Maury, Matthew Fontaine

Maury, Matthew Fontaine (fŏntān` môr`ē), 1806–73, American hydrographer and naval officer, b. near Fredericksburg, Va. Appointed a midshipman in 1825, he saw varied sea duty until a stagecoach accident (1839) made him permanently lame. In 1842 he was placed in charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments (later the U.S. Naval Observatory and Hydrographical Office). Soon his wind and current charts of the Atlantic began to appear, and they eventually cut sailing time on many routes. He wrote widely on navigation and naval reform, and his Physical Geography of the Sea (1855) was the first classic work of modern oceanography. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he resigned and served the Confederacy, first in harbor defense and then as an agent in England. After the war he served (1865–66) under Maximilian in Mexico, where he attempted to establish colonies of ex-Confederates. He returned to the United States in 1868 and was professor of meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute until his death.

Bibliography

See biographies by F. L. Williams (1966), C. L. Lewis (1927, repr. 1969), and V. P. Parriott (1973).

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Maury, Matthew Fontaine (1806–73) oceanographer; born near Fredericksburg, Va. He entered the U.S. Navy (1825) and spent the next nine years on worldwide sea voyages. In 1839 a stagecoach accident left him permanently lamed. Considered unfit for active duty, in 1842 he was appointed superintendent of the Naval Observatory's Depot of Charts and Instruments. There he compiled information from numerous ships' logs, and gained an international reputation for his research in navigation, oceanography, and meteorology. By interpreting the crossing of the trade winds at the equator, he designed shipping routes which shortened an Atlantic-Pacific crossing by 40 days. In his most famous work, The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), he proposed a transatlantic telegraph cable to be constructed on a level sea-floor plateau he had discovered between Newfoundland and Ireland. In 1861 Maury became a commodore in the Confederate Navy; while working to perfect underwater mines, he went to Europe where he also purchased and outfitted cruisers for the Confederate navy. After a brief self-exile in Mexico and Europe (1865–68), he returned to the U.S.A. to teach at the Virginia Military Institute (1868–73). He is known as the "Pathfinder of the Seas."