Читать книгу Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas - Charles Lee Lewis - Страница 8

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Maury’s early years in the navy afforded the lad from the backwoods of Tennessee wonderful experiences, and excellent opportunities for supplementing the desultory education that he had received. To a young man of his intellectual capacity, these voyages to foreign lands during the most plastic years of his life were invaluable in the development of a mind capable of grappling later with questions and problems which concerned the entire world.

Luckily for the young officer, the very first ship to which he was attached, the Brandywine, was the vessel which had been chosen to convey Lafayette home to France after his memorable visit to the United States. This ship, named from Brandywine Creek, the scene of the battle in which Lafayette was wounded on September 11, 1777, had been launched on June 16 of the year 1825. In equipping her for this special service, the officers had been selected so as to represent as many different states as possible and, where it was practicable, they were to be descendants of persons who had distinguished themselves in the Revolution. This accounted for the large number of midshipmen ordered aboard her, twenty-six instead of the usual eight or ten for a vessel of that size. Maury was thus brought in touch with young officers from various sections of the country; and among the senior officers were Captain Charles Morris, who had made a name for himself in the War of 1812, and Lieutenant David Farragut, who was to become one of the very greatest American naval leaders.

On the 8th of September the Brandywine set sail from the mouth of the Potomac, where Lafayette had been received on board the ship. She passed down the Chesapeake through a brilliant rainbow which was apparently supported on the Virginia and Maryland shores, as if Nature had reserved to herself the honor of erecting the last of the numerous triumphal arches that had been dedicated to the great Frenchman during his extraordinary visit. As the ship made her way to sea, almost the last glimpse which Lafayette had of America was the bluffs of the York River where he had so materially aided the American cause at the Battle of Yorktown.

The voyage turned out to be not a very pleasant one, for the ship had hardly gotten under way when she began to leak and for a time it was thought that she would have to return to port. But as it was reported that the leak was under control, Lafayette advised the captain to continue the voyage, and when the planks of the vessel swelled from immersion in the water the leak gradually diminished. The weather, however, then became stormy, and during most of the passage the distinguished passenger suffered so severely from sea-sickness and gout that he was unable to join the officers at dinner or to visit the deck. They were thus deprived, much to their regret, from listening as much as they desired to the reminiscences of the great general’s interesting and eventful life. There was another unpleasantness that affected the midshipmen in particular. This was caused by a steward who, in cleaning an officer’s uniform, upset a bottle of turpentine, the contents of which ran into a barrel of sugar belonging to the midshipmen’s mess. As a consequence, during the remainder of the voyage they had to eat their desserts strongly flavored with turpentine.

At the close of the voyage, the midshipmen presented to Lafayette, as a mark of their personal friendship, a beautiful silver urn appropriately engraved with scenes of the Capitol at Washington, Lafayette’s visit to the tomb of Washington, and the arrival of the Brandywine at Havre. At this French port, Lafayette disembarked, taking with him the flag of the American vessel as a souvenir of the voyage. From here Maury’s ship proceeded to Cowes where she was calked, and then sailed for the Mediterranean, joining Commodore John Rodgers’ squadron at Gibraltar on the 2nd of November. The ship was refitted here during the winter, and the following spring she returned to the United States, arriving at New York in May, 1826.

Such in brief outline was Maury’s first cruise. Though none of his letters giving his impressions of these first months at sea have been preserved, yet it is not difficult to imagine with what eagerness and delight his active young mind observed the strange sights and assimilated the new experiences. Many years afterwards he wrote of how he secured a Spanish work on navigation in order that he might acquire a new language and a science at the same time. In this connection he related how he resorted to various artifices for study while on watch. “If I went below only for a moment or two,” he wrote, “and could lay hands upon a dictionary or any book, I would note a sentence, or even a word, that I did not understand, and fix it in my memory to be reflected upon when I went on deck. I used to draw problems in spherical trigonometry with chalk on the shot, and put them in the racks where I could see them as I walked the deck. That with so much perseverance I should have failed in my prime object, I attribute to the want of books and proper teachers in the navy”. It was this seriousness of purpose and industry that caused Maury soon to become well known among his shipmates for his scholarship, and the story is told that even on this first cruise a certain mathematical problem was passed from steerage to wardroom without solution until he solved it.

