Issue Date: 9 / 2005

Matthew Fontaine Maury: The Sailor Who Launched Oceanography

Cmdr. Matthew Fontaine Maury, also known as the "Pathfinder of the Seas." Click image to enlarge.        "Our planet is invested with two great oceans; one visible, the other invisible; one underfoot, the other overhead; one entirely overlaps it, the other covers about two-thirds of its surface. All the water of the one weighs about 400 times as much as all the air of the other� To treat the Physical Geography of the Sea, we must necessarily refer to the phenomena which are displayed at the meeting of these two great oceans."                --Matthew F. Maury (1855)                Matthew Fontaine Maury's Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology published in 1855 (now one hundred fifty years ago) was the first textbook in the modern science of oceanography and will remain a landmark publication in the history of science. This work was the culmination of Maury's life-long devotion to the seas, first as a sailor and then as a scientist.                The man                Matthew Maury, the son of a small planter, was born on January 14, 1806, near Fredericksburg, Virginia. When he was four years old, the family moved westward and settled near Franklin, Tennessee. Here, Maury did his early schooling, and went to study at Harpeth Academy, then located near Franklin. Following in the footsteps of an older brother, Maury joined the United States Navy in 1825 as a midshipman. For years he spent his life on cruises across the oceans and circumnavigating the world until 1839 when he a stagecoach accident made him permanently lame on his right leg. This happened on his way from Tennessee to report for duty in New York.                Maury had developed a keen interest in writing scientific articles and books about oceans and the navy. His first book, Navigation after a Voyage around the World, was published in 1830, and his second book, A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation (1836), was used for training the novice at the United States Navy. Most of his articles were pseudonymous.                In 1842, Maury was appointed superintendent of the Navy's Depot of Charts and Instruments, which was expanded and renamed two years later as the United States Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. with Maury as its first superintendent. (This office was called the Naval Observatory and Hydrological Office from 1852 to 1866, when the US Naval Hydrological Office � where Maury worked � became a separate unit.) Here Maury had access to thousands of ships logs and charts coming from all over the world, and thus he began a scientific compilation and interpretation of this vast amount of data on ocean winds and currents. He published the Wind and Current Charts of the North Atlantic in 1847, and Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts in 1851. Both publications went through several revisions, and the last (the eight) edition of the Sailing Directions was published in two volumes in 1858-59, it was freely distributed together with the new Winds and Current Charts to the seamen who had contributed data to this enormous work.                The Sailing Directions provided the base materials for Maury's more famous book, The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855). Indeed, the content of the sixth edition of the Sailing Directions overlaps with that of the Physical Geography. What did motivate Maury to republish his materials as a new book? His biographer, Charles Lewis, notes that Maury's publisher (E. C. and J. Biddle of Philadelphia) had warned him that that his naval publications were not protected by copyright. Therefore, he prepared the first edition of the Physical Geography for a formal publication by Harper and Brothers in New York, and by Sampson Low and Sons in London.                Maury was one of the founding members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848 in Washington D.C. (which still exists today and publishes the weekly Science magazine). He also helped organize the International Maritime Conference in Brussels in 1853, and this added to his international fame.                When the Civil War broke out, Maury resigned from the Navy in 1861. Being a Virginian, he joined the Confederate Government and the Southern Cause. During the war, Maury went on missions to England to acquire war vessels and supplies for the Confederacy. He also worked on harbor defense and invented an electrical torpedo for launching against enemy ships.                When the war was over and the Confederacy was defeated, Maury went into exile, first in Mexico (1865-66) where he helped the Emperor Maximilian to establish a colony of Virginians, and then to England after Maximilian had been defeated. Maury lived in England until 1868 when he returned to the United States and became a professor of meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute. He thus spent the last years of his life in peace and devotion to science in his own country. He continued to write on science and published The World We Live In in 1866. In the fall of 1872, Maury became ill during a lecture tour. He died on February 1, 1873, in Lexington, Virginia. He was temporarily buried in Lexington, but his body was later moved to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.                Despite his bitter involvement in the Civil War, the United State forgave him totally. There is a Maury Hall (in his honor) at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Maury was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great American in 1930. Naval ships USS Maury have been named after him.                The book                What is perhaps most remarkable about The Physical Geography of the Seas is that such a scientific book was widely read by people. It was revised and reprinted many times, and the final (eighth) edition was brought out in 1861. The publishers in New York and London kept it on the market for over two decades. The book was also translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish.                In the preface to his book, Maury credits the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt for the use of the term "physical geography of the sea." Although recognized as the first modern textbook in oceanography, the word "oceanography" does not appear in the book (it was coined later, in 1859).                The book contains twenty-two chapters: 1) the sea and the atmosphere, 2) the Gulf Stream, 3) influence of the Gulf Stream upon climates and commerce, 4) the atmosphere, 5) rains and rivers, 6) red fogs and sea breezes, 7) the easting of the trade winds, the crossing of the calm belts, and the magnetism of the atmosphere, 8) currents of the sea, 9) the specific gravity of the sea, and the open water in the Arctic Ocean, 10) the salts of the sea, 11) the cloud region, the equatorial cloud-ring, and sea fogs, 12) the geological agency of the winds, 13) the depths of the ocean, 14) the basin and bed of the Atlantic, 15) sea routes, calm belts, and variable winds, 16) monsoons, 17) the climates of the sea, 18) tide-rips and sea drift, 19) storms, hurricanes, and typhoons, 20) the winds of the Southern Hemisphere, 21) the Antarctic regions and the climatology, 22) the actionometry of the sea.                