Besides the discovery of gold in California, 1848 ushered in another great contribution to the evolution of swift passages of clipper ships at sea, when Captain Jackson and the bark W.H.D.C. Wright returned to Baltimore with a cargo of coffee from Brazil in 37 days. The outward passage had only taken 38 days. He had completed a round voyage of 75 sailing days, more than a month ahead of schedule, and upon the W.H.D.C. Wright’s arrival in Baltimore Harbor, the counting houses and bars along the waterfront went wild.
Captain Jackson, a veteran of the Rio coffee trade, had departed Baltimore with a cargo of flour, along with recently acquired copies of Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions, that had been published the year before. They had successfully guided him from the Virginia Capes in his quest to find favorable currents and offshore winds off Brazil’s Cape de São Roque, and he had found Maury’s "Fair way to Rio."
Captain Jackson had bypassed the Atlantic doldrums encountered on the normal route, which took a course that slanted out toward Africa avoiding the Brazilian Cape that jutted out in the South Atlantic. It was mistakenly thought that the trade winds and currents would make it impossible for a ship to round the Cape while sailing close to the coast. With the normal route, there was no way to avoid the doldrums which slowed down sailing ships for days and weeks at a time. Instead, Captain Jackson had followed the advice of Maury to "Stand boldly on, and if need be, tack, and work by under the land."
In the pamphlets, Maury had compiled hundreds of naval observations. Among them were observations of navigators who for reasons unknown had sailed close to the
northern coast of the Cape de São Roque, and instead of finding counter currents, some captains had found "the currents in their favor."
Of the doldrums Maury wrote:
The calm belts of the sea, like mountains on the land, stand mightily in the way of the voyager. Like mountains on the land, they have their passes and their gaps.
He went on to add that they fluctuated with the seasons and that some calm belts were narrower than others.
Captain Jackson charted a practical route close to the Cape straight through the doldrums near the equator that took full advantage of the seasonal ever-fluctuating prevailing winds and currents in the minimum amount of time. Captain Jackson had navigated his route successfully through the doldrums to Rio Janeiro, where he delivered his cargo of flour and took on his usual cargo of coffee and made an equally swift passage back to Baltimore.
News of this record breaking passage swiftly made its way up the coast to New York and New England. Soon, every commercial captain wanted copies of these pamphlets. To the clipper ship captains obsessed with swift passages, these were a godsend. Maury had at last unlocked for them many of the mysteries of the seas.
Born in Spottsylvania County on January 24, 1806, Matthew Fontaine Maury was the grandson of Huguenot exiles on his father’s side, who had left France and settled in Virginia in 1714. His paternal grandfather, the Reverend James Maury, was an Episcopal clergyman, and also a teacher who had settled in Albemarle County, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson had been one of his pupils. So were two other presidents and five signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was the Reverend James Maury who had lit the spark in the impressionable young Thomas Jefferson in all matters concerning the speculations about the Missouri River and the Northwest Passage that had led to the Lewis & Clark Expedition.
When Matthew was five years old, his family moved to Franklin, Tennessee. Early on in life, he became interested in mathematics and was influenced by an old cobbler "who used to send the shoes home to his customers with the soles all scratched over with little X’s and Y’s." Matthew fell out of a tree when he was twelve years old and injured his back, at least temporarily. His father thought he was permanently disabled and at Matthew’s urging, sent him to Harpeth Academy, where he was instructed by some of the finest teachers of the day.
The Honorable Sam Houston obtained for young Matthew a midshipman’s warrant in the United States Navy in 1825, which his father did not entirely approve of, and had already turned down Matthew’s request to apply for admission to West Point. Still, Matthew left for the East with thirty dollars in his pocket that he had earned as a tutor at the academy.
Matthew now followed the path of his older brother who had also pursued a career in the Navy. There was no naval academy at the time, so he was assigned to sea duty. The 19-year-old midshipman came aboard the newly launched Brandywine, a 44-gun frigate, in the fall of 1825. The Brandywine had the honor of transporting the Marquis de Lafayette back to France after his triumphant one year tour of the United States, where Lafayette had lent an important hand in the struggle for independence from Great Britain at the time of the Revolutionary War.
The Marquis de Lafayette took a personal interest in the young midshipman, talking with him on many occasions over the voyage and made a great impression on the young Maury. So did the North Atlantic. Everyone on board the Brandywine became seasick. But Maury soon became dismayed with Nathaniel Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator, which was then required reading for all midshipmen, for it did not answer all the navigational questions that ran through Maury’s mind.
