The Silent Landscape: The Scientific voyage of HMS Challenger

Natural History, Oct, 2003 by Laurence A. Marshall

by Richard Corfield Joseph Henry Press, 2003; $24.95

The nineteenth century, no less than the age of Columbus and Magellan, is notable for its voyages of exploration. A search of Amazon.com returned nearly thirty entries for books about Darwin's travels with the HMS Beagle, and more than twenty for books about John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to the Arctic. Yet only two entries (one for this book!) featured the HMS Challenger, which carried out the most remarkable and influential maritime mission of the Victorian era. The obscurity of Challenger's voyage is understandable: no lands were claimed, no passage remained blocked by ice, no crews were decimated by frostbite, scurvy, or starvation. In fact, the voyage went pretty much as planned--which is to say it brought back scientific results of surpassing importance.

HMS Challenger left Portsmouth, England, in December 1872 with an itinerary that had been drawn up, not by commercial explorers or adventure-seekers, but by the academicians of the British Royal Society. Its objectives were scientific, pure and simple: to circumnavigate the globe, to take soundings at regular intervals along the way, and to measure the physical and biological characteristics of the ocean, from surface to bottom. Aboard were twenty naval officers, a crew of 200, and a scientific staff of five. John Murray, one of the scientists, spent the remaining decades of the century compiling a fifty-volume report on the expedition's results. Challenger was the first great oceanographic research vessel, and its findings were to set in motion revolutions in earth science and biology for the next hundred years.

When Challenger set sail, the prevailing wisdom was that ocean life could not exist below about 300 fathoms (1,800 feet). Yet virtually every time the dredge was hauled up from the deep, so many weird creatures came to light that scientists and crew alike quickly conceded that the ocean depths are a rich repository of primitive life-forms.

By the time the ship had reached the West Indies, the expedition scientists had come upon a great range of undersea mountains running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Two years later, on the other side of the world, their sounding lines revealed a chasm in the western Pacific more than five miles deep. Both features, and many others first recorded by Challenger's crew, are now recognized as part of the system of cracks and seams that connect the moving tectonic plates of our planet's crust.

Richard Corfield draws not only on the voluminous records of the expedition's scientists, but also on the personal memoirs of its naval officers-most memorably, the candid and previously unpublished diary of a young ship's steward named Joseph Matkin. The book's real excitement, though, lies in the many technical digressions that Corfield, an earth scientist himself, includes from the perspective of modern science. Climatology, evolutionary biology, oceanography, and plate tectonics all got a jump start from Challenger's results. It's easy to understand why two great contemporary research vessels--the Glomar Challenger, the first oceanographic drilling vessel, and the late and much lamented space shuttle Challenger--both bore the name of a cramped and creaky sailing ship of a century gone by.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Protect CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.