Maury, Matthew Fontaine

Maury, Matthew Fontaine (1806–73), American naval officer, born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, who became a midshipman in 1825. He devoted his energies to the study of navigation but is now best known for his work in oceanography, which brought him a worldwide reputation. He was appointed to the USS Vincennes for her circumnavigation of the world and while on leave after this voyage published A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation, which was highly successful.

In 1839 he was injured in an accident which ended his active service career, but in 1842 he was appointed superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments of the Navy Department in Washington, and given additional duties as superintendent of the new Naval Observatory. His interest in hydrography and marine meteorology led him to issue special logs to sea captains so that they could record the strength and direction of winds and currents they encountered. With the information gathered from these sources he published his ‘Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic’ in 1847, and the following year issued sailing directions for use with his chart, under the title, Abstract Log for the Use of American Navigators, bringing out new editions in 1850 and 1851.

Maury's publications made possible considerable savings in travel time and were enthusiastically received by mariners from many nations, with many masters cooperating with him by reporting their regular observations. Their success led to Maury organizing the first international maritime meteorology conference, convened in Brussels in 1853, and his uniform system of recording meteorological data was adopted for all naval and merchant vessels.

In 1855 Maury published The Physical Geography of the Sea, now acknowledged as being one of first text books of modern oceanography, and prepared a chart representing the bottom profile of the Atlantic between Europe and America to demonstrate the practicability of a submarine cable across the ocean. In the same year a section of a third edition of his Sailing Directions suggested traffic separation lanes in the North Atlantic, a recommendation that eventually bore fruit in 1898 when the five biggest transatlantic steamship companies of the day agreed to regular steamer lanes.

At the start of the American Civil War (1861–5) he joined the Confederate States Navy. When it ended he went to Mexico and then returned to England where he had spent part of the Civil War trying to find suitable vessels for the Confederate Navy. In 1868, he was appointed professor of meteorology at Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, a post he held for the rest of his life.