Background
William Pope McArthur was born on April 2, 1814 at Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. He was the son of John and Mary (Linn) McArthur.
hydrographer military scientist
William Pope McArthur was born on April 2, 1814 at Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. He was the son of John and Mary (Linn) McArthur.
Appointed midshipman in the United States navy (Feb. 11, 1832) at the request of his uncle, Dr. Lewis Fields Linn, later United States senator from Missouri, he spent several years in the South Pacific station and then attended the naval school at Norfolk.
McArthur commanded one of the vessels in the expedition to the Everglades during the second Seminole War (1837 - 38) but was severely wounded and sent to the naval hospital at Norfolk, where the energetic convalescent courted and married on May 3, 1838, Mary Stone Young, daughter of the hospital superintendent. In 1840 he was ordered to the brig Consort, which had been detailed to the United States Coast Survey, and during the next year he participated in the survey of the Gulf coast and was promoted to lieutenant (1841). Continuing in the Coast Survey, he was appointed by Alexander Dallas Bache in the autumn of 1848 to the command of the hydrographic party sent to make the first survey of the Pacific Coast. Arriving at Panama, McArthur found the isthmus overrun with lawless Americans and at once became the head of an effective vigilance committee. He then took command of the Humboldt, which lay at the island of Taboga without a captain and overloaded with emigrants, and sailed her to California. There he selected Mare Island as the most suitable location for a navy yard and sailed northward along the coast in the schooner Ewing. His pioneer work on the West coast, including a preliminary survey and a successful reconnaissance of the coast from Monterey to the Columbia River, was carried out in spite of mutiny, desertion, and McArthur's recurring attack of malignant fever. The results of the survey were published in 1851 by the United States Coast Survey (Notices of the Western Coast of the United States). McArthur died from an acute attack of dysentery as the Oregon was entering Panama Harbor on the return voyage.
McArthur married Mary Stone Young, the daughter of the Superintendent of the Hospital. Among their children was Lewis Linn McArthur, an Oregon Supreme Court Justice.
