Historic Fredericksburg Part 11

Alexander Humbolt said that Maury created a new science.

He plunged into the unknown; he charted the seas and mapped its currents and winds. He was the first to tell the world that winds and currents were not of chance, but of fixed and immutable laws, and that even cyclones were well governed. He knew why a certain coast was dry and another rainy, and he could, on being informed of the lat.i.tude and longitude of a place, tell what was the prevailing weather and winds.

Maury went to sea as a midshipman in the American navy in 1825, and in 1831, at twenty-four years of age, he became master of the sloop Falmouth, with orders to go to the Pacific waters, but, though he sought diligently, he found no chart of a track for his vessel, no record of currents or of winds to guide him. The sea was a trackless wilderness, and the winds were things of vagrant caprice. And he began then to grapple with those problems which were to immortalize him.

He came back from ocean wanderings in a few years and married an old sweetheart, Miss Ann Herndon, of Fredericksburg, and he lived for a time on Charlotte Street, between Princess Anne and Prince Edward, and wrote his first book, "A Treatise on Navigation;" while from his pen came a series of newspaper and magazine articles that startled the world of scientific thought. For the man had discovered new and unsuspected natural laws!

Misfortune--that vastly helped him--came in 1839, when his leg was injured through the overturning of a stage coach. The government put him in charge of a new "Bureau of Charts and Instruments," at Washington, and out of his work here grew the Naval Observatory, the Signal Service and the first Weather Bureau ever established on earth! Every other science was old. His science was utterly new, a field untouched.

[Sidenote: _Charting Seas and Winds_]

He found a ma.s.s of log books of American warships. Over these he pondered.

He sent hundreds of bottles and buoys to be dropped into the seven seas by fighting craft and merchantmen.

These were picked up now and again and came back to him, and from the information sent to him with them, and soundings in thousands of places, added to what he had gleaned in earlier years, he prepared his greatest work. It took ultimate form in a series of six "charts" and eight large volumes of "sailing directions," that comprehended all the waters and winds in all climes, and on every sea where white sails bend and steamer smoke drifts.

The charts exhibit, with wonderful accuracy, the winds and currents, their force and direction at different seasons, the calm belts, the trade winds, the rains and storms--the gulf stream, the j.a.pan current--all the great ocean movements; and the sailing directions are treasure chests for seamen. Paths were marked out on the ocean, and a practical result was, that one of the most difficult sea voyages--from New York to San Francisco, around the Horn--was shortened by forty days. It has been estimated that by shortening the time of many sea voyages, Commander Maury has effected a saving of not less than $40,000,000 each year.

Of his own work, Maury wrote:

"So to shape the course on voyages at sea as to make the most of winds and currents, is the perfection of the navigator's art. How the winds blow or the currents flow along this route or that is no longer a matter of speculation or opinion. The wind and weather, daily encountered by hundreds who sailed before him, have been tabulated for the mariner; nay, the path has been blazed for him on the sea; mile posts have been set upon the waves and time tables furnished for the trackless waste."

It was this work that, reaching over Europe and Asia, brought on the Brussels conference in 1853, to which Maury, founder of the science of hydrography and meteorology, went as America's representative, and here he covered himself with honors. He came back to write his "Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology."

This, the essence of his life work, the poetry and the romance of his science, pa.s.sed through twenty editions and was known in every school, but the book's greatest interest was killed by the removal of the poetic strain that made it beautiful. It has been translated into almost every language. In it is the story of the sea, its tides and winds, its sh.o.r.e lines and its myriads of life; its deep and barren bottoms. For Maury also charted the ocean floors, and it was his work in this line that caused Cyrus Field to say of the laying of the Atlantic cable:

"Maury furnished the brains, England furnished the money, and I did the work."