The Brandywine returned to the United States and the following summer of 1826, set sail again. This time, for a voyage around Cape Horn, where she was to relieve the frigate United States in the Pacific. At this point Maury was transferred to the Vincennes, a sloop-of-war, and known as "the fastest sailer in the Navy." Aboard the Vincennes, Maury was delighted to find many books in her library on navigation, mathematics, and trigonometry. Maury immersed himself in these books in his free time. Soon, he began chalking equations of spherical geometry upon the round shot cannon balls from the gun racks of the ship.
The Vincennes remained on station in the Pacific until 1829, when she was ordered to sail westward across the Pacific on a round the world voyage for home, the first U.S. Navy vessel to do so. It was a fascinating voyage for Maury, who took note of the variety of winds and currents that he discovered in the Pacific. Over the course of the voyage, the Vincennes made her way through the South China Sea, the East Indies, the Indian Ocean, and on to the Cape of Good Hope and the South Atlantic.
Throughout the long voyage, Maury took copious notes, spending much time studying and constructing a set of lunar tables as he prepared himself for examination upon his return.
The overconfident twenty-four-year-old Maury appeared before the examining board on March 3, 1831, and brazenly proceeded to work out his answer to a problem concerning lunar navigation using spherical trigonometry, instead of relying on principles stated in Bowditch’s book, and chalked out his computations on the blackboard. His answer was correct, but it went over the heads of his examiners who declared that Maury’s answer was incorrect and that he should study his Bowditch book more closely. As a result, Maury was given a low listing of twenty-seven out of a class of forty, which stalled his chances of promotion for a couple of years.
Maury returned to the sea three months later, this time as sailing master and navigator of the sloop-of-war Falmouth, bound for Cape Horn. Before the voyage, he had searched the bookstores in New York City for books concerning Atlantic Ocean and Cape Horn weather conditions, winds, and currents, and found nothing. Disappointed, he decided to keep a meticulous log of the voyage and recorded the winds, weather, tides, and currents, as well as the stars. Every 24 hours, he recorded the distance covered by the Falmouth, all the while keeping an eye out for errors in the charts.
The Falmouth reached Cape Horn in October 1831, where the sloop-of-war encountered fierce westerly gales. Maury, as navigator, sailed farther south toward the Palmer Archipelago of Antarctica, and at 62° 5’S he suddenly encountered more favorable winds. From his cramped stateroom, Maury studied all his collected accounts of previous Cape Horn navigators and his restless mind worked out his own solutions for rounding Cape Horn.
Off Cape Horn Maury observed the curious phenomenon of the low barometer. Maury had deduced by experience and observations that the prevailing winds south of Cape Horn revolved clockwise circling around a low-pressure center and that periodically the flow reversed at rare intervals, where a sailing ship could catch favorable easterly winds around the Horn. But the Cape westerlies blew fiercely head-on most of the time, forcing sailing ships to tack back and forth in vain efforts to progress to the west. Maury correctly deduced that under such conditions it was easier to sail farther to the south to find the easterly winds that would take them around the Horn.
The Falmouth rounded the Horn and in 24 days reached Valparaiso, way ahead of another ship that had tried to round the Horn farther to the north at the same time. That ship had been battered for 38 days, forcing their crew to put in to Talcahuano for repairs south of Valparaiso. Maury summed up his findings in a scientific report that he titled: On the Navigation of Cape Horn, and mailed it to the American Journal of Science and Arts and his report arrived at New Haven, Connecticut, several months later. Benjamin Silliman, the Journal’s editor, was impressed with the unknown author’s work and soon published the report, and it was well received.
After serving aboard the Dolphin and Potomac, Maury returned to the United States in May 1834, and soon married his distant cousin, Ann Herndon, in July. Immediately, he began writing a book on navigation as he now had plenty of time on his hands for the U.S. Navy, according to some, was "cursed by peace." The Navy budget was reduced and many of the officers were stranded on the beach at half pay, Maury included. He was not to go to sea again for four years. But now he had time to finish his book. Maury had grown increasingly unhappy with Bowditch’s New American Practical Navigator with its many errors and omissions, and he had deemed it to be not very useful for young midshipmen as it was intended more for experienced captains. Maury sought to simplify navigation principals, and in April 1835, sent along his manuscript entitled: A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation to Key & Biddle, a Philadelphia publisher who published the book a year later. In the meantime, Maury’s family had grown and he now had a son and two daughters.
