Excerpt from Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the SeasI believe that the most instructive form of reading is biography. In the story of a man's life one can see in quick review the struggle that man went through to attain or to fail to attain his heart's desire.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.