Background
Silas Bent was born on October 10, 1820, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, the eleventh child of Judge Silas Bent and Martha (Kerr) Bent, and brother of Charles and William Bent.
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Silas Bent was born on October 10, 1820, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, the eleventh child of Judge Silas Bent and Martha (Kerr) Bent, and brother of Charles and William Bent.
Silas was a graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.
Appointed a midshipman in the navy at the age of sixteen, Silas spent the following twenty-five years in that service, rising to the grade of lieutenant. During these years he served in various waters and became familiar with the oceanography of the seven seas, rounding Cape Horn four times and the Cape of Good Hope once, and crossing the Atlantic five times and the Pacific twice. In 1849 he was with Commander James Glynn when the latter sailed the U. S. Brig Preble into the harbor of Nagasaki and in the face of hostile demonstrations demanded and succeeded in securing the release of eighteen American sailors who had been shipwrecked and had been imprisoned by the Japanese authorities.
As flag lieutenant aboard the Mississippi, which carried Commodore Matthew C. Perry on his well-known Japan Expedition, between the years 1852 and 1854 Bent made hydrographic surveys in Japanese waters, the results being incorporated in a publication issued by the government entitled Sailing Directions and Nautical Remarks: by Officers of the Late U. S. Naval Expedition to Japan (1857). In connection with these oceanographic labors he carried out a study of the great Pacific current known as the Kuro Siwo, which was printed in Perry's official report of the Japan Expedition.
In 1860 Bent was detailed to the Hydrographic Division of the Coast Survey, but on April 25 of the following year he resigned his commission because "his sympathies were with his native state. " On resigning his commission he returned to St. Louis and assumed the management of the Tyler estate. Oceanography still claimed his interest, as evidenced by an address before the St. Louis Historical Society in 1868 on "The Thermometric Gateways to the Pole" which was printed in St. Louis the following year. In this and in a later publication of 1872 he maintained that the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic and the Kuro Siwo from the Pacific maintained an open sea about the North Pole. At this time considerable interest in North Polar exploration was manifested both in Europe and in America and while Bent's conclusions with regard to an open Polar Sea were not accepted by the leading authorities, his thesis encouraged discussion of the problems of polar exploration. He died on August 26, 1887, at Shelter Island, Long Island, and was buried in Louisville, Kentucky.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
In 1857, Silas Bent married Ann Eliza Tyler of Louisville, Kentucky.