Introduction: Reconsidering Matthew Fontaine Maury

Matthew Fontaine Maury occupies a prominent, if fraught, place in both naval history and the history of science. Naval historians have recognized him as an important naval reformer and scientist who, at the height of his influence, resigned his commission to join the Confederacy. Historians of science have mostly made critical judgements of Maury’s theories about the workings of ocean winds and currents, pointing to his status as a self-trained amateur scientist and naval officer who nevertheless exercised considerable – and, in their view, misplaced – influence over government-sponsored science. The scholars contributing to this Forum represent the leading edge of a welcome reconsideration of Maury and his many undertakings and legacies. Their work builds upon recent scholarship that provides a solid foundation for this enterprise and which suggests new questions and inquiries. The purpose of this introduction is two-fold: to provide a historiographical context within which the authors focus on a particular aspect of Maury’s work and legacy (Reformer, Scientist, Pathfinder); and to offer some additional thoughts about future directions of scholarship related to Maury.

Assessment of Maury and his legacy began before his death, when his departure from the Naval Observatory in April 1861 to support the Confederacy loosened the tongues and pens of critics from both the scientific and naval communities. ¹ After his death, his daughter compiled a ‘life and letters’ style biography. ² A biography appearing 75 years later was assessed by historian Steven J Dick as ‘exhaustive’ yet written ‘largely with a sympathetic view’. ³ In the meantime, three biographies appeared in the late 1920s and 1930 (around the time the monument to Maury as ‘pathfinder’ was dedicated in Richmond). ⁴ All this left historians who followed with the challenge of interpreting complicated political and, in some cases, personal investments in Maury’s story.

Considerations of Maury and his legacy during the 1960s were part of the growth of the history of science, which tended to judge Maury critically relative to his American rivals such as Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry and other members of the self-titled ‘Lazzaroni’, who aimed to enforce new professional standards of entry for the new jobs in science. In the grip of Thomas Kuhn’s influential philosophy of science, historians of American science, such as the influential Nathan Reingold, judged Maury’s science as bad or wrong, pushed out by the new ‘paradigms’ created by trained, professional scientists of the mid- to late 19th century. ⁵ As historians of science began to pay attention to patronage and institutional settings for American science, the assessment of Maury as a scientist remained largely critical even as his important role in the emergence of government funding for science and his control through his position at the Naval Observatory were appreciated. ⁶

Thanks to the award-winning work of William H Goetzmann, American exploration caught the attention of historians, who fused the history of science with wider fields of inquiry. Edward Towle and John Kazar contributed important works on the history of naval exploration in 1966 and 1973 respectively, which both dealt with Maury. ⁷ I consider that my own treatment of Maury contributed to this thread of scholarship, while one of this Forum’s authors, Jason W Smith, has produced an excellent dissertation that extends this trajectory, focusing especially on Maury’s hydrographic work. ⁸

In my view, recent scholarship on Maury, including the work of myself, Smith and others – but especially the outstanding contribution of Steven Dick in his history of the Naval Observatory, and the recent biography by John Grady – provides a welcome foundation for investigating Maury in the context of fresh historiographic questions and considerations. ⁹ I had for a long time wished that someone would write a definitive Maury biography, like Albert Moyer’s masterful study of Joseph Henry (which, incidentally, provides a more balanced view of the relationship of Maury and Henry than most histories of American science). ¹⁰ I have come instead to believe that a better outcome would be for a number of researchers with expertise in different areas of scholarship to study the widely varying aspects of Maury’s complicated involvements, political and ideological commitments and legacy. In this respect, there seem to me at least three fields of history whose recent scholarship and trajectories invite re-evaluation of Maury: the history of science; transnational history; and environmental history. These overlap, of course, and I can all but guarantee that other scholars who study Maury will have additions to offer.

The history of science and technology is a field that is already actively engaged in reconsidering Maury. For instance, Steven Dick’s work on the Naval Observatory carefully weighed longstanding accusations by contemporaries and by historians that Maury abandoned astronomy in favour of hydrography. He concluded that ‘the balance between astronomy and hydrography was not a product solely of Maury’s decision’. Instead, he argued that the institutional history and the context of antebellum science in America shaped and constrained Maury’s choice of roles. ¹¹ Penelope K Hardy’s article in this collection squarely challenges the assertion by some of Maury’s contemporaries and historians that he was not a scientist.

