Atlantic (15 page)

It took a while for the lunacy to lift. Those who clung to this belief—and it was surely no great stretch for those who disliked the idea of the earth as an oblate spheroid, but instead thought of it as a flat disc with dangerously vertiginous edges—were additionally skeptical of the reported ocean depths reported by the sounding lines. For how, they argued, could the lead or brass ball-weights on the ends of the much-employed galvanized Birmingham twenty-gauge piano wire possibly penetrate into the viscous zone? Surely all of the soundings merely bounced up against the upper edge of the zone rather than the bottom of the sea?

But then Maury’s men created a number of devices to bring back to the surface samples of the seabed, no matter how many thousands of feet below—and when in time masses of sand and gravel and crushed shells and broken shards of coral were retrieved, and the flat-earthers and the skeptics saw them with their own eyes, adherence to this strange belief abated and good sense returned.

Other fantasies came and went. One was also linked to the viscosity question: down in that stagnant region of intense pressure, low temperatures, and endless dark, there could surely be no life, said some: it was, in the coinage of the time, an
azoic
realm. But soon after the first cables were laid, sections that had broken had to be grapneled to the surface from thousands of feet down, and when laid out on deck the twisted wires were found to be alive with barnacles and worms and other creatures demonstrating the existence of a happy and abundant living universe, even down deep in the darkness.

Another bad idea eventually made good by nineteenth-century oceanographers related to the presence, most especially in the Atlantic, of a large number of very long-lived phantom islands. A map dated 1570 by the great Flemish atlas maker Ortelius showed many of them: the
Isle of Demons
in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River,
Saint Brandan
²⁷
to the south of Iceland and
Frisland
to its north,
Santana
a little to the northeast of Bermuda, and
Antillia
(or the
Isle of the Seven Cities
) to the southeast—and at the time of the map still playing host, so it was said, to Spanish bishops who had left eight centuries before, ahead of the invading Moors. Ortelius was unable to show on this map either the
Isle of Buss,
which Martin Frobisher claimed to have found during a storm, and had been placed almost six hundred miles west of Rockall, nor was he able to draw Mayda, off southern Ireland, nor the outline of
Hy-Brasil,
which sat with extraordinary persistence in the identical place in scores of earlier and later maps, fifty miles off Connemara.

None of these islands existed; they were as ephemeral and illusory as Atlantis. As was one further and final oceanic peculiarity that gripped the Victorian maritime mind for a short while: a supposed protoplasmic form of early life, an ur-slime. This was dredged up by the survey frigate HMS
Cyclops
and handed over to an initially not very interested T. H. Huxley, the paleontologist whose eventual coinage of the words
agnostic
and
Darwinism
indicates his strongly rationalist views. But rationalism failed him when, ten years after being handed the samples, he came to look down the microscope at this jelly-like ooze: he became irrationally excited by it, promptly gave it a name (
Bathybius haeckelii
—in honor of the German evolutionist who coined the word
ecology
) and declared it to be a primordial life-form that would surely carpet the seafloors everywhere.

Six years later there came an outbreak of public embarrassment as another biologist performed some very basic chemical tests on the slime and discovered that
Bathybius
was not a life-form at all, but a simple chemical reaction in the test tube between seawater and the preserving alcohol. Perhaps, bleated later supporters of Huxley—who after all, was a great man in his field, a giant of his times—it could have also been caused by a seasonal taint of plankton bloom. But most sided with the facts, and so in very short order the
Bathybius
that never lived was officially killed off. With mordant dignity Huxley renamed it
Blunderibus,
admitted his folly, thus recaptured his reputation in an instant, and promptly went back to naming other creatures, something he was particular good at. He first christened a kind of Mesozoic crocodile with the beautifully sonorous name
Hyperodapedon
and then moved on to a family of fishlike Devonian beasts that he named
Crossopterygians.

