Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, March 17, 1874, 37° 45′ S, 144° 58′ E to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, June 8, 1874, 33° 55′ S, 151° 10′ E

It had been the longest period of the voyage away from civilization and the crew and Scientifics shared a sense of relief when the Antarctic leg of the voyage was finally over. No one complained when Nares scrapped the planned visit to Hobart in Tasmania and decided instead to head straight for Melbourne. Almost as soon as they anchored, Challenger was overrun with influential citizens anxious to see the ship and to bid its crew welcome to Australian waters. As they rode at anchor in Hobson’s Bay they were amazed and delighted by the contrast to the silence and loneliness of their Antarctic sojourn. All was movement, color, and gaiety. Coastal steamers arrived and departed, yachts and steam launches filled with pleasure seekers and cargo crisscrossed the bay, and all around them merchant ships and other men o’ war were towed in and out of the harbor as they arrived from distant lands or made ready to set out across the Pacific Ocean that lay just beyond the sandbars.

Most impressive of all, the horizon before them was dominated by the vast, magnificent city of Melbourne, its skyline broken here and there by church spires and high roofs and the foreground dominated by the new buildings of government: the city hall, the new post office, government house, the parliament buildings and the treasury. Everything they saw reminded Challenger’s crew that they had arrived at the furthest outpost of an empire that ruled the 176

world, and that Australia, like India, was another vibrant jewel in Victoria’s crown.

All aboard, especially Joe Matkin, eagerly awaited news from home. Matkin was not disappointed, receiving seven letters in all, including one from his mother with news of the wedding of his beloved brother, Charlie. Yet not all his news from home was good. Joe’s father was still unwell so the young man lost no time in writing his beloved papa a letter enclosing a payment against the loan that Mr. Matkin had made him before he left Portsmouth 18 months and many thousands of miles before.

But even this news could not dull Joe’s enthusiasm for Melbourne. He had been to Australia twice before and both times had thoroughly enjoyed himself. The city of Melbourne was three miles distant from the port but easily accessible by train, for which the authorities furnished them free passes. Matkin and the others wasted no time in leaving their cramped ship and heading off to explore the city. Victorian Melbourne was the commercial capital of Australia and although it had been settled only 40 years before, by the time Challenger reached the city it was already thriving. Indeed it was officially classed as the ninth largest city in the British Empire. Those Challenger men who had not yet been out to this far-flung corner of empire had heard stories of the legendary Australian hospitality and they were not disappointed. Spry reflected that the months of March, April, and May 1874 were among the happiest of his naval career and it was no surprise that when the ship weighed anchor for the short voyage north to Sydney at the start of April, many of the crew deserted to stay on in Victoria.

Challenger arrived in Sydney on Easter Monday, April 7, 1874. Among those unfamiliar with the “Australian station,” the approach caused some consternation. The harbor was almost completely enclosed by high cliffs and inexperienced hands wondered if they were about to run aground. But almost at the last minute the gap between Sydney Heads became visible—as Captain Nares knew it would—and Challenger slipped through into one of the most per-

fect natural harbors in the world. They anchored between HMS Dido, fresh out from Britain, and the German frigate Ancona. As at Melbourne, the men were much impressed by the fine array of modern buildings that surrounded the harbor and particularly by the Astronomical Observatory, with its tower and time-ball, which dominated the grassy slopes on the cliffs above. Although Sydney Harbor was arguably one of the most spectacular and beautiful anchorages in the British Empire, like any working port it had its more prosaic side and the eastern shore was dominated by wharfs and quays where freight and passenger vessels berthed. Here, too, was the dry dock Challenger desperately needed after the rigors of the Antarctic voyage. She was still scarred after her encounters with icebergs so proper repairs to her jury-rigged jib boom were a top priority.

The months in Sydney passed agreeably, the officers at least finding the company civilized and charming. Below decks, however, the bluejackets agreed that they preferred the more earthy charms of Melbourne. The cultural pretensions of Sydney reminded them too much of the stratified class system that prevailed at home and aboard Challenger.

On the evening of June 7, 1874, the sea was calm, with not a breath of wind disturbing the tranquility of Sydney harbor. William Spry stared out across the water as the lights began to appear in the city. He was in a pensive mood and found himself remembering with amazement that it was only 102 years since Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay, just a few miles away over the ridge in front of him, and claimed Australia for the empire. How far the citizens of this far land had come in so short a time! As he watched the lights’ reflections heave in the oily swell he reflected on how pleasant the last three months in Australia had been and on the price those aboard Challenger paid for the chance to see the empire in this way. Tomorrow they left for New Zealand, ordered by the Admiralty to complete the final leg of surveying needed to trace the route for the new telegraph cable between Sydney and Wellington. Although

they planned one more stop in Australia, at the tip of the far northern promontory known as Cape York, the vastness of the Pacific already beckoned and with it the certainty of more long months at sea in the cramped confines of the ship. That was the price, Spry knew, the men paid for the chance to see the empire.

