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

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He then pointed out the unpreparedness of the country for war, and dwelt upon how the United States was forced weakly to acquiesce in the blockading of Mexico and the La Plata by France, and make no protest at the strengthening of her forts on the Great Lakes by England who was thus violating her treaty with this government. The navy should, he declared, experiment with steam vessels of war, and Pensacola and some point on the coast of Georgia or the eastern coast of Florida should be fortified. Turning then to personnel, he continued: “It takes something more than spars and guns, and walls of wood to constitute a navy. These are only the body—the arms and legs without the thews and sinews. It requires the muscle of the brawny seaman, and the spirit of the well-trained officer to impart life and motion to such a body, to give vigor and energy to the whole system”.

A real system of education for the navy should be devised. The army, he said, had a Military Academy at West Point, “affording the most useful and practical education to be obtained in the country”; while the navy was forced to make out with inefficient schoolmasters on board ship, and the midshipmen secured only a practical knowledge of seamanship, the manipulation of the sextant, a few rules by rote from Bowditch’s “Epitome of Navigation”, and a knowledge of right-angled plane trigonometry. Maury claimed that a broader training was needed, and suggested the following subjects as requisite for study: drawing and naval architecture, gunnery and pyrotechny, chemistry and natural history, astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy, navigation, tactics and discipline, gymnastics, international and maritime law, and languages (one of French, Spanish, or German and “that most difficult, arbitrary, and careful of all languages, the English”). These subjects were to be covered in a four years’ course, with a two months’ cruise each year, sometimes to foreign waters; while two years at sea after graduation and an examination at the end of that period of service were to be required before a commission in the navy was to be awarded.