After making a short visit to his home in Tennessee, Maury set sail on June 10, 1826 from Norfolk on the frigate Macedonian to which he had been ordered for temporary duty. This ship was bound for Rio Janeiro where she arrived after a passage of sixty-two days. After cruising in Brazilian waters for awhile, the frigate went on down the coast to Montevideo. At this time a war was raging between Brazil and Argentina over Banda Oriental, or Uruguay, which had been a sort of political football between the two countries until 1821, when it was partly subdued by Brazil. In 1825, however, it rose against this empire, and after a long struggle of three years it succeeded in having its independence recognized by the treaty of Rio Janeiro, on August 27, 1828. This state of affairs constituted the principal reason why American ships of war were sent to those waters. Thus was Maury brought into touch with history in the making, and the letters which he wrote at this time show an alert interest in what he was observing and display as well an unusual ability in recording experiences and his impressions of the people.

His name was still carried on the muster and pay rolls of the Brandywine; but that ship did not depart for South American waters until the last of August, 1826, when she set sail from New York with the Vincennes. Eventually it was Maury’s good fortune to be transferred to the latter vessel, in which he was to circumnavigate the globe. He first joined the Vincennes, on March 10, 1827, in Callao Roads, the port of Lima, Peru. The American warships had by this time entered the Pacific and were cruising up and down the South American coast from Valparaiso, Chile to Guayaquil, Ecuador to protect the commerce of the United States, as this part of South America also was then in turmoil.

Bolivar, after liberating the states of northern South America from Spanish rule, was endeavoring to organize Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, La Plata, and Chile into a grand republic, of which he aspired to be the ruler. The union of the first three of these states was practically realized, but the undertaking finally ended in failure because of the jealousy of Bolivar’s former companions in arms and the fickleness of the South American people. This characteristic of the people is humorously set forth in Maury’s letters in which he describes some of the fighting which he witnessed at Guayaquil. The young man’s historical outlook was thus further broadened by this personal contact with the affairs of the great Libertador, Bolivar.

On July 4, 1829, the war meanwhile having come to an end, the Vincennes, under the command of Captain William Compton (Bolton) Finch, set forth from Callao on her voyage across the Pacific. She was to make her first stop at the Washington Islands, now known as the Marquesas, in order, as Captain Finch’s orders read, to secure proper treatment from the natives for any of our defenseless seafaring countrymen who in their lawful pursuits were compelled by necessity to resort to the harbors of the islands for refreshment and supplies; to reclaim those who from improper motives had remained among the islanders; and by exhibiting the moral advancement of America to so raise the American national character in their estimation as to induce a praiseworthy imitation of it on their part. The ship arrived at one of the islands, Nukahiva by name, on July 26, and in order to carry out the spirit of his orders Captain Finch made his vessel a “tabu ship” that he might prevent the gross licentiousness to which ships from Christian lands were usually surrendered in those ports.

For an account of Maury’s experiences on this cruise little is to be derived from his extant letters, but fortunately Chaplain C. S. Stewart wrote a book entitled “A Visit to the South Seas in the U. S. Ship Vincennes during the years 1829 and 1830”, in which he mentions Maury as a member of the shore party which visited the Valley of Taioa and as one of those who went on various other expeditions on the island of Nukahiva under the direction of the chaplain. That these were unforgettable experiences is evident from Stewart’s rapturous descriptions of the people and the scenery of the island which, he declared, “seemed almost a fairy land, scarce less fascinating in its features than the imaginary haunts pictured by the pens of genius as the abode of Calypso, or the happy valley of the Abyssinian prince”.

Before leaving this island Maury had an experience of peculiar interest. It was here that his brother John had spent two years practically cut off from civilization. Just before the War of 1812, he had secured a furlough from the navy and had gone as first officer in a merchantman on a voyage to China. On departing from Nukahiva, the captain of this ship left John Maury and six men on the island to procure sandalwood and other articles of commerce. They were, of course, to be taken off on the return from China; but the war broke out and the ship was blockaded in a Chinese port by the English. Meanwhile the Americans were left to shift for themselves on Nukahiva, and in a war between two tribes, one of which was friendly to them, all the white men were killed except John Maury and another man named Baker. Fortunately, Porter visited the island during the famous cruise of the Essex, and rescued the two survivors. In order that he might learn something about the history of his brother while on the island, Midshipman Maury set about studying the language of the natives, during the three weeks or so of his visit. And shortly before his departure he was able to converse with the old chief who had been his brother’s friend. “The Happas and the Typees”, Maury wrote, “were at war. The latter having just captured three children from the former, we went to the rescue and recovered two, the third had been eaten. When we returned to the Happa Valley from the expedition—it was the valley where dwelt my brother—the men had liberty and the old Happa chief remained on board as a hostage, for his subjects were all a set of savages and the women literally in the fig leaf state. At night when all the men had come off safe and sound, and a few days only before we left, I was sent to take the old fellow ashore. Going ashore, I made myself known to him. He was the firm and fast friend of my brother. Had saved his life. He was then old. He it was that offered me his scepter, his own wife, and the daughter of a neighboring chief if I would remain”.

