HE RESORTS TO THE PEN 31 



among brother officers? So I gave him a list of the 

 officers belonging to the expedition; myself, the youngest 

 lieutenant in the navy, at the bottom of the list. He 

 froze up with disgust, ordered Wilkes home, and gave him 

 the command, and so I was the gainer, for I preserved 

 mine integrity". 



Maury was next assigned to the duty of surveying 

 Southern harbors, relative to the establishment of a 

 navy yard in the South. In this work he assisted 

 Lieutentant James Glynn, in the schooner Experiment 

 and the steamboat Engineer, in the examination and 

 survey of the harbors of Beaufort and Wilmington, and 

 the inlets Sapelo and Doboy on the coast of Georgia. 

 Early in the month of August, 1839, Maury was de- 

 tached from the Engineer at Norfolk with leave for one 

 month, and he set out very soon thereafter from his home 

 in Fredericksburg to visit his parents in Tennessee to 

 look after some business affairs for his father who had 

 become old and infirm, and also to make arrangements 

 for conveying them to Virginia where they were to make 

 their home with him. 



Maury had written in vain, in February and again in 

 August, 1839, to F. R. Hassler of the United States Coast 

 Survey offering his services as head of a triangulation 

 party. This was one of the several attempts he made 

 at different times to find work of such a nature as to 

 justify his resignation from the navy. By such small 

 threads often hangs a man's destiny. If Hassler had 

 accepted Maury's services, his whole future would 

 probably have been different from what it became, for 

 an event was soon to happen to him which, though 

 apparently at first most unfortunate, was indirectly to 

 place him on that flood tide which led him on to fortune. 



