Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures, edited by Kim DeWolff, Rina Faletti, and Ignacio López-Calvo (Oakland: University of California Press), 2021
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2021
Beginning in the 1840s, US naval vessels sounded the deepest waters of the Atlantic and returned ... more Beginning in the 1840s, US naval vessels sounded the deepest waters of the Atlantic and returned samples from its bottom. These hinted at the conditions and biology of depths now represented on the first bathymetric charts. Over the ensuing decades, information from ever deeper waters colored the contours of those charts, providing topographical data, but also clues to both biological and geological history of the planet. By the time HMS Challenger undertook the first major scientific circumnavigation directed at the global ocean itself in the 1870s, the seabed was a prime target for both naval officers and naturalists despite its inaccessibility.
Historians of science have begun to notice shipboard efforts to sample the deep, from Helen Rozwadowski’s exhumation of a convenient “Telegraph Plateau” in the deep Atlantic to Alistair Sponsel’s exploration of naval hydrographic practice in the formation of Darwin’s ideas. Building on their work, this paper attends to both technological process and cartographic results of bringing instruments to bear on the depths, and to the imperial and scientific ends to which the resulting maps were turned. Naval officers performed hydrography to delineate hazards the bottom posed to ships and telegraph cables. To naturalists, on the other hand, bottom sediment could unlock both Darwin’s theories and the geological history of the earth. Together, these groups developed new technologies for the collection, interpretation, and representation of the muck, ooze, and clay they found on the bottom, thus reordering understanding of the deep ocean environment and illustrating a topography that remained invisible.
Amidst recent calls in the United States and elsewhere to remove statues and other references tha... more Amidst recent calls in the United States and elsewhere to remove statues and other references that glorify historically racist figures, we offer a reexamination of nineteenth-century naval officer and early ocean scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury. While Maury made significant contributions toward understanding and representing the ocean-atmosphere system and argued for increased support from both government and public for such studies, his work, including his science, was also inextricably involved in his nation's imperialist goals. Before and after his resignation from the United States navy to join the Confederacy during the American Civil War, Maury worked for the perpetuation and expansion of race-based slavery. For these reasons, we argue that oceanographers, historians, and the public need to rethink depictions of Maury that glorify his accomplishments without interrogating their darker side. Presenting honest portrayals is not only historically responsible but also aids the larger project to recruit and retain more diverse students and scientists.
While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, histo... more While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, historians of science have treated him more poorly. He is often portrayed as an uneducated amateur who jumped to conclusions about the oceans based on slim evidence and biblical reasoning, and who missed the opportunity provided by the founding of the US Naval Observatory to place American scientists on a competitive footing with their European counterparts. Consigning Maury to the category of disappointing amateur, however, misses the opportunities his case presents to better understand the historical milieu in which he worked, as well as his enduring contributions to the scientific exploration of the deep ocean. This article reconsiders Maury as scientist, siting the origins of his poor historical reputation in arguments over the professionalization of science and of the navy. His reputation also suffered after his departure from Washington, DC, for the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War. The article examines his participation in a practice of science flavoured by its location in the nation’s capital, where science required as much attention to lobbying and leveraged connections as to the calibration of instruments. In this context, Maury was a serious scientist who embraced the task of doing science in the public interest, and he participated in an ongoing effort to further the USA’s ability to be competitive on the world stage, whether that stage was dressed for scientific achievement or commerce. Maury sought authority for his claims with a strong sense of the geopolitics of geophysics. Re-examining Maury as scientist provides a window onto a pattern of scientific practice in Washington, DC, in the middle of the 19th century whose echoes propagated through the rest of that century and into the 20th.
Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures, edited by Kim DeWolff, Rina Faletti, and Ignacio López-Calvo (Oakland: University of California Press), 2021
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2021
Beginning in the 1840s, US naval vessels sounded the deepest waters of the Atlantic and returned ... more Beginning in the 1840s, US naval vessels sounded the deepest waters of the Atlantic and returned samples from its bottom. These hinted at the conditions and biology of depths now represented on the first bathymetric charts. Over the ensuing decades, information from ever deeper waters colored the contours of those charts, providing topographical data, but also clues to both biological and geological history of the planet. By the time HMS Challenger undertook the first major scientific circumnavigation directed at the global ocean itself in the 1870s, the seabed was a prime target for both naval officers and naturalists despite its inaccessibility.
