In the spring of 1855, a retirement board of U. S. Navy officers was created to get rid of some of the "dead wood" of the navy. One of the officers to get the ax was Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury. It was amazing that the man who had given the seafaring world the key to understanding the complex oceans of the world with his Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions and had won so many European honors and recognition should be so ill considered by his fellow officers. They surprisingly showed little sympathy to the man when they placed him on the retired "reserved on leave of absence pay" that kept him on duty at the National Observatory and left him with a greatly reduced salary from $3500 to $1200 annually.

Maury became greatly indignant over this matter and he petitioned Congress with his grievance. Ironically, among the opponents that Maury encountered in Congress were Senators' Jefferson Davis, Judah P. Benjamin, and Stephen R. Mallory; the last two senators who would someday serve in Davis' Confederate Cabinet.

Maury wrote to the Secretaries of the Navy that he had served under concerning his plight and asked for an evaluation of his service. He got back a reply from EX-Secretary Graham:

I considered your services at the National Observatory of far more importance and value to the country and the navy than any that could be rendered by an officer of your grade at sea in the time of peace. Indeed, I doubt whether the triumphs of navigation and of the observatory will not contribute as much to an effective naval service and to the national fame as the brilliant trophies of our arms.

The others echoed these sentiments and the following winter by special act of Congress Maury was reinstated as well as promoted to the rank of commander with back pay.

Maury went on to write The Physical Geography of the Sea where among other things he espoused the existence of a "telegraphic plateau," as early as 1848 between Newfoundland and Ireland which the navy had confirmed by 1853. Upon conducting the soundings on the ocean floor for the cable path, Maury devised the machinery to be used for laying the rubber-coated wire from continent to continent. This project was completed in 1866.

The Physical Geography of the Sea was printed up in five languages and very well received. Maury would go on to call for the establishment of a system of meteorological research, "if extended to the land, would afford for the agricultural interests of the country, and for science too, results quite as important as those which commerce and navigation have already received from it." Today Maury is considered the father of the Weather Bureau.

An early biographer sums up Maury's book thus:

Analyzing and tabulating millions of observations of the sea, its currents and its climate, its calms and its breezes, its winds and rains, its storms, its shoals and depths, its myriads of animal life and its marvelous formation of shore lines and bottom, he found his way to the very heart of nature and laid before us, like an open book, her majestic laws.

The work is written in a popular vein and is most charming and instructive. The dry bones of his science appear flesh and blood-yea, he breathes into them the very breath of life. master of a pure English style he sets before us the marvelous phenomena of the earth and sea and air, in thought and language that flow deep and strong and warm and life-giving like the great current of the Gulf Stream. It is the very poetry of a great science.

In 1855, Maury mapped out "steamer lanes" across the North Atlantic that were proven to be the shortest way to a fraction of a mile between New York and Europe. If the steamers kept to them like a train kept to its track, the fear of collisions could be greatly reduced. Merchants and underwriters were so pleased with this undertaking, as they had been with his Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions, along with his latest book, that they presented Maury with a service of silver plate along with a purse of $5,000.

Around that same time, Maury had been studying the great Mississippi River and had collated a vast array of knowledge concerning the great Mississippi basin and delta concerning the water velocity, precipitation, and evaporation. He designed gages that measured the rise and fall of the river along with a diking plan for redeeming its "drowned lands."

But despite all the laurels that Maury received from the learned scholars and merchants of the world, Maury had a dark side to him as well for he had racist views. Maury wanted to rid the South of slavery, but the method he proposed was to ship all the slaves off to the Amazon and sell them all to the highest bidder to open the lands in that harsh region where they would be subject to unknown cruelties and evils.

Maury was a son of the South and when Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Maury resigned his position at the National Observatory and moved with his family to Fredricksburg, Virginia.

The news of Maury's going over to the Confederacy was received in the North with trepidation and dismay and many northern merchant houses soon turned against him as he was now considered a deserter. A. A. Low & Bro. changed the name of one of their ships, the Maury, so named in his honor, to the Benefactress.

There was an immediate clamor in the South to make Maury the Confederate Secretary of the Navy. But Maury's old nemesis' Jefferson Davis, by then the President of the Confederacy, and his advisors Benjamin and Mallory, were unusually cold toward Maury.

