Maury—Matthew Fontaine Maury—was born in 1806 in Fairfax just north of Richmond, half the way to D.C. Maury served his country well, and later when it was divided, served the Confederacy better. Over whether or not he owned slaves, most sources are silent, but late in life he was an emissary to Great Britain on the South’s behalf and procured more than one warship, and he sent them sailing from Scotland for the new little navy. It could be true, as some say, what’s left of the Mason-Dixon line has moved a few points south. As I recall, there are no statues in Fairfax, of men anyway, or at least that type of man on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Maury was the type that could find a home here.
Even before the War of Secession, the great war that earned only a few men a permanent place in this one-time capitol, Maury was the “pathfinder of the seas,” not only a competent navy man but a hero of Commerce and the creator of Oceanography. In ’47 he published a book of charts that six years later, in ’53, cut down the amount of time it would take to get from New York to San Francisco. One ship, the apt “Flying Fish,” rounded the Cape with his charts, boasting 92 days and four hours, give or take a few minutes at break-neck speed in a clipper. Like most great achievements, his book caught on a little too late: the dream of fast gold in the West was already waning.
But Maury was neither deterred nor perturbed nor put down. In 1858 when the British wanted to extend a transatlantic cable from the Old World to the New, Maury was their man. He found the right depth that was neither too deep nor too shallow along a plateau, which was out of the reach of ships’ anchors and icebergs but sounded reliably by the Atlantic Telegraph Company. It worked so perfectly it seemed predestined, for now when the queen sneezed the president could bless her through dots and dashes—not to mention what it did for the company (ATC, which was French based—telling, perhaps, as to why they chose a man with the name Fontaine—becomes Anglo-American Telegraph Company shortly after; it seems AATC’s only role at the turn of the century is to rest on its laurels and collect on the 99-year lease agreement with Western Union; in the early 1960’s Western Union reneges on the deal and AATC makes out like a bandit; right after this, AATC changes its name to Transatlantic Cables Limited and moves to offices in Bermuda where, like planes and ships, it seems the company’s history is lost; today there are many fiber optic cable companies based in Bermuda).
Grateful Victoria and even Buchanan, perhaps unprepared for the man’s future counter-allegiance, praised M.F. Maury as the “indefatigable investigator of the ocean depths.” Although I’m sure more than one tripped over the phrase’s consonants while reviewing newspaper copy, the praise is just. At dusk the halogens shine their unwavering light on his statue’s ponderous face, as frozen as was his faith, as immutable as was his God.
You see, Maury knew that the same voice that whispered the Word to the prophets spoke this earth into existence, and he knew what that meant. In the Physical Geometry of the Sea, which in ’55 outsold it seems even Shakespeare, he claimed that it was Psalm 8:8, “the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas,” that provided the spark to his intellectual fire, for at that time he realized that God, though seated in heaven, had left His mark elsewhere, too.
It was not He, but he, Matthew Fontaine, just thirteen years before his timely death on the once-rebel soil, who stood before five thousand at the University of the South, when the soil was not yet rebel and the students still living students and not yet dead officers. I don’t think Maury hesitated when he proclaimed unto them, “The Bible is true and science is true,” although it was a somewhat dubious pairing for a scientist on the cusp of 1860 (remember Darwin’s Origin was published a year earlier), for which Maury (perhaps soberly) provided a terrible analogy: “What would you think of an historian who should refuse to consult historical records of the Bible,” he said, and here he took a breath and gathered himself to make his point, “because the Bible was not solely written for the purposes of history?” It was as simple as that, and we can safely suppose that just as his question was rhetorical, the applause was inevitable. Greater claims had been made from this one truth, and greater, more terrible consequences carried through. Why not a sea path as straight as the world is round?
We know that history is not as fixed as its instances seem to imply. However, some scholars who still suffer in Darwin’s wake, Maury’s own ilk, these biblical-scientists, even doubt the man, though not, of course, the lesson of good guidance he provides. They wonder if it was indeed a son of Virginia Lee Cox who, by the popular account and by Maury’s own, read to him this famous passage about sea-paths in Psalms, while he was sick. For even these scholars, while granting Maury that he was suffering under delusional fever, do not dispute the fact that when Matthew Fontaine began his work, Virginia’s eldest was not even two years old, and to believe that this first truth came from the mouth of a babe—well, that would be too great a miracle. Further still, others who do not otherwise question their faith also point out that some minor currents, such as the Gulf Stream, were well studied by the 1840’s, and they hint, despite all, that Maury’s later findings were hardly of divine origin but instead contingent on his time and place, admitting that Maury himself went south of the border late in life to try some new theories among peers, those who were more acquainted with the workings of the equator and who would never have statues.
I do not doubt that Maury sometimes foundered by the swell of his own fictions. But he is out there right now as true as stone and metal and certainly as cold. It has been a clear winter afternoon, all afternoon in Richmond, and they say it’s going to be a clear night. He’ll sit it out, enthroned with the wide world behind him. His bronze, I would say, looks almost golden in this now evening light. His lengthened shadow points straight to the ocean.
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