There are two areas within the history of science that might particularly reward inquiry by Maury scholars. The first is the practice of science. Attention to how science was practised emerged in part as historians looked away from laboratories to investigate science in the field. Both Hardy and Smith devote careful attention to the category of practice. ¹² Two specific thoughts about Maury and practice relate to the potential value of investigating inscriptions and visual representations, which are integral parts of the scientific process, but not ones that often attract the most attention. John Leighly, in his introduction to the 1963 reprint of Maury’s book, The Physical Geography of the Sea, drew attention to Maury as a writer and to this popular book, which remained in print for 20 years, as a document deserving careful historical consideration. In the field of book history in general, and history of science in particular, James Secord’s excellent study of the controversial mid-19th-century defence of evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, suggests the benefits of serious study of popular works of science, even those criticized at the time and in retrospect for including ‘bad’ science. ¹³ Also, such an approach seems especially urgent and potentially rich given the known moments of cross-over between Maury and important literary figures of his day, including Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, who wrote 20,000 Leagues under the Sea with Maury’s book open beside him, propelling his fictional submarine Nautilus around the world’s oceans in the order in which Maury discussed them. ¹⁴ In the USA, Herman Melville referred to Maury’s whale charts, after they were announced but before they were even published, as evidence for the viability of Ahab’s quest of an individual whale in the open ocean. ¹⁵

Another aspect of the history of the book that bears consideration for Maury scholarship is its tradition of attention to the audience and to the reception of written work, something that Secord’s book does well. Very often Maury biographies heavily cite Maury’s own writings (Grady’s does, for example), but it would be good to have studies investigating what a variety of audiences thought about Maury’s writings, both his popular book and technical publications (i.e. Sailing Directions), as well as his more literary endeavours, such as his essays and arguments published in the Southern Literary Messenger. ¹⁶ This kind of history is challenging to write, but with the solid foundations now available, it may be possible as never before. Although the articles that follow do not primarily focus on the reception of Maury’s writings, Margaret Stack’s contribution involves detailed study of a series of articles on naval reform published in the Southern Literary Messenger.

Maury’s writing, though popular, was not as innovative as the visual representations of the ocean he created to interpret and present the new knowledge about the ocean, a topic taken up today by Jason W Smith. An historian of British science, Michael Reidy, has highlighted the central role played by visual technologies such as tidal charts, charts depicting magnetic variation and other such displays of data that could be created by scientists and handed over to ships’ masters to use in the extension of British imperial power. ¹⁷ Graham Burnett has drawn new attention to Maury’s whale charts, an extension of his compiling activity to cover an industry in which the USA gained ascendancy in the mid-19th century. ¹⁸ How innovative were Maury’s visual representations of new ocean knowledge? How did Maury’s role in the USA and internationally compare with that of Beaufort, who jump-started scientific hydrography in Britain? What was the relationship between the production of knowledge about the ocean and its use? Smith’s work makes important contributions here, as does Hardy’s.

Many of these questions about inscriptions and visual representations raise the issue of considering Maury not only in the national context but in an international context as well. As in the USA, Maury and his work were admired by some and criticized by others abroad. Investigation of who responded in what ways to Maury’s ideas and initiatives might be accomplished in the context of scholarship on the geopolitics of science. A recent, excellent article in Isis by Azadeh Achbari discusses Maury’s relationship with the Dutch naval officer Marin Henri Jansen, and demonstrates that there were similar patterns in the USA and European countries of innovation by naval officers to achieve government funding and international organization of science, followed abruptly by their swift replacement by professional scientists. Such a pattern lends weight to the need to question simplistic judgements of Maury as a ‘bad’ scientist and instead to undertake comparative as well as transnational history. ¹⁹

Transnational history, and especially recent considerations of American expansion in the 19th century, offer a newly textured context for Maury’s ideas about naval reform and the purpose of an American navy. Walter Johnson’s discussion of Maury in River of Dark Dreams argues for serious consideration of him as ‘an advocate of slavery, an imperialist, and a free trader’ whose vision of the American political economy was distinctly southern, looking not to the Atlantic but to the Pacific via the Mississippi Valley. Grady’s biography stresses Maury’s Huguenot roots to re-contextualize his interest in far-away lands. ²⁰ All three Forum contributors deal with American expansion at some level, and certainly Maury’s scientific work at heart aimed to promote expansion, whether commercial, cultural or political. Stack, in particular, argues for an ideological, expansionist motive behind Maury’s calls for naval reform.

Finally, environmental history suggests consideration of Maury’s role in forging the conception of the ocean that emerged from new 19th-century investigations. Environmental history is guided by natural rather than mainly political boundaries. It pays attention to the mutual relationship between people and the natural world. These are perspectives that historians in general should no longer ignore. I would argue that historians studying the oceans, and specifically those studying the complex and contradictory character of Maury, would do well to consider the questions and perspectives of environmental history. ²¹ Maury played an integral part in the discovery of the ocean’s depths, as its third dimension gained relevance for new industries including sperm whaling and submarine telegraphy as well as for cultural reasons. ²² As Jason W Smith’s work shows, the emerging understanding of the ocean – in all three of its dimensions (and, indeed, also including the atmosphere) – was pursued because of anticipated uses of the ocean and formed the foundation for both traditional uses such as shipping, warfare and fishing, and for new uses made of the ocean going forward, including as a cultural destination and a place where people would test themselves against nature.

This historiographical overview hardly exhausts the possibilities. But it is hoped that it provides an adequate backdrop against which the Forum contributions can be set, as well as stimulating readers’ thoughts on future profitable questions and directions for Maury scholarship.