THE 1 800 s - (Cont'd) 



week overland trek. Lynch and his party finally reached their jumping-off point and commenced a 

 200-mile trip down the winding course of the Jordan River to the Dead Sea. Three weeks were 

 spent sailing the Dead Sea, charting, sounding and collecting scientific data. A surveying party was 

 also organized to run a level to the Mediterranean which finally established the fact that the Dead 

 Sea was 1,300 feet below sea level. The boats were again taken apart, packed on camels, and the 

 party marched to Jerusalem, leveling as they went; and then down to Jaffa. Lynch then started off 

 to map the Upper Jordan, by going overland to Nazareth, to the source of the Jordan. From this 

 point, via Damascus and Baalbek, his party traveled to Beirut, arriving there in June 1848. 



The great adventure over, all hands exhausted and sick. Lynch charted a small French brig 

 for passage to Malta. Upon arriving, they boarded their ship Supply and headed for home. 



Althougli Lynch's expedition has faded with time, there is a peculiar postscript to his 

 efforts. Some seven years later the successful use of camels by Lynch caught someone's interest 

 and in the proceedings of the Thirty-third Congress, appears this paragraph: 



"And be it further enacted, that the sum of thirty thousand dollars be, and 

 the same is hereby, appropriated, to be expended under the direction of the War 

 Department in the purchase of camels and the importation of dromedaries, to be 

 employed for military purposes. - Approved March 3,1855." 



Secretary of the Navy Dobbins was thus requested by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to 

 arrange for a camel "sealift"! Consequently, Lieutenant David D. Porter (destined to become one 

 of the first two admirals of the U. S. Navy) was ordered to take command of Lynch's old ship 

 Supply, sail to the Middle East, procure the camels for the U. S. Army, and disembark them on the 

 Texas coast. 



A camel post was established at Camp Verde, Texas, and camel caravans were quite common 

 across the plains and deserts of Texas. The Civil War, however, saw the camels turned loose to 

 become victims of the desolate regions of the Southwest. 



Another juxtapositional footnote to oceanography's past concerns the American artist, 

 James Abbot McNeill Whistler. In 1854 he obtained a job as a draftsman with the Coast Survey 

 following his expulsion from West Point after failing chemistry in his third year. He was an 

 indifferent draftsman of charts and was not to be bound by office hours. There is a story that he 

 brought an extra hat to his office; when a superior came looking for him, one hat was on its peg. 

 Whistler, it is said, was wearing the other hat in a nearby tavern. He did however take an interest in 

 copperplate etching and mastered the technique of engraving. His preferences, though, were 

 caricature and landscape sketching rather than charting. The charts he did execute were generally 

 embellished with landscapes and fanciful figures. Dismissed from the Survey for prankishness after 

 slightly more than 3 months, Whistler in 1855 sailed for Europe and fame, never again to return to 

 the United States. 



With the outbreak of the Civil War, oceanography, with the exception of surveys and charts 

 needed to support the war effort, came to a standstill. Its principal advocate, Matthew Maury, 

 resigned from his position as Superintendent of the Naval Observatory and Hydrographic Office 

 and put his considerable talents at the disposal of the Confederate States Navy as Chief of the 

 Naval Bureau of Seacoast, River and Harbor Defenses of the South. Because liis resignation had 

 been refused by Lincoln, he was classed on the official Union records as a deserter. He was accused 

 of treachery to the Union, namely, of removing buoys from the Chesapeake Bay, and a price was 

 set on his head by the city of Boston. Maury vwote from Richmond, in justification of his 

 position; "I have lost none of my interest in these enchanting fields of physical research which I 

 have revelled in for near twenty years. I am here to war, not against science, but against the 

 oppressor and for my fatherland. As for the 'buoys' I have touched them not." Following the war, 

 Maury accepted, in 1868, the professorship of meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute after 



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