Maury dedicated the British editions of his book to his friend Lord John Wrottesley (1797-1858) and the American editions to George Manning of New York, who was in charge of distributing Maury's Charts and Sailing Explanations to seamen around the world. He dedicated the eighth edition to William C. Hasbrouck (1800-1870), his teacher at Harpeth Academy. Hasbrouch later became a lawyer. They always remained close friends, and Maury entrusted to Hasbrouck the management of his business interests during the Civil War.                Maury's poetic style of writing has made his book charming; it is quite a contrast to a technical language we expect to read in scientific books. For example, consider the expressions, "rivers are the rain-gauges of nature" or "the brine of the ocean is the ley of the earth."                The science                Humans have navigated the seas for millennia and have gradually gained some knowledge about the oceans. However, marine navigation was still largely a matter of guesswork and good luck in the nineteenth century. Maury tried to understand the nature and patterns of phenomena governing the seas. He considered his effort both as a young science and as a religious call. "There is no employment more ennobling to man and his intellect, he wrote, "than to trace the evidence of design and purpose, which are visible in many parts of the creation." Elsewhere Maury said, "The wonders of the sea are as marvelous as the glories of the heavens, and they proclaim, in songs divine, that they too are the work of holy fingers."                One of the most significant contributions that Maury made to oceanography was his systematic study of ocean winds and deep-ocean currents. Ocean winds generate surface waves while deep-ocean currents are caused by variations in water density or temperature, and have a great impact on the Earth's climate and marine life. One of these currents is the warm Gulf Stream, about which Maury wrote: "There is a river in the ocean: in the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows; its banks and its bottom are cold water, while its current is of warm; the Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream."                Maury was not the discoverer of the Gulf Stream or other ocean circulations. Scientists and seamen prior to him also knew about these phenomena. For example, the British geographer James Rennell (1742-1810) wrote Currents of the Atlantic Ocean, which was posthumously published in 1832. Nonetheless, Maury was the first professional person who systematized the knowledge of ocean phenomena. His Wind and Current Charts was used by many sailors; it saved navigation time and reduced risk by taking advantage of the ocean's currents and winds. His system of documenting oceanographic data was adopted by navies and commercial ships around the world.                Nearly a century later, Rachel Carson in The Sea Around Us (1951) praised the practical significance of Maury's work with these words: "Maury's sailing directions were attracting world notice: he had shortened the passage for American east-coast vessels to Rio de Janeiro by 10 days, to Australia by 20 days, and around the Horn to California by 30 days. The co-operative exchange of information sponsored by Maury remains in effect today, and the Pilot Charts of the Hydrological Office, the lineal descendants of Maury's charts, carry the inscription: Founded on the researchers of Matthew Fontaine Maury while serving as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy."                Maury made an extensive use of deep-sea soundings to map the ocean depths. In the nineteenth century, astronomers had calculated the average depth of the ocean to be 16.5 to 39 km (11 to 26 miles). Using the deep-sounding data, Maury demonstrated that the average depth could not be "more than three or four miles" (the modern calculation is 3,798 meters or 12,460 feet). He further argued that the concept of an average depth is misleading, because the data show a startling "orographic [mountainous] view" of the ocean floor.                Maury wrote: "Could the waters of the Atlantic be drawn off so to expose to view this great sea-gash which separates continents, and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene that most rugged, grand, and imposing." Indeed, the deepest spot on the ocean floor, the Mariana trench in the west Pacific is 11,033 meters (36,198 feet) below sea level. If Mount Everest (the tallest mountain on the Earth's surface, measuring 8,846 meters or 29,022 feet above sea level) were dropped into this trench, it would sink more than a mile.                The best example Maury gave of the topographic heights and depressions on the ocean floor was from the Atlantic Ocean. In the course of his deep-sea soundings, Maury noted that the Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland was shallower in the center on either side. He called it the "Telegraphic Plateau" and indeed a telegraphic cable was laid upon it in 1858 (it failed within a month, but a similar venture was successful in 1868). Maury found that the high relief in the center of the Atlantic runs from north to south and he called it the Dolphin Rise, after the ship Dolphin that had been used to survey the Atlantic. This was the first indication of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which was subsequently mapped by H.M.S. Challenger during 1872-1876.                Maury's opinions and interpretations were not always right. For instance, his idea of the "Open Polar Sea" suggested that the ocean near the North Pole was free of ice. Although popular in the nineteenth century, this idea was disproved by later observations. But this example shows that science is a self-correcting process; science relies on evidence and observation, not authority or belief. Were Maury to return to our time, he would be pleased to see the striding developments that oceanography has made in finding facts about the oceans and in human access to these "great depths." Maury's work itself ushered in this oceanographic research, and for his pioneering role, Maury has been aptly described as a "pathfinder" or a "founding father" of oceanography.                BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE                The Physical Geography of the Seas was reprinted in 1963 by Harvard University Press, with an introduction by John Leighly. The life and works of Matthew F. Maury have been discussed in several biographies, including A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury (London, 1888) by his daughter, Diane Fontaine Maury Corbin; Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas (Annapolis, 1927; reprinted in 1980) by Charles Lee Lewis; Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea (Rutgers University Press, 1963) by Frances L. Williams, who also gives a detailed bibliography of Maury's publications; and a more recent book, Tracks in the Seas: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans (International Marine, Camden, Maine, 2002) by Chester G. Hearn. Young readers may refer to Janice Beaty's Seeker of Seaways: A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury Pioneer Oceanographer (New York, 1966) available in many public libraries.                 Rasoul Sorkhabi is a a research professor at the University of Utah's Energy and Geoscience Institute in Salt Lake City.