Ocean Forms - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 44

capture bottom sediment) on the end. For shallow water, that was
relatively quick and simple, but for truly deep water, that needed reel-
ing out a few miles of line. How did one know when that line hit the
bottom? This needed great precision and skill, watching the speed of
the line to be able to judge a change in the way it reeled out. The
potential drag effect of deep-sea currents on the line added further
uncertainty, too. All in all, such gathering of data was a slow, tedious,
and uncertain business. Within even the best-known ocean, the
Atlantic, long a regular shipping route, there was then no inkling that
such a thing as an enormous ridge ran down its middle.
The first suspicion of this submarine topography came from a man
almost as extraordinary as Humboldt himself. Matthew Fontaine
Maury was an energetic, adventurous Virginia farm boy, seemingly
destined for the farming life. At the age of 12, that spirit of energy and
adventure led him to climb a high tree. He fell from it and hurt his
spine so badly as to end the prospects of farming. Sent to school, he
showed an almost unbelievable tenacity of study (one that he was to
maintain throughout his life), learning Latin grammar, for instance, in
seven days. Against the wishes of his father he joined the Navy, sailed
the seas of the world, and not only learned the skills of navigation but
determined to improve them.
Noting, for instance, that there were no systematic records in the
Navy of the winds and currents to be encountered in voyages, he
simply set about compiling these to produce the first wind and cur-
rent charts of the Atlantic. He prepared star charts too, so precise that
they were used in back-calculating the orbit of the planet Neptune,
then newly recognized. He conceived the system of meteorological
observation that later became the US Weather Bureau. Caught on the
Southern side in the American Civil War (although he hated slavery)
he—alas—invented the all too successful electrically controlled
underwater mine.