Townsend Cromwell was an oceanographer who discovered the Cromwell current while researching drifting in the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean. He died in an airplane crash, that of Aeroméxico Flight 111 on 2 June 1958, which killed all 39 passengers and seven crew on board. The accident, also fatal to the American fisheries research biologist Bell M. Shimada, occurred near Guadalajara, Mexico, as the men were en route to join the Scot Expedition at Acapulco. Cromwell was Senior Scientist with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission and Research Associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California. His field of work was the physical environment and its relation to fisheries. He became a weather officer in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After receiving a B.A. degree from University of California in 1947, he returned to La Jolla, his boyhood home, as a student at Scripps, receiving an M.S. degree in oceanography from the University of California in 1949. At Scripps he was strongly influenced by the oceanographer H. U. Sverdrup.