vicksburg on the staff of General Dabney H. Maury, disappeared while reconnoitering the enemy alone, and was never heard of again.[19] News of this unfortunate event did not reach the father until April 8, 1863, and soon afterwards he wrote as follows on the evils of war: “War is a great scourge, and this has touched you and me and many a good fellow with a heavy hand. As I look out upon the landscape that lies before my window, and see the men and women working in the fields, and the fields smiling to man’s husbandry, when I see no marks of the spoiler, and recognize that each one is safe in his person and secure in his possessions, then it is I see peace, and think of my poor country with a sigh, and, oh, with what reflections. ‘Thoughts on thoughts a countless throng’, bless your hearts—you and John—for comforting, with so much solicitude and affection, my poor dear wife in her affliction! Good brothers are you both. How lovely and beautiful are the memories of my Johnny! I wonder if all parents think of their dead as I do of mine. Bless that sleeping boy! Never did he, in his whole life, do one single act that either displeased or grieved me or his mother. ‘He never offended’. What an epitaph; and how proudly I write it! But where is the end of this war to find us—where you and yours, me and mine, and where so many that are dear and near to us? Our charming circle of relations is, I fear, broken up, never, never to be restored on this side of the grave”.

His family had been made refugees three different times, and Maury had been much concerned over their needs and probable sufferings. He wrote in the summer of 1864 to Dr. Tremlett from the Duke of Buckingham’s palace at Stow, “I had a letter to-day of May 7th from my daughter Nannie, and she says, ‘Flour has gone to $100 per barrel—too high for us—but meal is cheaper, thank God!’... ‘We had for dinner to-day soup made out of nothing, and afterwards a shin. ’Twas good, I tell you; we all dote on shins’. And again, from my little Lucy, ‘Ham and mashed potatoes to-day for dinner; and, as it was my birthday (9th May), Mamma said I might eat as much as I wanted’. Here, you see, there is no complaining, but only a gentle lifting of the curtain, which in their devotion and solicitude they have kept so closely drawn before me. With this pitiful picture in my mind’s eye, I felt as if I must choke with the sumptuous viands set before me on the Duke’s table. Alas, my little innocents!”

So it was with a heavy heart and the future all dark that he and his young son set sail, after an absence of more than two years, for home,—the home which Maury himself was not to see until several more years of exile had been spent in foreign lands.

CHAPTER XIII
With Maximilian in Mexico

When Maury reached St. Thomas in the West Indies, about the middle of May, 1865, he learned from the newspapers that the Confederacy had completely collapsed, but he continued his voyage to Havana. From here his son Matthew, Jr. was sent on home to Virginia; while Maury himself waited to consider what was best for him to do—an old man now broken in health and ruined in finances, separated from family and friends, and without home or country.