Historians of science have begun to notice shipboard efforts to sample the deep, from Helen Rozwadowski’s exhumation of a convenient “Telegraph Plateau” in the deep Atlantic to Alistair Sponsel’s exploration of naval hydrographic practice in the formation of Darwin’s ideas. Building on their work, this paper attends to both technological process and cartographic results of bringing instruments to bear on the depths, and to the imperial and scientific ends to which the resulting maps were turned. Naval officers performed hydrography to delineate hazards the bottom posed to ships and telegraph cables. To naturalists, on the other hand, bottom sediment could unlock both Darwin’s theories and the geological history of the earth. Together, these groups developed new technologies for the collection, interpretation, and representation of the muck, ooze, and clay they found on the bottom, thus reordering understanding of the deep ocean environment and illustrating a topography that remained invisible.
Amidst recent calls in the United States and elsewhere to remove statues and other references tha... more Amidst recent calls in the United States and elsewhere to remove statues and other references that glorify historically racist figures, we offer a reexamination of nineteenth-century naval officer and early ocean scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury. While Maury made significant contributions toward understanding and representing the ocean-atmosphere system and argued for increased support from both government and public for such studies, his work, including his science, was also inextricably involved in his nation's imperialist goals. Before and after his resignation from the United States navy to join the Confederacy during the American Civil War, Maury worked for the perpetuation and expansion of race-based slavery. For these reasons, we argue that oceanographers, historians, and the public need to rethink depictions of Maury that glorify his accomplishments without interrogating their darker side. Presenting honest portrayals is not only historically responsible but also aids the larger project to recruit and retain more diverse students and scientists.
While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, histo... more While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, historians of science have treated him more poorly. He is often portrayed as an uneducated amateur who jumped to conclusions about the oceans based on slim evidence and biblical reasoning, and who missed the opportunity provided by the founding of the US Naval Observatory to place American scientists on a competitive footing with their European counterparts. Consigning Maury to the category of disappointing amateur, however, misses the opportunities his case presents to better understand the historical milieu in which he worked, as well as his enduring contributions to the scientific exploration of the deep ocean. This article reconsiders Maury as scientist, siting the origins of his poor historical reputation in arguments over the professionalization of science and of the navy. His reputation also suffered after his departure from Washington, DC, for the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War. The article examines his participation in a practice of science flavoured by its location in the nation’s capital, where science required as much attention to lobbying and leveraged connections as to the calibration of instruments. In this context, Maury was a serious scientist who embraced the task of doing science in the public interest, and he participated in an ongoing effort to further the USA’s ability to be competitive on the world stage, whether that stage was dressed for scientific achievement or commerce. Maury sought authority for his claims with a strong sense of the geopolitics of geophysics. Re-examining Maury as scientist provides a window onto a pattern of scientific practice in Washington, DC, in the middle of the 19th century whose echoes propagated through the rest of that century and into the 20th.
The bottom of the sea is a tangible, material place, but it remained a realm of the imagination u... more The bottom of the sea is a tangible, material place, but it remained a realm of the imagination until the mid-nineteenth century, when naturalists teaming with naval officers began adapting the mariner’s sounding tools to measure the deepest oceans. Yet even then, interpretation of these data was difficult—how did you know for sure the lead had hit bottom when the weight of the line absorbed the tactile feeling of impact? And what could a few dozen data points convey about the physical geography of an entire ocean basin?
Nearly two centuries later, conveying both the immensity of the task these investigators undertook and the uncertainties involved in their data gathering and analysis remains difficult. This paper will present a pedagogical exercise—using technologies as basic as the mariner’s sounding lead—to make tangible the experience of measuring something that cannot be touched or even seen, and of interpreting and displaying the results. I tried it in autumn 2022, in western Wisconsin, USA, over a thousand kilometers from the sea, as I taught a class on historical knowledge of the oceans to university students, many of whom have never seen the sea, and all of whom are reliant on GPS for measuring and displaying the world around them. The outcome rendered both the unseeable sea bottom and the unreachable past more tangible, and helped my students understand the contingencies that surround the use of technology and the nature of knowledge we derive from its use.
