Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans

About this book

A great story of discovery and adventure in the tradition of Longitude Maritime navigation remained largely a matter of guesswork until well into the 19th century and making a voyage meant following a series of all-too-often disastrous hunches. Changing that became the lifelong obsession of the brilliant irascible geographer Matthew Fontaine Maury whose career both aided and mirrored Americas rise as a maritime power. With his controversial appointment as the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1840 he at last found his lifes work. While others built railroads across the trackless interior Maury mapped the highways of wind and current over the previously trackless sea. In Tracks in the Sea Chester G. Hearn uses Maurys career as a window on the 19th century including the brief but glorious clipper-ship era of the 1850s the rise of steam and steel the Civil War and the destruction of the U.S. merchant fleet and the points of intersection with some of the most colorful and influential people of the time including presidents congressmen military leaders scientists explorers merchants and writers.