Matthew Fontaine Maury
Of all the famous men who went from Fredericksburg to take large parts in the rapidly moving history of America, or in the work of the world, Commodore Maury added most to the progress of science. Not only did he create knowledge, but he created wealth by the immense saving he effected to shipping by charting shorter ocean routes. He is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond, under a simple shaft which bears the name, “Matthew Fontaine Maury.” The great “pathfinder of the seas” was born in Spotsylvania County, January, 1806, and died at Lexington in 1873.
A World Famed Scientist
He wore the most prized decorations the monarchs of Europe could give him; he founded the most valuable natural science known, and was reckoned a transcendent genius. Of him, Mellin Chamberlain, Librarian of Congress, said, with calm consideration “I do not suppose there is the least doubt that Maury was the greatest man America ever produced.”
Alexander Humbolt said that Maury created a new science.
He plunged into the unknown; he charted the seas and mapped its currents and winds. He was the first to tell the world that winds and currents were not of chance, but of fixed and immutable laws, and that even cyclones were well governed. He knew why a certain coast was dry and another rainy, and he could, on being informed of the latitude and longitude of a place, tell what was the prevailing weather and winds.
Maury went to sea as a midshipman in the American navy in 1825, and in 1831, at twenty-four years of age, he became master of the sloop Falmouth, with orders to go to the Pacific waters, but, though he sought diligently, he found no chart of a track for his vessel, no record of currents or of winds to guide him. The sea was a trackless wilderness, and the winds were things of vagrant caprice. And he began then to grapple with those problems which were to immortalize him.
He came back from ocean wanderings in a few years and married an old sweetheart, Miss Ann Herndon, of Fredericksburg, and he lived for a time on Charlotte Street, between Princess Anne and Prince Edward, and wrote his first book, “A Treatise on Navigation;” while from his pen came a series of newspaper and magazine articles that startled the world of scientific thought. For the man had discovered new and unsuspected natural laws!
Misfortune—that vastly helped him—came in 1839, when his leg was injured through the overturning of a stage coach. The government put him in charge of a new “Bureau of Charts and Instruments,” at Washington, and out of his work here grew the Naval Observatory, the Signal Service and the first Weather Bureau ever established on earth! Every other science was old. His science was utterly new, a field untouched.
Charting Seas and Winds