During the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists interested in marine biology and geology increasin... more During the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists interested in marine biology and geology increasingly partnered with naval officers to reach the deepest oceans. Access to deep governmental pockets gave naturalists the technologies necessary to reach this otherwise inaccessible domain, expert technicians to operate these technologies, and large ships as platforms from which to launch them, while naturalists gave navies new ways to claim the oceans. But both members of this partnership also brought their own visual traditions, which incorporated technologies of information gathering and methods of representation that rendered those results comprehensible to their audiences. Sailors had procedures for determining position on the apparently featureless open ocean and methods of chart production to render the results comprehensible and authoritative. Naturalists, on the other hand, documented species discovery and discernment through art and fostered a growing tradition of isometric lines to represent measurements of the natural world.
Using the graphical representations of ocean space rendered by American scientist and naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury in the 1850s and by naval officers, artists, and “scientifics” onboard the British naval vessel HMS Challenger in the 1870s, this paper will examine the ways these two traditions merged in shipboard spaces to produce new representations of the natural world as precise, measurable, and knowable. That this took place on the ocean is not coincidental but grew from the needs of both groups to render an immense, unknown space into something knowable, subject to understanding and control by both science and government, and, importantly, legible to the publics that supported them both.
A partnership between navies and scientists was key to the development of a science of the oceans... more A partnership between navies and scientists was key to the development of a science of the oceans, from early efforts to map global tidal forces to Cold War efforts to understand underwater acoustic phenomena. In each case, the needs of ocean scientists for patronage and access to large technological platforms aligned with governmental needs to make knowledge claims about the ocean bottom for imperial as well as commercial reasons. But focusing on organizational relationships, while important, elides the human relationships between the naval personnel and scientists who actually shared the decks of ships.
This paper considers the role of individual naval officers and their networks in the planning and conduct of the British Challenger Expedition in the 1870s. Naval officers and networks proved crucial to the origination and success of the project at every phase, from its origin in London meeting rooms to its conduct on the ship’s quarterdeck to the publication of its results. Far from simply lending assistance in the form of ships and men, individual officers influenced the hands-on conduct of science and its popularization back home. And far from simply performing a duty, some also leveraged their participation to personal benefit in naval, political, and scientific circles. All told, the partnership allowed each side access not just to equipment and data, but also to new networks and new forms of recognition even as these individual ties helped solidify the organizational partnership for the longer term.
In the late 1860s, British naturalists leveraged connections with the Royal Society of London, Br... more In the late 1860s, British naturalists leveraged connections with the Royal Society of London, Britain’s premier scientific body, to convince the Royal Navy to provide surveys ship for weeks-long scientific cruises in the North Atlantic. While the stable platform—and readily-available labor pool—of a large ship allowed access to the deep sea, an area previously inaccessible to science, naturalists still had to learn to access it and to interpret what they found. Their early efforts returned mixed results, leaving the naturalists ready to conclude that some areas of the bottom supported little life, which meshed well with then-current scientific understanding of the deep. The ship’s captain, however, suggested a simple but vital change to their rig, which when implemented provided a bounty of sea life for the naturalists’ study and radically reconfigured their understanding of ocean fauna.
While the relationship between scientists who study the sea and the sailors who get them there has sometimes been contentious, this case study demonstrates not just of cooperation but active and innovative collaboration between naturalists and crew. This relationship would be crucial to the further development of ocean science, beginning with the same sponsors’ support for a multi-year expedition of global scope aboard HMS Challenger a few years later. The captain’s contribution also changed scientific understanding of the sea bottom at a key moment in the development of marine biology, suggesting a need for historians of science to pay more attention to the ship’s crews who have generally been treated as invisible technicians.
Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2020 :: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Spring 2019 :: Xavier Uni... more Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2020 :: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Spring 2019 :: Xavier University
Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fa... more Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019 :: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Course design assistant Fall 2012 :: Teaching Assistant Fall 2013 :: The Johns Hopkins University... more Course design assistant Fall 2012 :: Teaching Assistant Fall 2013 :: The Johns Hopkins University :: Teaching Assistant to Dr. Maria Portuondo
Colloquium of the Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Amidst recent calls in the US and elsewhere to remove statues and other references that glorify h... more Amidst recent calls in the US and elsewhere to remove statues and other references that glorify historically racist figures, we offer a reexamination of nineteenth-century naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who was well-known during his lifetime for his contributions to navigation, ocean science, and meteorology.