The
Bathybius
mystery having been solved meant that when HMS
Challenger
left the dockside in Portsmouth just before Christmas of 1872, she was less on a mission to discover the undiscoverable and correct the misconceptions of ages, and more on a scientific jamboree the likes of which had never been known, and which has seldom been repeated since.

6. TAKING THE MEASURE

HMS
Challenger
was initially a warship, a large, 2,600-ton corvette with three masts and a large funnel to sweep away the exhaust from her 1,200-horsepower engine. All but two of her guns had been removed to make way for laboratories and equipment. Her commander, at least for the long outbound Atlantic sectors of what would be a globe-girdling expedition, was George Nares, an indefatigably correct sailor who would later win fame for his Arctic explorations (though his fame was somewhat tarnished by a later official report that blamed him for a scurvy outbreak on one polar voyage, since he had omitted to stow aboard a sufficient quantity of limes
²⁸
). The head of science was C. Wyville Thomson, a professor of natural history in Edinburgh and a man who had become intrigued from two earlier surveying voyages by the question of whether life could be sustained at the vast depths of the ocean. He went out of his way, even in the early, shakedown portion of the cruise, to send down dredges and sounding mechanisms—which were always lowered on hemp twine rather than the piano wire favored by most oceanographers because the many miles of line thought necessary to plumb the greatest expected depths would put too much strain on the ship’s cranes—to prove his assertion. At first his men found precious little in the red clays they hauled up from off the African coast, but then, nearly four miles down off the West Indies, the dredge drew up a pair of miserable-looking annelid worms, proof, for which the rather dour Welshman reported tremendous excitement on deck, that life did in fact flourish without boundaries of depth, and that “animals . . . exist over the whole floor of the ocean.”

The great ship shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic, the Canaries to Bermuda, Halifax to Cape Verde, Madeira to Fernando do Noronha, Fernando Póo to the Falkland Islands, all the while taking soundings, recording temperatures, dropping its supply of dredges and epibenthic sledges to the seafloor and having powerful donkey-engines haul them and their dripping contents back to the surface.

On occasion the hauls provided some heady moments: from the six-hundred-fathom-deep shelf off Argentina, the sledge meshes were found to have snared sea cucumbers and sea urchins, starfish in a rainbow of colors, barnacles, corals, squid, slugs, amphipods and isopods, and scores of the very primitive hermaphrodite chordates known properly as tunicates but more familiarly known by sailors as sea-squirts or sea-pork. Generally, though, and in the deeper sea, the routines became a tedious business, even for the scientists, who would come to dread the arrival of yet more grim-looking sludges, especially if the dredge returned at dinnertime. Sixty-one sailors deserted before the journey was done, and a small number died—two going mad, two being drowned, one being poisoned, another having the indignity of his face turning bright red before he dropped dead, and one unfortunate man named Stokes being hit on the head by a flying block-and-tackle, and having to be buried at sea (which prompted his shipmates to ask Captain Nares if the body would indeed float eternally within the viscous zone).

There were as many diversions as the science allowed. At Christmas there was dancing and whisky and plum pudding, followed by readings and recitations and fiddling contests staged beside an always-refilled punch bowl. Birthdays, of scientists as well as their bluejacket crew, were celebrated with raucous activity. Afternoon tea, then a growing commonplace ashore, was served every day both to allow for interruption in the drear routines of dredging and to serve as a reminder of the civilities of home—even though the Darjeeling was often to be poured into the bone china cups during a lashing hurricane or in some tropical corner of the sea under an unimaginably fierce sun. Someone had brought a harmonium-like instrument called a melodeon on board, and its sounds often wafted up from the ’tween decks during quiet nights, reducing some of the homesick men to tears.

Whenever
Challenger
put in to a foreign port, curious visitors from ashore were invited aboard, especially ladies. To some she seemed like a steam yacht on a world cruise, and her officers were careful not to forget she served as a floating embassy, and her expedition was invariably publicized as an example of British grit and determination, so flocks of the fascinated came to gawp. But the ladies came on to dance and entertain as well, and the ships’ fiddlers and the melodeon player were kept busy during the port calls.

