Atlantic

by Simon Winchester

  For when the ill-assorted gaggle of six ships sailed off toward Madeira in the late summer of 1838, it turned out that scientifically incompetent professional sailors had been handed most of the venture’s more important knowledge-gathering positions. Not that the professional officers were especially good at sailing, either. One of the ships went down in a river estuary and its crew was saved by an African-American member of another ship’s company who plucked them all from the water with one of the locals’ canoes. A sailor on the Vincennes, one George Porter, was allowed to be caught up by a trailing rope and swept up by his neck to the main topgallant sail, swinging there a hundred feet above the sea, being slowly strangled to death. (He survived, his neck unbroken but his face completely black for want of oxygen. His first demand on opening his eyes was for a glass of grog.)

  Then there was an almighty fuss on Fiji when the Americans managed to insult someone, had two of their crewmen murdered by enraged islanders, and then, in an augury of policies to come, retaliated by burning down a village or two and killing eighty islanders. And to cap it all off, a second ship was lost, this time with all hands, in a violent storm off the other Staten Island—the rugged and unpopulated island off the southeastern tip of Tierra del Fuego, the last gasp of the Andean cordillera before it plunges into the sea.26

  All told the Ex-Ex was a profoundly disagreeable venture, and when the remaining vessels limped back home into New York harbor nearly four years after leaving Norfolk, the commanding officer, a man named Charles Wilkes (who ostentatiously wore a captain’s uniform even though a lieutenant), was cashiered and successfully court-martialed for having punished his men so harshly—especially by having some miscreants flogged around the fleet, a peculiarly cruel punishment that allowed bosuns from each ship to have an opportunity to whip the unfortunate man until he was within an inch of his life. There have been subsequent attempts to rehabilitate Wilkes; but his legacy as a captious and rank-obsessed commander, combined with the slapdash manner in which he arranged for the publication of the expedition reports—the last volume emerged thirty-two years after the ships got home—cast a long shadow over what could have been a spectacular American entrance into the world of oceanography.

  Yet the expedition’s best-known no-show, Matthew Fontaine Maury, was to redress the balance and restore America’s oceanic reputation, and in short order.

  When Maury was offered the position on the Ex-Ex, he was on half-pay leave from the U.S. Navy and working as superintendent of a failing gold mine in western Virginia, close to home. And soon after he turned it down, and with the six ships of the Ex-Ex battling their transoceanic way from debacle to debacle, he was involved in a stagecoach accident in which he broke his pelvis and his legs. The accident effectively ended his career as a seagoing sailor, at thirty-three years old. The turn of events might well have dissuaded him from ever thinking of the sea again. But in fact the opposite was true.

  After a stagecoach accident, U.S. Navy officer Matthew Fontaine Maury devoted his energies to marine cartography and oceanography. His book The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology is a classic. All American naval charts owe their design and accuracy to his pioneering methods of survey and organization.

  Nine years earlier Maury had been a junior officer aboard the first U.S. naval vessel to circumnavigate the world, the 700-ton sloop Vincennes. He had left New York on a brand-new and much larger vessel, the Brandywine; he received orders to transfer to Vincennes in port in Chile, after he had endured the doubling of Cape Horn and had written extensive notes about the most efficient way to do so. The journey home was nothing short of remarkable for a Virginia farmer’s son who had grown up on a hardscrabble estate in Tennessee. The vessel sailed home first by way of Tahiti, Hawaii, Macau, the Philippines, Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies. It next plowed on across the Indian Ocean to Somalia, doubled Cape Agulhas, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to take on supplies in Table Bay, before finally crossing the Atlantic to St. Helena and following the constant southerly winds—“a Gulf Stream in the air,” as an enthralled Maury was to write—back to Sandy Hook. The Vincennes dropped anchor in Brooklyn a full four years after the Brandywine had carried Maury away.