Ironically, one who sang the praises of Maury's new book was none other than Nathaniel Bowditch, who recommended that his own book be replaced with Maury's as required reading for U.S. Navy midshipmen.
In 1839, Maury received an appointment to serve as astronomer and hydrographer under Commodore Catesby Jones on the South Sea Exploring Expedition. He prepared and practiced in the use of all the necessary scientific instruments required, but Captain Wilkes succeeded Catesby Jones to the command of the expedition, so Maury resigned thus giving the new commander the freedom to select his own associates.
Maury was then assigned to the brig Consort that was about to go on a tour of Southern harbors. There, Maury was to be assigned the duty of making surveys. But the Consort was in dry dock for repairs and would not be ready to go to sea for several months.
Maury had not seen his parents in nine years and decided to take a furlough and visit his parents in Tennessee. After this family reunion, Maury departed by stagecoach for New York, where the Consort awaited him to report aboard. At Lancaster, Ohio, on October 17, 1839, the agent had overbooked the coach, and Maury, being a gentleman, had given his seat to a lady and rode with two other passengers alongside the driver.
That night near Somerset, Ohio, the driver lost control of the stagecoach and the right wheels bogged down on the soft shoulder of the road, throwing the stagecoach down the bank. Maury was thrown clear and broke his right leg as he hit the ground. Fortunately no one else was hurt, but Maury lay on the ground for over an hour while one of the other passengers rode off for help on one of the horses.
A local doctor returned with the rescue party and brought the injured Maury to a tavern for there was no hospital nearby. Maury’s right leg was broken above and below the knee and his kneecap was dislocated. The doctor who set the fractures did such a poor job that a second doctor had to re-break the leg and reset it again. Both occasions were without anesthetic.
Maury was laid up in Somerset, Ohio, until early January 1840, when he finally left with his leg in a cast by sleigh to the nearest station for the journey to New York by train. The Consort had long since sailed away without him, so Maury returned to Fredricksburg, Virginia, to rejoin his family. There, he contemplated the reality that he would always walk with a limp and would never be able to handle the pitching movement of the deck of a sailing ship again. Maury was only thirty-three years old and it now appeared that his naval career was over.
As part of his recuperation therapy, Maury began to write a series of articles called "Scraps from the lucky bag" for the Southern Literary Messenger under the pen name "Harry Bluff." The "lucky bag" was Navy slang for a ship’s lost-and-found and the title, a clever play of words.
Maury’s restless farsighted mind brought up many subjects for the first time that to his way of thinking were long overdue. Some of which were summed up in the July, 1890 issue of The Popular Science Monthly article:
Sketch of Matthew Fontaine Maury: " . . . the adoption of steam as a motive power ; great-circle sailing ; the establishment of navy-yards and forts at Memphis and Pensacola ; the use of blank charts on board public cruisers ; the Gulf Stream and its causes ; the connection of terrestrial magnetism with the circulation of the atmosphere ; and a ship-canal from the Illinois River to Lake Michigan."
Maury also proposed the establishment of a Naval Academy similar to the Military Academy at West Point. He was also critical of the procedures involved in the repairing of ships and accused the Navy of graft; pointing out the repairs often cost twice as much as the cost of building the ships in the first place. Many officers backed him up on this and hundreds of letters arrived at the editorial office of the Southern Literary Messenger, all anonymous to avoid reprisals from senior officers. The Washington Intelligencer’s editor nominated "Harry Bluff" for Secretary of the Navy to the author’s dismay, for Maury had certainly ruffled the feathers of many of the Navy’s senior officers. Eventually, Harry Bluff’s true identity was revealed and Maury feared that his naval career might be cut short.
To his surprise and relief, Maury was given a new assignment in 1842 to the Navy’s Depot of Charts and instruments. To the Navy brass, it seemed the perfect way to rid themselves of their outspoken troublesome young lieutenant, by placing him in this old-fashioned out-of-the-way depot, where navigational instruments were stored; sextants, barometers, and the like. But to Maury’s delight, he also discovered an ever-growing collection of ships’ logs there on the dusty shelves that went back to the early days of the United States Navy. After every voyage, Navy regulations required that the ship’s logs be sent to the depot. There, they had collected dust for years, unwanted, unread, and nobody could dispose of them. Maury’s predecessor had actually unsuccessfully tried to sell them off as scrap paper.
