Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the SeasLewis, Charles Lee
History
Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas
Lewis, Charles Lee
Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 1806-1873
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’;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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