There was sport, too: the more middle class of the scientists had brought their shotguns along and went after the more common seabirds with abandon. The traditionalist sailors were initially horrified that, once in the Roaring Forties of the South Atlantic, the sportsmen would shoot specimens of the wandering albatross, a bird long considered taboo; but no serious harm befell the ship, accidents were trivial, and the deaths and other casualties proved to be within the statistical limits for so large a crew on so long a haul.

All told, the ship was away for three and a half years—during which she lightly hit an iceberg (probably thanks to the spirit of the well-shot albatross), was given two Galapagos tortoises that wolfed down all her pineapples, found sea-bottom waters at the equator off Brazil that were almost at freezing point and so deduced the existence of a deep current flowing north from the Antarctic, and discovered, to much zoological celebration, a tiny and excessively pretty squid called
Spirula
and regarded by some as a missing link in the newly revealed Darwinian scheme of species origin. The vessel returned to Portsmouth—encountering on the homestretch off Portugal a massive flotilla of patrolling British warships, one of which had its band play “Home Sweet Home” from its afterdeck. When finally she tied up at the quayside,
Challenger
had logged almost seventy thousand miles, at an average rate of rather more than two miles a day. Men could walk more quickly.

But, oh! the specimens she brought home: hundreds upon hundreds of crates, of animals, of plants, of bottles of seawater from various depths and places, of test tubes and Kilner jars and Petri dishes of oozes and slimes and gelatinous animals and plants. It took four years for the first volume of the Official Report to be published and another fifteen years—almost the end of the century—before the final one, and the hapless Wyville Thomson went mad and collapsed under the intense and sustained pressure from the publishers.

All told there were to be eighty volumes. It was a formidable intellectual achievement, arguably the most comprehensive study of the ocean ever undertaken, and it remains a landmark to this day. The information assembled and disseminated represented what was at the time the sum total of humankind’s knowledge of the sea, and especially the Atlantic Ocean. And once it was done, oceanography was set steadily to become what it is today, a greatly more professional calling. It would not be much longer before the sailors retired to the bridge and the specialists moved in—the chemists and zoologists and submariners and physicists, the mathematical modelers and paleoclimatologists and high-temperature bacteriologists—and changed forever what the science of oceans originally had been.

7. FASHIONING THE CHARTS

Some of the romance then inevitably bled away. With a new fashion for oceanographic progress in the twentieth century and its consequent exponential growth, and with the creation of the great institutions—Scripps in California in 1892, Woods Hole in Massachusetts in 1930, Lamont-Doherty in New York in 1949,
²⁹
and the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, and smaller European ocean stations in places like Roscoff, Kiel, and Heligoland—the vision of the sea that had impelled the pioneers began to dim somewhat. The routines of the laboratory and the computer started to slowly take over from the rhythms of the old days: the ever-shifting horizons, the knife-sharp winds, the smell of fish and Stockholm tar, the coils of rope, the flap of sails, the keening of gulls, and the thud of marine engines made way for the hum of machines and air-conditioning and the silky sounds of laser printing.

Prince Albert I of Monaco was one of the last of the gifted amateurs to be fully invested in field oceanography, before the calling was enveloped by the realm of technocracy. His interest came about at a time when nineteenth-century France was developing an acute (though rather short-lived) passion for the sea, and since it was a passion that very much involved an aristocracy that had been somewhat underemployed since the revolution of 1789, it was conducted with great style and élan. The fabulously wealthy Marquis Léopold de Folin was an early entrant. After some years spent searching the floor of the Brittany coast in a comfortably converted trawler, he managed to persuade the French navy to supply him with a full-dress paddle-steamer, the
Travailleur,
and in her he conducted surveys of the seabed in the Bay of Biscay and beyond; they remain classics of scholarship and brio.