But to Maury, these logs were a treasure trove for he immediately realized that they were vast chronicles of events at sea. Every day, a ship’s log listed the vessel’s position as well as the weather, winds, and currents encountered along every route that U.S. Navy vessels traveled. These were precise specific observations, not the general vague overall wind and current patterns that left much desired. In Maury’s restless mind, he soon sought to collate all this information in a new and different way, by area.
Maury also saw that the Navy’s general navigational information was sorely lacking, with only a few American charts of the coast of the United States. Ironically, the United States Navy still relied heavily on charts provided by the British Admiralty, with whom they had fought two wars over the past sixty-five years.
So Maury and his staff resolved to go through all the logs and collate observations for each area along the main routes and compile information on the weather, winds, and currents for all the seasons in a systematic way that had never been applied before. It was a noble effort to unlock and understand the mysteries of the seas. In the past, many successful skippers kept their secrets to themselves, but that attitude was soon to change.
Maury informed Congressman John Quincy Adams, the former President, on his plan to organize this accumulated information to navigational charts in a greatly simplified way, organized "in such a manner that each may have before him, at a glance, the experience of all."
Adams was greatly interested in the depot, as well as in constructing a series of lighthouses along the American coast. He soon secured the congressional authorization of $25,000 for an observatory to be built in Washington as a new home for the depot. It was built in 1844, along with a superintendent’s house for Maury’s growing family, that now numbered four children with his wife expecting a fifth child.
With fourteen staff members now under him, Maury pushed on with earnest determination, as his staff assembled all this accumulated ship’s log information by area. Maury himself devised a simplified method of schematic illustration representing different aspects on pictorial charts using easy to understand symbols.
A shuttlecock symbol represented the winds. Radiating lines of various lengths represented wind velocities, the longer the lines, the more powerful the winds, with the shuttlecock head pointing out the direction of the winds.
Arrow-shaped symbols indicated the directions of the ocean currents, the longer their length, the stronger the currents, with numbers along side showing their speed. Also included in the charts was additional information, such as compass variations and water temperatures. Included in the early versions, were the names of the ships and logs from where the information came from. Maury’s friend and shipmate from his cruise around the Horn aboard the Falmouth, Lieutenant William B. Whiting, was the illustrator.
Maury’s superiors were pleased and encouraged him on with his noble undertaking. The Navy brass now directed all their captains to fill out special abstract logs with specific information and to send them on to Maury for him to study and complete additional charts. Maury encouraged Naval officers to help him supplement their logs by periodically recording their ship’s positions and throwing drift bottles over the side of the ship with the information sealed inside. This information would take time to accumulate, but by 1847, there was enough information to put out the first pamphlet of charts under the title: Wind and Current Charts. That was accompanied by another pamphlet titled: Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany Wind and Current Charts simplified later to Sailing Directions.
Navy navigators and captains now carried both pamphlets aboard their ships. Soon alert captains of the merchant fleet took notice and requested copies of the Navy, which was glad to oblige.
Maury himself was a great admirer of the growing fleet of tea clippers such as Rainbow, Houqua, and the Sea Witch. He thought them to be "the noblest work that has ever come from the hands of man," and well understood the significance that his pamphlets would have when their captains possessed them. But it would take an obscure Captain Jackson engaged in the Rio coffee trade to light up their imaginations and set the stage for the glorious era of the clipper ships to come.
Soon, every commercial captain and navigator in the merchant fleet was clamoring for copies of Maury’s pamphlets and five thousand copies of the first edition of Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions were eagerly acquired. Maury was delighted to find these captains and navigators to be most eager to participate.
They returned the favor by filling out and sending in the prepared abstract logs upon completion of their voyages, thus greatly expanding and accumulating knowledge over all the oceans of the world at an unprecedented self-perpetuating rate. The abstract logs began pouring in over the next decade requiring Maury to annually update and expand his charts. The flow of expanded publications increased at a steady rate that now included trade wind charts, monsoon charts, storm charts, thermal charts, as well as whaler charts.
Captains and navigators the world over enthusiastically embraced this exciting new way of sharing information, which led to shorter passages everywhere, and to the merchant houses this meant greater profits, especially to the merchant with the fastest ships.
With the discovery of gold in California, merchants clamored to send their winged freighters loaded down with goods around the Horn through stormy seas. They would need all the help they could get and the wise captain and navigator who sailed with Maury’s Charts and Directions sailed with a great advantage. The Cape Horn sweepstakes 15,000-mile race to the Golden Gate around the bottom of the world was on.
Next: Ocean Monarch
The Era of the Clipper Ships
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