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Historians of science have begun to notice shipboard efforts to sample the deep, from Helen Rozwadowski’s exhumation of a convenient “Telegraph Plateau” in the deep Atlantic to Alistair Sponsel’s exploration of naval hydrographic practice in the formation of Darwin’s ideas. Building on their work, this paper attends to both technological process and cartographic results of bringing instruments to bear on the depths, and to the imperial and scientific ends to which the resulting maps were turned. Naval officers performed hydrography to delineate hazards the bottom posed to ships and telegraph cables. To naturalists, on the other hand, bottom sediment could unlock both Darwin’s theories and the geological history of the earth. Together, these groups developed new technologies for the collection, interpretation, and representation of the muck, ooze, and clay they found on the bottom, thus reordering understanding of the deep ocean environment and illustrating a topography that remained invisible.
Historians of science have begun to notice shipboard efforts to sample the deep, from Helen Rozwadowski’s exhumation of a convenient “Telegraph Plateau” in the deep Atlantic to Alistair Sponsel’s exploration of naval hydrographic practice in the formation of Darwin’s ideas. Building on their work, this paper attends to both technological process and cartographic results of bringing instruments to bear on the depths, and to the imperial and scientific ends to which the resulting maps were turned. Naval officers performed hydrography to delineate hazards the bottom posed to ships and telegraph cables. To naturalists, on the other hand, bottom sediment could unlock both Darwin’s theories and the geological history of the earth. Together, these groups developed new technologies for the collection, interpretation, and representation of the muck, ooze, and clay they found on the bottom, thus reordering understanding of the deep ocean environment and illustrating a topography that remained invisible.
Nearly two centuries later, conveying both the immensity of the task these investigators undertook and the uncertainties involved in their data gathering and analysis remains difficult. This paper will present a pedagogical exercise—using technologies as basic as the mariner’s sounding lead—to make tangible the experience of measuring something that cannot be touched or even seen, and of interpreting and displaying the results. I tried it in autumn 2022, in western Wisconsin, USA, over a thousand kilometers from the sea, as I taught a class on historical knowledge of the oceans to university students, many of whom have never seen the sea, and all of whom are reliant on GPS for measuring and displaying the world around them. The outcome rendered both the unseeable sea bottom and the unreachable past more tangible, and helped my students understand the contingencies that surround the use of technology and the nature of knowledge we derive from its use.
Using the graphical representations of ocean space rendered by American scientist and naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury in the 1850s and by naval officers, artists, and “scientifics” onboard the British naval vessel HMS Challenger in the 1870s, this paper will examine the ways these two traditions merged in shipboard spaces to produce new representations of the natural world as precise, measurable, and knowable. That this took place on the ocean is not coincidental but grew from the needs of both groups to render an immense, unknown space into something knowable, subject to understanding and control by both science and government, and, importantly, legible to the publics that supported them both.
This paper considers the role of individual naval officers and their networks in the planning and conduct of the British Challenger Expedition in the 1870s. Naval officers and networks proved crucial to the origination and success of the project at every phase, from its origin in London meeting rooms to its conduct on the ship’s quarterdeck to the publication of its results. Far from simply lending assistance in the form of ships and men, individual officers influenced the hands-on conduct of science and its popularization back home. And far from simply performing a duty, some also leveraged their participation to personal benefit in naval, political, and scientific circles. All told, the partnership allowed each side access not just to equipment and data, but also to new networks and new forms of recognition even as these individual ties helped solidify the organizational partnership for the longer term.
While the relationship between scientists who study the sea and the sailors who get them there has sometimes been contentious, this case study demonstrates not just of cooperation but active and innovative collaboration between naturalists and crew. This relationship would be crucial to the further development of ocean science, beginning with the same sponsors’ support for a multi-year expedition of global scope aboard HMS Challenger a few years later. The captain’s contribution also changed scientific understanding of the sea bottom at a key moment in the development of marine biology, suggesting a need for historians of science to pay more attention to the ship’s crews who have generally been treated as invisible technicians.
Spring 2019 :: Xavier University