[Sidenote: _Honored by All Europe_]

No other American ever was honored by Emperors and Kings as was Matthew Fontaine Maury. He was given orders of Knighthood by the Czar of Russia, the King of Denmark, King of Spain, King of Portugal, King of Belgium and Emperor of France, while Russia, Austria, Sweden, Holland, Sardenia, Bremen, Turkey and France struck gold medals in his honor. The pope of Rome sent him a full set of all the medals struck during his pontificate.

Maximilian decorated him with "The Cross of the Order of Guadaloupe" while Germany bestowed on him the "Cosmos Medal," struck in honor of Von Humboldt, and the only duplicate of that medal in existence.

The current of the Civil War swept Maury away from Washington, and he declined offers from France, Germany and Russia, joining his native state in the Confederacy. He introduced the submarine torpedo, and rendered the South other service before the final wreck, which left him stranded and penniless. He went to Mexico now, to join his fortunes with those of the unhappy Maximilian, and when the Emperor met his tragic end he found himself again resourceless--and crippled. In 1868 when general amnesty was given, he came back to become the first professor of meteorology at the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute. In October, 1872, he became ill and died in February of the next year.

And this man, who had from Kings and Emperors more decorations than any American has ever received, and for whom Europe had ever ready the highest honors and greatest praise, was ignored by his own government, to which he gave his life's work. No word of thanks, no tribute of esteem, no reward, was ever given him. A bill to erect a monument to him lies now rotting in some pigeonhole in Congress. But an effort to renew this is underway.

ARCHIBALD MCPHERSON

Curiously enough, no more memory is left to Fredericksburg of Archibald McPherson than the tombstone under the mock orange tree in St. George's Church, the tablets to his memory in the old charity school on Hanover Street (now the Christian Science Church) and a few shadowy legends and unmeaning dates.

He was born in Scotland and died in Fredericksburg in 1854. He was a member of St. George's Church and vestry.

But what manner of man he was, the few recorded acts we know will convey to every one. He established a Male Charity School with his own funds princ.i.p.ally, and took a deep interest in it, and, dying, he left the small fortune he had acc.u.mulated by Scotch thrift "to the poor of the town," and provided means of dispensing the interest on this sum for charity throughout the years to come. Most of this fund was wiped out by depreciation of money, etc., during the Civil War.

_Men of Modern Times_

_Soldiers, Adventurers and Sailors, Heroes and Artists, mingle here._

A prophet without honor in his own country was Moncure Daniel Conway because, a Fredericksburger and a Southerner, he opposed slavery. But his genius won him world praise, and later, honer in his own country.

Born in 1832, near Falmouth, to which village his people moved later, the child of Walker Peyton Conway and Marguerite Daniel Conway he inherited from a long line of ancestry, a brilliant intellect and fearlessness to tread the paths of freedom.

The difficult studious child was too much for his teacher, Miss Gaskins, of Falmouth, so he was sent, at the age of ten, to Fredericksburg Cla.s.sical and Mathematical Academy, originally John Marye's famous school, and made rapid progress.

His hero was his great uncle, Judge R. C. L. Moncure, of Glencairne, and his early memoirs are full of loving grat.i.tude for the great man's toleration and help. The Methodism of his parents did not hold him, for he several times attended the services at St. George's Church.

The wrongs of slavery he saw, and after he entered d.i.c.kinson College, at Carlisle, in his fifteenth year, he found an anti-slavery professor, McClintock, who influenced him and encouraged his dawning agnosticism. His cousin, John M. Daniel, editor of the Richmond Examiner, became, in 1848, a leading factor in Conway's life, encouraging his literary efforts and publishing many of his contributions.

All beauty, all art appealed to him. Music was always a pa.s.sion, and we also find constant and quaint references to beautiful women and girls. It seemed the superlative compliment, though he valued feminine brains and ability.

His great spiritual awakening came with his finding an article by Emerson and at the age of twenty, to the delight of his family, he became a Methodist minister.

His career as such was not a success. After one of his sermons, in which he ignored Heaven and h.e.l.l, his father said: "One thing is certain, Monk, should the Devil aim at a Methodist preacher, you'd be safe."

