Page:Matthew Fontaine Maury 1806-1873.pdf/12

 learning his first lessons in Spanish and Navigation from the same book, and had many a kindly talk with him.

Later, the Brandywine cruised in British and Mediterranean waters, returning to America in 1826, after transferring Maury to the sloop-of-war Vincennes for the cruise around the world, which occupied four years. During this voyage the Vincennes touched at Nukahiva, one of the French Marquesas group. This island was reminiscent of his brother John's enforced two years' sojourn there during the second war with Great Britain. His was a genuine "Robinson Crusoe" experience, too thrilling to omit yet too long to be included in this record. The King of the Isle recognized Matthew from his resemblance to his brother and offered to adopt him as his son and heir, but neither the honor nor the life in the cocoanut grove appealed to the young midshipman.

He continued his study of Navigation, Spanish, and Spherical Trigonometry during the cruise and was a close observer of winds and currents. Upon his return, after his examinations, he received the advanced rank of passed midshipman and in 1831 was appointed sailing-master of the sloop-of-war Falmouth, on the Pacific Station. Anxious to make a quick trip and unable to find in New York sufficient information on winds and currents, he resolved some day to supply this need.

Soon after his return to the East, in 1834, he married his cousin, Miss Ann [Hull] Herndon, whom he met on his first visit to Virginia in 1825. During the next two years, he prepared for publication a treatise on navigation the first nautical work of science that had ever come from the pen of a naval officer "a book that carried the fame of its author to the most distant countries of the earth."

His last active sea service was the making of surveys of the Southern Harbors. After more than a year of this work, in 1839, Maury obtained a few weeks' leave to visit his aged parents in Tennessee and make arrangements to bring them to Virginia to live with him. On his return trip, at Somerset, Ohio, he was so severely injured in a stage-coach accident that he would be for ever unfit for active sea service. He regarded this as the greatest calamity of his life, but it proved another blessing in disguise and really set him forward in a broader and richer field of