William Lewis Maury: CSN-- Part 2: Was He Related?

Continued from Oct. 30, 2013. William L. Maury served in the U.S. Naval Observatory under his cousin, Matthew Fontaine Maury and charted seas. worked with cartography and recorded astronomical observations.

The book Recollections of a Rebel reefer, written in 1917, was about him aned and the cruise of his ship, the commerce raider CSS Georgia.

From Find-a-Grave.

He was named after his uncle, William Lewis Herndon (the first U.S. Navy officer to explore the entire Amazon River and who went down with his ship, the steamer SS Central America, on September 12, 1857, in a three-day hurricane off Cape Hatteras).

William Maury married his cousin Ann Fontaine Maury, the daughter of Matthew Fontaine Maury, in 1856. He resigned from the U.S. Navy on June 10, 1861 and commanded a naval battery at Sewell'l Point, Virginia, and was later stationed at Wilmington, NC, serving on the CSS United States. (Bet there is an interesting story here with a ship's name like that.)

In 1862, he was stationed at Charleston in the torpedo service. Promoted to commander on Feb. 17, 1863, and went on "vacation" to Dumbarton, Scotland, where he oversaw the refitting of the merchant ship Clyde which had been secretly been purchased by the Confederacy. He sailed it to Brest, France, where the ship was commissioned the CSS Georgia which, during its cruise, destroyed Union ships worth $406,000 in value.

He is buried at Lakewood Cemetery at Bowling Green, Virginia.

I Thought He Might Be Related. --Old B-Runner