MATTHEW Fontaine Maury had a way with words. "There is a river in the ocean," he wrote ink 1855. "In the severest droughts it never fails and in the mightiest floods it never overflows its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm the Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream, and there is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters."
Maury was at the height of his career as the most celebrated oceanographer of the 19th century.
In the previous decade and a half, he had assembled vast amounts off wind, current and seasonal weather information from ships' log books, to compile standard wind and current charts that were to revolutionise the science of navigation.
They so shortened sailing times that it was estimated Maury's work saved international commerce $50 million a year.
Another of his ventures concerned the sea bed particularly that of the North Atlantic Ocean which became a matter of very practical importance when it was decided to lay a telegraphic cable from America to Europe.
Maury collected all the information available from depth soundings, and by 1850 had produced an accurate contour map of the bottom of the entire Atlantic although it was another 15 years, punctuated by many breaks and failures, before the transatlantic cable finally was laid. These pioneering activities made Maury famous even in his own lifetime.
It is a gratifying footnote to the history of oceanography to note that Matthew Fontaine Maury, although American by birth, had tenuous connections with our island.
He was of Huguenot stock, his great grandmother Mary Anne being the daughter of one James Fontaine, who had been obliged to flee from France in 1685 following the evocation by Louis XIV of the Edict of Nantes.
James Fontaine found his way to Ireland, where Mary Anne met Matthew Maury, another French Huguenot who had moved here from Gascony two years previously. The pair married in Dublin in 1716, and emigrated to Virginia where, several generations later, Matthew was born, 190 years ago today.
Meteorologists, however, associate Matthew Fontaine Maury neither with Ireland nor with oceanography.
They remember him for quite a different reason, as the energetic organiser of the First International Meteorological Conference in Brussels in 1853, from which can be traced the beginnings of formal co operation between nations in meteorology, and ultimately the development of the World Meteorological Organisation we know today.