Needless to say, this flattering offer was rejected, and Maury was on the Vincennes when she sailed away from the island. In leaving the bay, the ship narrowly escaped destruction, for the vessel was at first becalmed and then suddenly carried by the swell toward the breakers. Every face was pale with fear and the silence of the grave hung over the ship, but a timely breath of air filled the topsails and finally slowly carried her out to the open sea. In five days she was seven hundred miles away at Tahiti, one of the Society Islands. Here Maury had the pleasure of joining several shore parties, and was also present at an interesting reception to the Queen of Tahiti on board the Vincennes, when the firing of the salute to the queen greatly alarmed her and caused her to behave in a very humorous and undignified manner.

The ship then set sail, after a month’s visit, for the Sandwich Islands. On the island of Hawaii Maury visited the Cascade of the Rainbow and probably saw also the volcano of Kilauea, about both of which Chaplain Stewart goes into rhapsodies in his account of the voyage. Captain Finch went also to Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, and there presented to King Kamehameha III a pair of gloves and a large map of the United States, and a silver vase to the regent and two silver goblets to the princess. A letter from the Secretary of the Navy was then delivered to the king. This was well received by his majesty, and his reply was in the friendliest possible tone, agreeing to treat American sailors with more consideration and fairness in the future. The purpose of the visit having thus been accomplished, several deserters having been reclaimed, and the settlement of claims for about $50,000 for American citizens having been negotiated, the ship departed for China.

Leaving behind the northern Bashee Islands, which are considered one of the barriers of the Pacific as well as one of the portals to the Celestial Empire, the ship came to anchor on January 3, 1830 in the roads of Macao, a Portuguese city, situated on a small island about seventy miles from Canton. The Vincennes thus gained the distinction of being the second American man-of-war to visit Chinese waters, having been preceded only by the Congress in 1819. After receiving a statement from the American consul and merchants at Canton on the advisability of having American men-of-war make periodic visits to Chinese waters, Captain Finch was off again, this time for the Philippines.

After a brief visit at Manila, the ship turned towards home, and, stopping in the Straits of Sunda and at Cape Town, on the first of May came in sight of the Island of St. Helena. Here ample time was afforded the officers for seeing Longwood House in which Napoleon had lived and also his tomb, from which the body of the great general had not at that time been removed to Paris. After leaving this island, the ship made no other stop until she arrived in New York on the 8th of June, 1830, with her band appropriately playing, “Hail Columbia! Happy Land!”

After almost four years to a day, Maury was home again; but he was no longer the raw lad from the Tennessee backwoods, for the information and experience which he had gained on this cruise of the first American man-of-war to circumnavigate the globe had gone a long way towards taking the place of a college education. Men of the stamp of Commodore Charles Morris, Lieutenant Farragut, Captain Finch, Chaplain Stewart, and dozens of other officers with whom he had come in contact during his first two cruises had contributed, by example at least, in making him into an officer and a gentleman. During all this time he had studied, and read as widely as opportunity afforded, having had the privilege for a portion of the time of using the books of Midshipman William Irving, a nephew to Washington Irving.

