Matthew Fontaine Maury
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1806-1873
Nicknamed "Pathfinder of the Seas", was an American oceanographer who
made important contributions to charting wind and ocean currents.
Maury was born in Spotsylvania, Virginia. In 1825 at the age of 19,
he joined the United States Navy as a midshipman on board the frigate
Brandywine. Almost immediately he began to study the seas and record
methods of navigation. When a leg injury left him unfit for sea duty,
Maury devoted his time to the study of navigation, meteorology,
winds, and currents.
His hard work on and love of plotting the oceans paid off when he
became superintendent of the Department of Charts and Instruments in
1842. Upon the establishment of the United States Naval Observatory
in 1844, Maury became its first superintendent, holding that position
until his resignation in April 1861. Here Maury studied thousands of
ships' logs and charts.
He published the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, which
showed sailors how to use the ocean's currents and winds to their
advantage and drastically reduced the length of ocean voyages, and
his Sailing Directions and Physical Geography of the Seas and Its
Meteorology remain standard. Maury's uniform system of recording
synoptic oceanographic data was adopted by navies and merchant
marines around the world and was used to develop charts for all the
major trade routes.
Maury's work on ocean currents led him to advocate the theory of the
Open Polar Sea, the hypothesis that the ocean near the North Pole is
free of ice. While today this is known to be false, in the 19th
century it was a popular idea that inspired many explorers to seek a
navigable sea route to the Pole.
With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Maury, a Virginian,
resigned his commission as a U.S. Navy commander and joined the
Confederacy. He spent the war in the South, as well as abroad in
England, acquiring ships for the Confederacy. He also worked on an
electric torpedo design, but did not manage to perfect it into an
effective weapon. He later gave talks in Europe about the development
of his torpedo.
Following the war, Maury accepted a teaching position at the Virginia
Military Institute, holding the chair of physics.
He died in 1873 during a lecture tour, in Lexington, Virginia. Three
ships named USS Maury have been named for him.
