("To accompany Bill S. 567).
"The Committee on Naval affairs, to whom was referred the resolution of the Senate to inquire into the value to commerce and navigation of the Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions of Lieutenant Maury, and to report on the justice and expediency of making a suitable remuneration therefor, have had the same under consideration, and thereupon report.
"Some ten or twelve years ago, Lieutenant Maury of the United States Navy, on duty at the Naval Observatory, conceived the idea of ascertaining and defining the courses of ocean winds and currents, a knowledge of which he believed would shorten all ocean voyages, and link distant countries more closely together, and he obtained the permission and the aid of the Navy Department to collect the observations of mariners upon every sea. His plan was announced; the Navy was required to cooperate; an appeal was made to American ship-masters, who in all that pertains to their profession are unsurpassed; and in a brief time reports and extracts from ships' logs from every sea whitened by American sails began to accumulate at the Washington Observatory, and the abstracts of these reports—reports which, if made by one observer only, would have occupied more than two millions of days, a longer period than man has been upon the earth—already fill nearly four hundred large manuscript volumes. From the Arctic Seas, and the sunny waters of the Pacific; the tracks of thousands upon thousands of voyages between American ports and those of Europe, Asia, and Africa; from the east and the west, the north and the south, came the daily observations of ocean's wayfarers; and these, in the hands of Mr. Maury, constituted the raw material from which the charts and sailing directions were to be constructed. Thus, without any expense beyond