That the opportunities for instruction on shipboard were, however, very limited is indicated by the following summary of Maury’s experience with the school system of the navy. “The first ship I sailed in”, he wrote, “had a schoolmaster: a young man from Connecticut. He was well qualified and well disposed to teach navigation, but not having a schoolroom, or authority to assemble the midshipmen, the cruise passed off without the opportunity of organizing his school. From him, therefore, we learned nothing. On my next cruise, the dominie was a Spaniard; and, being bound to South America, there was a perfect mania in the steerage for the Spanish language. In our youthful impetuosity we bought books, and for a week or so pursued the study with great eagerness. But our spirits began to flag, and the difficulties of ser and estar finally laid the copestone for us over the dominie’s vernacular. The study was exceedingly dry. We therefore voted both teacher and grammar a bore, and committing the latter to the deep, with one accord, we declared in favor of the Byronical method—

‘’Tis pleasant to be taught in a strange tongue

By female lips and eyes’;

and continued to defer our studies till we should arrive in the South American vale of paradise, called Valparaiso. After arriving on that station, the commander, who had often expressed his wish that we should learn to speak Spanish, sent down ‘for all the young gentlemen’, as the middies are called, and commenced to ask us one by one—‘Can you speak Spanish?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Then you are no gentleman’. ‘Can you?’ But always receiving the same answer, he sent us out of the cabin as a set of blackguards. As he was as ignorant on this subject as any of us, we included him among the number, and thought it an excellent joke. Thus ended our scholastic duties on that ship. I was afterwards transferred to another vessel in which the schoolmaster was a young lawyer, who knew more about jetsam and flotsam than about lunars and dead reckoning—at least, I presume so, for he never afforded us an opportunity to judge of his knowledge on the latter subjects. He was not on speaking terms with the reefers, ate up all the plums for the duff, and was finally turned out of the ship as a nuisance. When I went to sea again, the teacher was an amiable and accomplished young man, from the ‘land of schoolmasters and leather pumpkin seed’. Poor fellow!—far gone in consumption, had a field of usefulness been open to him, he could not have labored in it. He went to sea for his health, but never returned. There was no schoolmaster in the next ship, and the ‘young gentlemen’ were as expert at lunars, and as au fait in the mysteries of latitude and departure, as any I had seen. In my next ship, the dominie was a young man, troubled like some of your correspondents, Mr. Editor, with cacoethes scribendi. He wrote a book. But I never saw him teaching ‘the young idea’, or instructing the young gentlemen in the art of plain sailing; nor did I think it was his fault, for he had neither schoolroom nor pupil. Such is my experience of the school system in the navy; and I believe that of every officer will tally with it”.[1]

Maury had the privilege of continuing his studies ashore in New York and Washington for several months before he embarked on his next cruise. He was then preparing himself for the examination for the rank of passed midshipman. This examination covered the following subjects: Bowditch’s “Navigation”; Playfair’s “Euclid”, Books 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6; McClure’s “Spherics”; Spanish or French; Mental and Moral Philosophy; Bourdon’s “Algebra”; and Seamanship. The time devoted to each midshipman by the examiners, in the order of his appointment, ranged from fifty minutes to two hours. To judge from the questions in seamanship, the examination was largely of a very practical nature,—on how to handle the sails of a ship and how to navigate her.

In his examination, Maury passed twenty-seven in a class of forty. An explanation of this apparently low standing may be gathered from the following account of the manner of conducting such examinations: “The midshipman who seeks to become learned in the branches of science that pertain to his profession, and who before the Examining Board should so far stray from the lids of Bowditch as to get among the isodynamic and other lines of a magnetic chart, would be blackballed as certainly as though he were to clubhaul a ship for the Board in the Hebrew tongue.... Midshipmen, turning to Bowditch, commit to memory the formula of his first or second method for ‘finding the longitude at sea by a lunar observation’. Thus crammed or ‘drilled’, as it is called, they go before the Board of Examination, where, strange to say, there is a premium offered for such qualification. He who repeats ‘by heart’ the rules of Bowditch, though he does not understand the mathematical principles involved in one of them, obtains a higher number from the Board than he who, skilled in mathematics, goes to the blackboard and, drawing his diagram, can demonstrate every problem in navigation”.[2] Maury, no doubt, wrote this out of his own personal experience; and even though the results of his examination may have indicated that in the ordinary duties of his profession he was not above the average, still it was to be in a special field of the service that his genius was to display itself.

During the winter which Maury spent in Washington he fell completely in love with his cousin, Ann Herndon, who was visiting relatives in Georgetown. Hitherto there had been a certain safety in numbers, as indicated by the numerous references in his letters to the charms of English girls and the “piercing eyes and insinuating smiles” of the Brazilian and Peruvian maidens. But before he went to sea again he became engaged to his cousin, and on his departure he gave her a little seal which was to be used only when she wrote to him; it bore the inscription of the single word Mizpah, that beautiful Biblical parting salutation, “The Lord watch between thee and me when we are absent one from the other”.

