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Richard Maury
Richard Maury (1910-1998) was born on St. David’s Island, Bermuda, in 1910, a descendant of Matthew Fontaine Maury, America’s famed pioneering oceanographer and hydrographer. At th...view moreRichard Maury (1910-1998) was born on St. David’s Island, Bermuda, in 1910, a descendant of Matthew Fontaine Maury, America’s famed pioneering oceanographer and hydrographer. At the age of eight he owned and sailed his first boat; but soon thereafter a childhood illness that was long to plague him ended for good his formal education. Even so, just as he taught himself to draw credibly enough to illustrate his own literary efforts, so too did he educate himself to the extent that reviewers have on occasion variously likened his prose to that of Richard Henry Dana, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, even to Conrad. When, at twenty-three, Maury sailed off in the Cimba, he was already something of a sea veteran, having served before the mast in the old full-rigged ship Tusitala (at sixteen and seventeen) as well as in several ocean tramps of that period. Nor was the sea ever to disenchant him: Maury continued to sail deep-water steamships, enjoying a long career as a professional master mariner. He died in 1998.view less