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After almost four years to a day, Maury was home again; but he was no longer the raw lad from the Tennessee backwoods, for the information and experience which he had gained on this cruise of the first American man-of-war to circumnavigate the globe had gone a long way towards taking the place of a college education. Men of the stamp of Commodore Charles Morris, Lieutenant Farragut, Captain Finch, Chaplain Stewart, and dozens of other officers with whom he had come in contact during his first two cruises had contributed, by example at least, in making him into an officer and a gentleman. During all this time he had studied, and read as widely as opportunity afforded, having had the privilege for a portion of the time of using the books of Midshipman William Irving, a nephew to Washington Irving.

That the opportunities for instruction on shipboard were, however, very limited is indicated by the following summary of Maury’s experience with the school system of the navy. “The first ship I sailed in”, he wrote, “had a schoolmaster: a young man from Connecticut. He was well qualified and well disposed to teach navigation, but not having a schoolroom, or authority to assemble the midshipmen, the cruise passed off without the opportunity of organizing his school. From him, therefore, we learned nothing. On my next cruise, the dominie was a Spaniard; and, being bound to South America, there was a perfect mania in the steerage for the Spanish language. In our youthful impetuosity we bought books, and for a week or so pursued the study with great eagerness. But our spirits began to flag, and the difficulties of ser and estar finally laid the copestone for us over the dominie’s vernacular. The study was exceedingly dry. We therefore voted both teacher and grammar a bore, and committing the latter to the deep, with one accord, we declared in favor of the Byronical method—