Читать книгу Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas онлайн
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These “Harry Bluff” and “Will Watch” articles, together with one other on “Navy Matters” by “Brandywine” which also appeared in the Whig at this time and reveals Maury’s authorship through its style, contained the germs of the ideas which he more fully developed in his “Scraps from the Lucky Bag”. This series of articles on the need of reform in the conduct of naval affairs appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger during the years 1840 and 1841, under Maury’s former pseudonym of “Harry Bluff”. The navy was then in a condition of dry rot, and the time was ripe for some courageous person to awaken the country to a realization of the true state of affairs and to point out the reforms that were needed. Maury’s former experience in the naval service and his present enforced leisure led him to take up the task, which he performed with a brilliancy and a degree of success that was far beyond even his own expectation and gave him a national reputation.
His choice of the Messenger as the medium for conveying to the public his ideas on maritime subjects had been made the previous year when there was published in it an unsigned article, entitled “A Scheme for Rebuilding Southern Commerce: Direct Trade with the South”. In this he first emphasized the importance of the Great Circle route for steamers between English and American ports and pointed out how the Great Western on her first voyage might have saved 260 miles by using such a route and thus have cut down the time of her passage by about one whole day. Maury claimed afterwards that after the appearance of his article a work on navigation was published in England and that one of its chief recommendations was its chapter on “great circle sailing”. Its author was rewarded with a prize from the Royal Geographical Society, and the work itself was extensively patronized by the Board of Admiralty, a copy of which they ordered to be supplied to each of the British men-of-war in commission.