Maury first served as a member of a Council of Three, in the service of the Governor of Virginia. Then in June 1861, he became a Commander of the Confederate Navy and was appointed Chief of the Bureau of Sea-coast, Harbor, and River Defenses of the South. In this capacity, he assisted in the fitting out of the ironclad Merrimac and invented a torpedo for use in defending harbors and land.

Over the summer of 1882, Maury was engaged in mining the James River downstream of defensive positions. Maury soon published a series of papers advocating the building up of the Confederate Navy and of building a number of small floating batteries to strategically place along Southern rivers and bays to fend off Union blockaders.

Toward the latter part of the summer of 1862, Maury received new orders and departed Charleston, South Carolina, to run the Union Blockade of that harbor to Bermuda. From there he sailed to Halifax, and on across the North Atlantic to Liverpool, where Maury joined Captain James Dunwood Bulloch, of Georgia, the head of the Confederate Secret Service in England.

There for the greater duration of the War, he assisted Bulloch in the search for British steamers to fit out for service in the Confederate Navy. These ships would then sail forth, receive their armaments at sea, and proceed to take a heavy toll on Union commerce upon the oceans of the world; especially upon Yankee clipper ships.

While in England, Maury also tried to purchase torpedo material for the Confederate Navy.

Upon completing his tour of duty in May 1865, Maury took a steamer for home. The steamer put into Havana for refueling when Maury received the news that the Civil War had ended, along with the news that all military or naval officers that had resigned their commissions to join the rebellion were specifically excluded from amnesty. With this unsettling news, Maury decided to escape the noose and soon booked passage to Mexico.

Upon his arrival in Mexico City, Maury offered his services to Emperor Maximilian as well as a colonization scheme to bring Southern planters along with their recently freed slaves, "apprentices," there to form a colony. Maximilian soon appointed Maury as the Imperial Commissioner of Colonization, but few Southerners were attracted by this offer. About the only service that Maury succeeded in while in Mexico was the introduction to cultivation of the cinchona-tree.

The next year in March 1866, Maury returned to England, where scientific and naval men gave him a testimonial dinner in recognition of his scientific work.

Maury then visited France, his Huguenot homeland, where Napoleon III employed him in Paris to instruct a board of French naval officers in his system of defensive sea mining that he had developed in the early years of the Civil War.

Maury then returned to London, England and tried to establish a school for instruction in electric torpedoes for British Naval officers as well as Swedish, Dutch, and officers of other nations, that eventually failed.

A New York publisher, Mr. C. B. Richardson, encouraged Maury to write a series of geographical textbooks for young reader and Maury approached this task with enthusiasm commenting on one occasion:

I could not wind up my career more usefully (and usefulness is both honor and glory) than by helping to shape the character and mold the destinies of the rising generation.

Unfortunately, the books met with little financial success in the United States for few Northerners would buy Maury's books for he was considered a traitor.

Maury was honored in 1868 with the degree of L.L. D. from the University of Cambridge along with Alfred Tennyson and other notables. But by then Maury's financial resources were stretching thin. Maury was quick to take advantage of a blanket amnesty that was offered by President Johnson in 1867 and returned to the Unites States soon after receiving his award at Cambridge, where he accepted the professorship of Meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute. For a time before taking up this position, Maury considered a venture for establishing a steamship line between Norfolk and the Holland port of Flushing, but nothing ever came of it.

Two years earlier in 1866, Cyrus Field had at last succeeded in opening the cable service across the "telegraphic plateau" and upon the completion of the enormous task Field stated: "Maury furnished the brains, England gave the money, I did the work."

Maury continued to campaign for a national weather bureau and was actively advocating for a Telegraphic Meteorological Bureau. He toured giving lectures in Boston, Missouri, and about the South on the subject. A paper wrote on the subject was unanimously approved at the International Congress, at St. Petersburg, for the Advancement of Geographic Knowledge.

While on tour in Fredricksburg, Virginia, an illness came on and he collapsed. Maury's family brought him home to Lexington. Matthew Fontaine Maury died on February 1, 1873; his departing words to his son were: "Am I dragging my anchors?"

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