McArthur was wounded in both legs by Seminoles at Jupiter, Florida. While one musket ball was pulled from one leg, a ball remained in the other leg. He was sent to the Naval Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, for treatment and convalescence. There he met, courted, and married Mary Stone Young, the daughter of the superintendent of the hospital. Among their children was Lewis Linn McArthur, an Oregon Supreme Court justice.
In 1840 he began a survey of the Gulf Of Mexico aboard the brig USS Consort.
After sailing from New York, McArthur was delayed in Panama by the influx of settlers in the California Gold Rush. In Panama, McArthur was asked to captain a former coal storage ship to San Francisco.[1] The von Humboldt left Panama on May 21, 1849 and took 102 days to arrive at San Francisco, the first 46 of which were spent getting to the Mexican port of Acapulco.[1] Among the four hundred passengers on von Humboldt were Collis P. Huntington, the future president of the Southern Pacific Railroad and San Francisco Society portrait painter Stephen W. Shaw.
In September 1849, Lieutenant Commander McArthur was placed in command of the U.S. surveyschoonerEwing which had been brought around the Cape Horn to the United States West Coast by Lieutenant Washington Allon Bartlett.[2] Upon reaching San Francisco, the Ewing and the USS Massachusetts were hampered from progress in the survey due to desertions of their crews who joined the gold rush, including a mutiny when crew members rowing into the city from the Ewing threw an officer overboard in an attempt to desert to flee to the gold fields.[3] They managed to survey Mare Island Strait[2] before steaming to Hawaii to obtain crewmen from Hawaiian monarch King Kamehameha III.[1] They returned to San Francisco in the spring of 1850, with the coastal survey of northern California beginning on April 3, 1850, and continuing up the coast of Oregon to the mouth of the Columbia River. On August 1, 1850, while still in Oregon,[clarification needed] McArthur purchased a 1/16 interest in Mare Island for $468.50,[2] then returned to San Francisco later that month to prepare charts and write reports.
The greatly increasing commerce of Oregon demands that these improvements be made immediately… Within the last eighteen months more vessels have crossed the Columbia river bar than had crossed it, perhaps, in all time past.[4]
Oregon Territory
McArthur and some of his shipmates were quite taken with Oregon and the Willamette Valley, he wrote:
The climate is agreeable and healthy. The water is not inferior to any in the world. The face of the country is too uneven to permit as general cultivation, still it will and must soon become a great agricultural and stock growing country. The scenery is beautiful and in some places and some points of view the grandest that the eye ever beheld.
McArthur was not to survive the voyage to the east coast in 1850. He became ill on board with dysentery, died, and was buried in Panama. The Navy purchased the original 956 acres (387 ha) of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard on January 4, 1853. McArthur's family share was $5,218.20.[2] in 1867, his body was disinterred and he was reburied on Mare Island.[1]
Namesakes
McArthur's name is applied to several ships and geographic features.
^Gudde, Dr. Erwin G. "Mutiny on the Ewing". Retrieved January 2, 2008. Originally published in The JOURNAL, Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1951-12-01, Number 4
^Hannable. William Historylink.org 2003-12-06 retrieved 2008-01-02