This love affair caused Maury to consider resigning from the naval service, but his hope of getting employment as a surveyor did not materialize and he finally concluded that he supposed Uncle Sam would have the selling of his bones to the doctors. Accordingly, in June, 1831 he sailed again for the Pacific, this time in the Falmouth. His ship touched at Rio for a brief visit, then doubled Cape Horn, and arrived at Valparaiso the last of October. The Falmouth remained on this station for about a year, and Maury renewed his former acquaintances and enjoyed the hospitality of Chilean society at dances and dinners without number. The vessel then cruised further north along the coast, visiting various ports and remaining several months at Callao.

One of Maury’s shipmates on this cruise has left some reminiscences which throw considerable light upon his young friend’s qualities as an officer. “I encountered some ridicule”, wrote Captain Whiting, “from my messmates for predicting that Maury would be a distinguished man. I asserted that there was that in him which could not be kept down.... In a survey of San Lorenzo Island while attached to the Falmouth I was an assistant to Maury, and he displayed that perseverance and energy undismayed by difficulty when he had once determined upon accomplishing a result, which ever marked his career. In prosecuting the survey of the Boca del Diables he scaled rocks and crept around the corners of cliffs when I was almost afraid to follow him, but the attainment of his object seemed to be with him the only subject of his thoughts. He landed on the Labos Rocks to the westward of San Lorenzo to make some astronomical and trigonometrical observations while I remained in the boat. When he landed it was almost a dead calm, and the sea comparatively smooth; but by the time he had finished his observations a fresh wind had sprung up from the southwards, the tide had risen, and the sea was raging so as to forbid the near approach of the boat, one minute receding from the rock so as to leave a yawning gulf of twenty or thirty feet depth, then rushing up again with appalling and irresistible force. Calling on me to approach as near as I dared, Maury ascended to the highest point of the rock, took off his jacket, and with a string which he found in his pocket tied in it his watch and sextant, and then threw it with all his might into the sea toward the boat, while the bowman of the boat stood ready to seize it with his boathook before the water had time to penetrate the wrapping. Maury then, watching the culmination of a wave, sprang from the rock himself and being a good swimmer and possessed of much youthful strength reached the boat in safety, but it was a fearful leap”.

The seeds of Maury’s later wonderful achievements in the science of the sea were implanted during this cruise of the Falmouth. He was the sailing master of the ship, and naturally wished to make as quick a voyage as possible. Before sailing he had searched diligently for information concerning the winds and currents and the best course for his ship to take, and was astonished to find that there was practically no information on the subject to be secured. The observations of these phenomena of the sea which he accordingly made on this voyage turned his mind toward a series of investigations which later was to make his name known round the entire world.

Maury did not return to the United States in the Falmouth, but shortly before her departure from Callao he was transferred on August 20, 1833 to the schooner Dolphin, in which vessel he performed the duties of first lieutenant. He remained on the little schooner but a few weeks, and then was attached to the frigate Potomac, which had just arrived at Callao under the command of Captain John Downes. This ship had been on duty on the Pacific coast of South America for a little more than a year, after having cruised almost around the world by way of the Cape of Good Hope, the Malay Archipelago, China, and the South Seas.

In a short time, however, the Potomac sailed for home, arriving at Valparaiso the middle of December. Here, according to Captain Whiting, Maury had a very unpleasant experience with a young lady named Manuela Poma with whom he had previously become acquainted. Her hand had been sought by a young officer of the Chilean army, who the evening before the Potomac sailed came on board the ship and told Maury that he had destroyed all his hopes of happiness. He said that the previous day he had made a declaration of his love to Manuela and that she had rejected him, telling him that her affections were already bestowed on the young American naval officer. Instead of priding himself on this conquest, as many young men would have done, Maury was exceedingly distressed as he had considered his relationship with the young girl to have been nothing more than that of friendship, and by a returning ship he sent a long letter to Manuela. Soon after his arrival in Boston he learned that she had died of consumption.

The voyage home round the Horn and by way of Rio was more or less uneventful, except for imminent peril for a time from icebergs off the Falkland Islands. After three years Maury was home again, and according to the decrees of Fate this was to be his last cruise. Hence a distinctive period in his life had come to a close; but his nine years of almost continuous sea duty had been a splendid preparation for the peculiar scientific work that he was soon to undertake.