He moved to Cambridge. The prominence of his Southern family, and his own social and intellectual charms gave him entre to the best homes and chiefest among them, that of his adored Emerson, where he met and knew all the great lights of the day. His slavery opinions, valuable as a Southern slave owner's son, made him an a.s.set in the anti-slavery propaganda of the time.

[Sidenote: _Conway's Famous Friends_]

Among his friends were the Th.o.r.eaus, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Aga.s.siz.

I must hurry over the charm of those college days to Moncure Conway's first Unitarian Church, in Washington. So p.r.o.nounced were his sermons on anti-slavery that his father advised him not to come home on a visit. He did come and had the humiliation of being ordered from Falmouth under pain of tar and feathers, an indignity which cut him to his soul. His success in Washington was brilliant, but he found trouble, owing to his abolitionist opinions, and had to resign. In 1856 he accepted a call to a Cincinnati church, whose literary and artistic circles made much of the new preacher. The wealth of that larger population enabled Conway to establish several charitable homes. He married there Ellen Davis Dana, and there published his first book, "Tracts For Today." He edited a paper, The Dial, to which Emerson contributed.

He went to England to the South Place Chapel, London, an ethical society, and the round peg seemed to have found its proper hole at last. Here he labored for twenty years, and became known through all Europe. His personal recollections of Alfred Tennyson, the Brownings their courtship; of Carlyle, are cla.s.sics. A very interesting light is thrown on Freud. He was intimate with the whole pre-Raphaelite school and gives account among others of Rossetti and his lovely wife, all friendships he formed in Madam Brown's charming home.

Burne Jones, Morris, Whistler, Swinburne, Arthur Hughs, DeMaurier (was there ever such a collection of genius in one country) are all described in Conway's vivid pen pictures. Artemus Warde was his friend, and Conway conducted the funeral services over that world's joy giver, and in his same South End Chapel, preached memorial addresses on Cobblen, d.i.c.kens, Maurice, Mazzanni, Mill, Straus, Livingstone, George Eliot, Stanley, Darwin, Longfellow, Carlyle, the beloved Emerson, Tennyson, Huxley and Abe Lincoln, whom he never admired, though he recognized his brain and personality. He accused him of precipitating the horrible war for the sake of a flag and thus murdering a million men.

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his wife visited England in 1872 and Moncure Conway and his wife knew them intimately and afterwards visited them in this country. Joseph Jefferson, John Motley, George Eliot, Mrs.

Humphrey Ward (whose book, Robert Elsmere, he flays) and W. S. Gilbert, all were his friends. The man was a genius, a social Voltaire; a master of thought and phrase. Where before did an exile from his own country ever achieve a friendship circle where the names now scintillate over all the world?

[Sidenote: _He Travels Through Russia_]

He visited Paris in 1867 and the story of his travels in Russia later are full of charm, of folk lore and religious mysticism. But before long we find him back in his South Place Chapel. His accounts of several woman preachers there are interesting, as is that of Annie Besant--the wondrous before-her-time--whom Mrs. Conway befriended in her bitter persecution by her parson husband for agnosticism. In 1875 Conway returned to America, and Falmouth town, grieving over the war ravages and his lost boyhood friends. He toured through the West, lecturing on Demonology, and the great Englishmen he knew. The death of his son, Dana, and of his wife in 1897, were blows, and his remaining years were spent in Europe with several visits between to his brother, Peter V. D. Conway, of Fredericksburg, and friends in America. His life ended in 1907 in Paris. A great man, a brilliant and a brave one. He fought for his beliefs as bravely as ever did any warrior or explorer in unknown lands.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEAUTIFUL "BELMONT"

_On Falmouth Heights, Now the Home of Mr. and Mrs. Gari Melchers_]

[Sidenote: _A Great American Artist_]

GARI MELCHERS