Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea (review)

210civil war history Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea. By Frances Leigh Williams. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Pp. xx, 720. $10.00.) The broad outlines of the career of Matthew Fontaine Maury (18061873 ) have long been known. Naval officer, superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Confederate naval ordnance expert, and secret service agent in England, imperial commissioner of colonization to the Emperor Maximilian, and professor of physics at Virginia Military Institute, Maury's distinguished contributions to the fields of meteorology, astronomy, navigation, oceanography , and physical geography are almost legendary. His work on the Atlantic cable, his efforts to establish a U.S. Weather Bureau, and his campaign for international scientific cooperation mark him as one of the great American scientists of the nineteenth century. But here for the first time is a definitive biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury, pathfinder and scientist of the sea. This massive volume is exhaustively researched, skillfully organized, and poignantly written. It will serve for years as the standard word on the brilliant self-educated American naval officer whose name, in his own lifetime, became a household word in international scientific circles. Three major themes are developed in this study, all of which add new dimensions, psychological and technological, to an understanding of Maury's life. First, there is Maury the husband and the father, the kindly breakfast -table patriarch whose Victorian moral standards were never compromised , and whose private life was one of marital happiness and an unending search for economic security and professional recognition. His selfmotivated pursuit of a scientific education was almost neurotic in its intensity . His ego demanded delicate nurture. "Maury could live without praise," concludes Williams, "but he could certainly work better with it." Then there is the depressing story of Maury's long fight with a navy that sought to retire him in 1855 (soon after the publication of his famous Physical Geography of the Sea) on the dubious grounds of medical disability and insufficient sea duty. This is the same navy, it might be added, that once informed Alfred Thayer Mahan that it was not the business of naval officers to write books, and that managed to find ways not to promote the dissident Hyman G. Rickover to flag rank. Indeed, one wonders whether the navy knows quite what to do with its stray intellectuals beyond punishing them with non-promotion. Maury, who remained a lieutenant for thirty years, eventually won his much-publicized struggle with the reactionary Plucking Board, but in exposing the board's starchamber procedures he earned the enmity (it was mutual) of Jefferson Davis and Stephen R. Mallory. These tensions carried over into the Civil War period and rendered Maury's later position in the Confederate navy at best anomalous. Finally, there is the theme of Maury's running conflict with the scientific establishment. Williams breaks important new ground here in her BOOK reviews211 detailed account of Maury's struggle with Professors Alexander D. Bache and Joseph Henry. There was more to this than mere bureaucratic squabbling among government scientists. It posed the question of whether a rather plain, self-educated naval officer of considerable ego could speak for and compete in a scientific community dominated by sophisticated, Harvard-trained New Englanders possessing greater egos. Williams gives Maury the best of this argument, but in awarding her decision to the lieutenant she denigrates the equally impressive scientific achievements of Henry, Bache, and the Smithsonian phalanx. Maury was certainly not infallible in his scientific judgments. Nor was he invariably on the frontier of all scientific thought. His views, for example, on the increasingly controversial relationship between science and religion were naive by the standards of his own day. He seems never to have read or wrestled with Charles Darwin. To him, the field of geology remained an appreciation of "sermons written in the stones by the finger of God." Similarly, Maury knew more about plankton than politics. While the sectional political situation deteriorated steadily throughout the 185TZs, Maury occupying a ringside seat in Washington, achieved little more than a nodding acquaintance with the political, social, and constitutional elements in the equation. He...