Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. Simon Winchester

into historical curiosities: the average speed of Saharan camels, the probable landing place in Britain of Julius Caesar, and the likely site of the shipwreck of St Paul. He lived and worked until he was nearly ninety, and though he was distinguished enough to be buried alongside other national heroes under the nave of Westminster Abbey, he is otherwise widely overlooked.

      5. PLUMBING THE DEEP

      Comparing James Rennell’s interest in the ocean with Benjamin Franklin’s a few years before illustrates to some small degree the diverging European and American motivations behind the science that would tackle the strangely sinister world of the deep. Rennell’s fascination verged on the academic and the conceptual; Franklin, whose interest in the Gulf Stream arose out of the reports that mail packets were being mysteriously delayed, had more of a commercial take on the subject. And for years this divergence continued: Britain looked at the sea as something of great theoretical interest, as well as an entranceway to its ever-expanding empire; America had its eye on the ocean as an obstacle over which mastery could only be won by practical means — by making ever more efficient the shipping lines, by laying and then expanding the use of submarine communications cables, by adroitly harvesting the sea of its edible and usable creatures.

      It was the lobbying of powerful merchants in the East Coast ports that eventually persuaded the US Congress to establish a coastal survey, yet at the very same time scientists in Britain, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were all looking to the ocean as the ultimate source, not of trade or funds or fortune, but of an endlessly diverting cavalcade of unknown animals and plants. To Europeans-the generalization may be as unfair as most, yet has enough truth to it to stand - to win knowledge of the Atlantic was to gain knowledge of the planet; to those on its far side in the nineteenth century, to know the Atlantic was to be the better equipped to make money.

      Charles Darwin was among those early nineteenth-century Britons who sailed into the Atlantic for the pleasure of study alone. He was just twenty-two, newly graduated from Cambridge, when he was invited in 1831 to sail “to Tierra del Fuego and home by the East Indies” on the ninety-foot-long, ten-gun naval brig HMS Beagle. It was a journey that lasted an unexpected five years, and it was principally a survey mission — there were all manner of new devices on board, including accurate chronometers, lightning conductors, and anemometers specially calibrated to measure the newly created Beaufort wind scale. On the way south, Darwin saw and collected specimens from the Cape Verde Islands, the Peter and Paul Rocks, Brazil, Montevideo and Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands, and on the way home three years later looked in on St Helena and Ascension, too. But his interest was mainly in the geology or the wildlife of his various landfalls - the maritime aspects of the enterprise were largely left to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy.

      Perhaps the most memorable event so far as Darwin was concerned occurred as he was about to leave his home ocean and round the Horn into the Pacific: Fitzroy had aboard the ship three extremely large Fuegian natives, captured two years before as specimens²⁴ and brought to London to be taught English, clothed, instructed in basic Christianity, and in other ways “civilised”. Now they were being taken back home. Despite their London tailoring, fine manners, and good knowledge of English, Darwin regarded them as little more elevated than animals, and was not entirely surprised when one of them, Jemmy Button (the others were a woman named Fuegia Basket and a man, York Minster; a fourth, who was named Boat Memory, had died of smallpox), reverted to his aboriginal state within days of being dropped near the Horn. Soon after being left, he was re-encountered when the storm-savaged ship had to put back into harbour - and to the surprise of the ship’s company he appeared as shaggy-haired and near-naked as when first found, two years before. He could not be persuaded, despite Darwin’s entreaties, to return to the ship and come back to London yet again. Though the finches of the Galapagos Islands would eventually reveal much more, these Patagonian unfortunates offered Darwin lessons for his eventual thoughts on evolution: he could say with some certainty from his knowledge of Jemmy Button that the biblical story of human creation was uncertain, at best - for some kinds of clothed men could always revert to nakedness, whatever Genesis suggested took place in the Garden of Eden.

      Two expeditions were landmarks in the winning of Atlantic knowledge: the first was conducted by a flotilla of American vessels that set out from Norfolk, Virginia, in the summer of 1838, and the second was the venture by a single Royal Navy vessel that stood out from Portsmouth, Hampshire, in the winter of 1872. The former was known somewhat portentously as the United States Exploring Expedition, and in terms of Atlantic history was made more famous by the absence of one invited member who resigned shortly before sailing. The second expedition has come to be remembered, rather more economically, as simply the voyage of HMS Challenger. The convoluted fate of the first is still a matter of discussion to this day; but of the second - in more recent times one of the five American space shuttles was named in honour of the single British ship, which testifies to the success of that pioneering sea voyage undertaken almost exactly a century before.²⁵

      The American venture - known more familiarly at the time as the Ex-Ex — was an ill-timed, ill-organised, and ill-accomplished congressional attempt to divine the mysteries of America’s two neighbour oceans, especially the Pacific. Commerce was Capitol Hill’s driving force: the fast-growing American whaling and fur-sealing industries needed new hunting grounds to exploit, and landlubber traders needed new territories with which to do business. Congress offered funds, and then got itself into the most terrible pickle trying to mediate between competing claims of the scientists and the naval officers from which it had to choose to drive the venture out into the ocean. The figure who because of the endless rows chose not to go - but who would nonetheless become nineteenth-century America’s most celebrated oceanographer - was a young naval lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. His decision to forgo the expedition (he had been invited along as the official astronomer, but decided the organising civil servant in charge was an “imbecile”) turned out to benefit his own reputation: few of those on this expedition would win much kudos.