  The voyage left him a changed man, a man with a mission—a mission that no amount of rejection and injury could apparently deter. On that long circumnavigation he had learned the most complicated aspects of mathematics, and had consolidated in his mind what would be a lifelong fascination with maps, charts, currents, tides, and winds. Though nine years afterward he would have his career as a deck officer brought to a sudden stop, he was now so obsessed by the sea and its physical mysteries that he managed to persuade his superior officers to give him a deskbound job—first as head of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, and from 1844 as head of the newly formed U.S. Naval Observatory. From this position for the next thirty years he would direct America’s mapping of the seas and all the remarkable phenomena found within them.

  Maury’s most enduring triumphs involved the ocean on his doorstep, the Atlantic. Their best-known manifestation was the great map he published in 1854: A Bathymetrical Chart of the North Atlantic Basin with Contour Lines drawn in at 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 fathoms. This document, based on the soundings he had ordered taken by as many naval vessels as he could find—which was actually not very many, rendering the map less accurate and comprehensive than its title suggests—left two important legacies.

  The first was the incontrovertible evidence brought in by his survey vessels that the deep water of the ocean shallowed considerably along a line that seemed to run roughly north-south halfway between the European and American coasts. He named this shallowing the Dolphin Rise, after one of his ships: it was the first hint of the existence of what is now recognized as the longest and most dramatic mountain chain in the submarine world—the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

  And second: the revelations in Maury’s map whetted the appetite of a millionaire Massachusetts industrialist named Cyrus W. Field, who had made his fortune in the paper business. Field had long nurtured the idea that it might be possible to extend the principle of the electric telegraph across the Atlantic. And when he saw the extent of the mid-ocean plateau on Maury’s map, he inquired. The reply was just as he had hoped, for Maury wrote:

  From Newfoundland to Ireland, the distance between the nearest points is about sixteen hundred miles; and the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau, which seems to have been placed there especially for holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way. It is neither too deep nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that wires once landed will remain for ever beyond the reach of vessels’ anchors, icebergs and drifts of any kind, and so shallow, that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom.

  Little did Maury, or Field, know what the “plateau” was really like—a tortured confusion of peaks and troughs, immense canyons and aiguilles of basalt that would snag and stretch any cable that might be laid. Ignorance of what lay beneath the waves was still profound: the cable layers of those early days—sailors on the USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon first of all, egged on by the eagerness of their equally uninformed investors—behaved like blind men tossing wires from a jet flying across the Himalayas or the Alps. They imagined that their cables would drift like gossamer down onto tracts of endless subsea flatland, but never imagined the sharp summits and ridges and rock-strewn chasms that actually lay below. The very earliest cables, some of them evidently hanging in mid-sea between mountaintops that rose more than two miles high from the abyssal plains, promptly chafed, stretched, and snapped with dismaying frequency. It was not until 1866 that the first permanent link was laid, and for decades afterward cable ships had to scuttle around to repair the breaks that even the well-laid plans set down.

  There were other early fears about the cables, too. One shareholder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company wrote to a friend of his assumption that the voices of those who spoke across the line, “
subject to such uncommon compression, may only emerge as mouselike squeakings.” It was just one misconception among many: Victorian times were abundantly awash with wonderful imaginings about the ocean. One that was widely accepted for far too long held that because the density of water increases with pressure (it essentially doesn’t, water being all but incompressible), there were zones in the deep sea beyond which objects could not sink—a wrecked iron ship, for example, would descend into the sea until it reached the level where the water became just too viscously dense for it to pass, and it would remain there, hovering, for eternity.

  Gradation in the water’s density would reserve different levels for different things, the theory went. Buckets of nails would sink lower than holed rowing boats. Horses would underlie frogs. Dead people would descend to a level determined by their obesity or the thickness of their clothing—with perhaps, as some of the more churchly said, the pressing weight of sins or of a guilty conscience forcing the less virtuous ever lower. In the end the submerged miscellanea filed into weight-related strata—with separate layers of lost cattle, drowned children, unpopular office furniture, sunken oceangoing tugs, executed bandits, hastily dumped six-guns, derailed railway trains, unwanted pets—would be fated to wash eternally around the lower reaches of the sea, a template of the world above, marooned forever in the cold and salty gloom.

  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 Brandan27 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 limes28). 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 iso
pods, 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.