Maritime navigation remained largely a matter of guesswork until well into the 19th century, & making a voyage meant following a series of all-too-often disastrous hunches. Changing that became the lifelong obsession of the brilliant, irascible geographerMatthew Fontaine Maury, whose career both aided & mirrored America's rise as a maritime power. With his controversial appointment as the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory in 1840, he at last found his life's work. While others built railroads across the trackless interior, Maury mapped the highways of wind & current over the previously trackless sea. In Tracks in the Sea, Chester G. Hearn uses Maury's career as a window on the 19th century.
Author: Hearn, Chester
Pages: 278
Product code: 60.60.775
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