Tracks in the Sea : Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans

by Chester G. Hearn

Navigation at sea was a matter of guesswork until well into the 19th century. Changing that became the obsession of Matthew Fontaine Maury. While others built railroads, Maury mapped highways of wind and current over the seas. Hearn uses Maury's career as a window on America's maritime development in the 19th century, including the clipper-ship era of the 1850s, the rise of steam and steel, and the Civil War.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction, Biography, Maritime

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2002

About the author

A 1954 graduate of Allegheny College, Chester Hearn served in the U.S. Army and worked in industrial management before becoming an author of books on the American Civil War in his retirement.

Reviews

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been aware of Matthew Fontaine Maury and something of his contributions to navigation, but the details of how much information he collected, processed and distributed - and how he went about it - are amazing. His conflicts with superior naval officers and a few rival scientists are remarkable to read and make him sound quite modern.

This biography is thoroughly researched and detailed, but the writing is somewhat pedestrian and occasionally puzzling. Did the US Navy in 1825 really have "only seven ships of the line" (p. 37)? I don't believe the United States ever had ships of the line such as HMS Victory. There were large, powerful frigates such as Constitution, but nothing larger.

Hearn doesn't look in depth at Maury's decision to join the Confederate side in the Civil War. He apparently loved being a US Navy officer and was opposed to secession, but when it happened he resigned his commission and sided with his native Virginia. One would like to know more about his reasons.

In the deathbed scene, "his two sons" are with him, and the reader thinks "Wait a sec, didn't he have another son?" In fact he did. The third son "died mysteriously" near Vicksburg during the Civil War, but this significant and intriguing fact is not mentioned in the text - only in the notes at the back of the book.

Some of the best writing in the book is the description of the clipper ship races around Cape Horn in the San Francisco. Apart from being commercial ventures and attempts to set records, they really were races, with great public interest and captains arranging to leave New York at about the same time. Maury's research, along with design improvements, enabled the ships to acheive shorter and shorter passages.

Interesting book, could be better written.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I doubt if I would have read this book before realizing that Maury is also descended from my French Huguenot ancestor, Jacques Fontaine. So I began it rather dutifully but was quickly fascinated by the story of how Maury collected enormous amounts of data on ocean currents, winds, weather conditions and turned them into useful guides for 19th century shipmasters. Up until that time ships had no way of knowing how currents might help them choose better routes - especially around Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope - and navigation was by guess and by golly, to a great extent.
Maury's first voyage was in 1825 and Bowditch was the only guide available. Bowditch did the math but "the navigator had to know his latitude, know the accurate time, and be able to accurately shoot the sun, moon, or stars with a sextant. With that, the navigator had the basis for fixing his longitude...if he understood how to use Bowditch's tables. To reach that level of knowledge, a sailor required hands-on instruction from an experienced seaman, and most seafarers during Maury's time were not well educated."
So up until this time, ships hugged the coast and zigzagged across the Atlantic, moving between landmarks like the Bahamas and the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. Hard to imagine now!
Maury was a natural-born scientist from the start and his vocation was to uncover the patterns in these natural phenomena.
The astonishing thing is the amount of opposition he received from those in the Navy who were set in their old ways, in spite of the fact that their ways led to shipwrecks and great waste of time and money on the part of shipowners who were never sure when or if their ship and cargo would arrive.
Eventually he became head of the US Naval Observatory - in fact, he pretty much created the Naval Observatory - and received acclaim at home and even more acclaim abroad for his work, not to mention praise and gratitude from those seamen whose lives and voyages were made so much safer and easier. We would have no shipping lanes, were it not for Maury. Yes, ships used to just bang into each other...
This book is a mixed blessing. It is quite clear and concise in its details, so that a duffer like me can follow Hearn's arguments, but I did skim at times since I'm unfamiliar with much of the terminology. It would have been nice to have a duffer's glossary. There is no bibliography so you must meander through his footnotes to find out the source for various facts. Numerous Maury papers are available at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and other libraries, and primary sources were liberally consulted. The account of the clipper races just before the Civil War is fun but lengthy for those who are not crazy about sports reporting.
Maury exerted what influence he could to keep the South from seceding. Hearn doesn't really clarify why Maury chose to leave the Navy in 1861 and join the Confederate cause, other than to say that he simply couldn't bear to see his native states of Tennessee and Virginia have no voice in policy-making under the Union. Perhaps he didn't write much about his views on slavery. He tended to stick to scientific topics.
The one thing Hearn mentions is his notion that the slaves in the US could be shipped off to Brazil to work on plantations in the Amazon, and thus get rid of one obstacle in the way of unity. It was an original notion and nobody took him up on it. This implies that maintaining slavery in the USA was not his highest priority and that unity was more important. So his choice of the Confederacy is puzzling.
The Confederate leadership appreciated him even less than the Union leaders - in fact, much of his Union opposition joined the Confederacy. And his main task was to buy and equip sailing ships to raid Union commercial ships and take them as prizes -- not exactly the purpose for which he had mapped the currents of the sea.
He was a true globalist, however, in an age of isolationism. He worked steadfastly for global scientific cooperation in meteorology and hydrology, drawing an enormous number of countries into this enterprise in the early 1860s, even though he faced opposition from the US and Britain.
Shortly after he resigned his commission in the Navy, his successor at the Naval Observatory ceased publishing his guides for seamen, out of jealousy at his renown. This didn't last, however. In 1885 the Hydrographic Office revived all of his work and continued to publish unfinished work until 1915, when sailing vessels finally yielded the field to diesel and coal powered ships during World War I.
"The hundreds of sailing craft that ply the oceans today, from bluewater yachts to tall ships, still depend on and are guided by the pilot charts and sailing directions. Maury, who had fought so hard for recognition, would have been pleased by so lasting a memorial."

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this to try to understand why there is (as of today) a monument to him on Monument Avenue in Richmond. It was very technical and therefore to me uninteresting. I came away understanding he was an amazing scientist. Had he happened to be born elsewhere, there would not be a discussion about removing a statue of him. But he chose to resign from the US Navy at the start of the Civil War, and approaching the end of his life. This book is insufficient to discern his actual contribution to the Confederacy. However, it seems as though that time was toward to end of his life, and his work prior to that was of so much use it still has value.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uhm, who doesn't want to know more about how to traverse the sea. Great book, I thought it might be a tad boring, but this book was intriguing from cover to cover, minus the maps which I had no clue how to decipher.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maury is the father of modern oceanography and maritime weather analysis and reporting. This was an excellent book.