Читать книгу Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas онлайн

29 страница из 60

One of Maury’s shipmates on this cruise has left some reminiscences which throw considerable light upon his young friend’s qualities as an officer. “I encountered some ridicule”, wrote Captain Whiting, “from my messmates for predicting that Maury would be a distinguished man. I asserted that there was that in him which could not be kept down.... In a survey of San Lorenzo Island while attached to the Falmouth I was an assistant to Maury, and he displayed that perseverance and energy undismayed by difficulty when he had once determined upon accomplishing a result, which ever marked his career. In prosecuting the survey of the Boca del Diables he scaled rocks and crept around the corners of cliffs when I was almost afraid to follow him, but the attainment of his object seemed to be with him the only subject of his thoughts. He landed on the Labos Rocks to the westward of San Lorenzo to make some astronomical and trigonometrical observations while I remained in the boat. When he landed it was almost a dead calm, and the sea comparatively smooth; but by the time he had finished his observations a fresh wind had sprung up from the southwards, the tide had risen, and the sea was raging so as to forbid the near approach of the boat, one minute receding from the rock so as to leave a yawning gulf of twenty or thirty feet depth, then rushing up again with appalling and irresistible force. Calling on me to approach as near as I dared, Maury ascended to the highest point of the rock, took off his jacket, and with a string which he found in his pocket tied in it his watch and sextant, and then threw it with all his might into the sea toward the boat, while the bowman of the boat stood ready to seize it with his boathook before the water had time to penetrate the wrapping. Maury then, watching the culmination of a wave, sprang from the rock himself and being a good swimmer and possessed of much youthful strength reached the boat in safety, but it was a fearful leap”.