Below decks in his airless cabin, Joe Matkin’s thoughts were similar as he put the finishing touches to letters that he would have to take immediately to the post office. Almost two dozen men had gone missing in Australia, tempted by the extraordinary beauty of the land, the opportunities for settlement, and their distaste for another two years of cramped confinement in the ship. And yet Joe stayed on board: As he stared at the soot-scarred bulkhead, he could not for the life of him imagine why.

Henry Moseley was as sorry as the others to be turning his back on this wonderful continent, but he was moved not so much by trepidation for the voyage ahead as by regret for leaving a place with such singular zoology. It had become clear to him that if the deep ocean was one place where the proof of Mr. Darwin’s theories might be found, then Australia was another.

The Australian writings of both Spry and Moseley contain frequent references to the so-called missing links of the fossil record, reflecting Victorian biologists’ preoccupation with the search for intermediate forms of life, that is, forms that have characteristics of both ancestor and descendent. This is another powerful testament to the influence that Darwin’s Origin of Species had on the formulation and execution of the Challenger expedition. Just as Darwin had asserted that forms of life that were found on land only as fossils would be found alive in the depths of the ocean, so had he set the cat among the paleontological pigeons by stating that the rarity of intermediate life forms in the rocks of the geological column was due to great gaps in the fossil record. These missing links. he thought,

were due to subsequent earth movements, times of zero sedimentation, or because evolution had proceeded in isolated enclaves that left no trace of themselves in the fossil record.

Such missing links were inferred from the way that Darwin himself saw evolution proceeding: by the long slow accumulation of favorable variation over the course of eons. A prerequisite for Darwin’s theory was vast spans of time, geological time, over which these favorable variations could accumulate and thereby form new species. Darwin did not believe that evolution could proceed rapidly. In fact he explicitly denied the possibility in Origin of Species. It is difficult, with our twenty-first century perspective, to see why Darwin eschewed rapid evolution, but perhaps it was because of his innate Victorian conservatism. He had already served up a large lump of heresy by suggesting that animals and plants evolved from other animals and plants in the first place, and perhaps he worried that if he suggested that the process occurred quickly he would fatally damage the credibility of his theories. On the eve of Origins publication, Thomas Henry Huxley himself, Darwin’s most pugnacious defendant and, as we have seen, one of the main proponents of the Challenger expedition, had cautioned the sage of Down House against this view in a letter. “You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly” (the Latin tag means “Nature does not make leaps”). But the prevailing wisdom was that progress—including evolution— was slow and measured and that missing links, whether in the fossil record or squirreled away in obscure corners of the empire, were there to be found if one looked hard enough. It is no surprise, therefore, that when the Challenger expedition set out, only 13 years after publication of Origin, the Scientifics had the finding of these missing links high on their agenda.

One of the most spectacular of the missing links was found by an expedition that Wyville Thomson led into the wilds of Queensland in the last days before Challenger departed for New Zealand. Spry reports that the professor returned from his foray

“laden with botanical wonders and fishing spoils, (among which were several specimens of a peculiar fish called “Ceratodus” or, popularly, “Barramundi”).”

Ceratodus (or Neoceratodus as it now more formally known) is the Australian lungfish, a member of an obscure group of fish known from other continents, particularly South Africa and South America, that have lungs to supplement their gills as well as rudimentary limbs for walking upon the land. Technically, they are a member of the Dipnoi (the lungfish), which are themselves part of a larger group called the Sarcopterygii (the lobe-finned fish). The importance of the Sarcopterygii is that it is the group from which land-dwelling vertebrates (tetrapods) evolved about 300 million years ago during the Devonian period. Walt Disney celebrated the importance of this seminal evolutionary transition in his groundbreaking animated film Fantasia. Perhaps you remember the sequence wherein a curiously shaped fish with blobby fleshy fins struggles to make it out of a shrinking pool of water and onto the land under the light of a broiling sun? Well, that was a sarcopterygian, a lobe-finned fish.

Today the lungfish, such as Neoceratodus, are the only surviving members of the lobe-fins. Even in Challenger’s day the Scientifics were very well aware of the colossal importance of the vertebrates’ transition from sea to land. They knew that their find of Ceratodus was hugely important. In fact, the fish had been described only a few years earlier, in 1870, by the German naturalist Johann Krefft. However, Krefft’s choice of publication to describe his new fish must have made Challenger’s Scientifics wince. Conventionally, new species are named in the pages of a learned scientific journal and it is inconceivable that Krefft, as curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney between 1864 and 1876, was unaware of this. Yet he chose to publish his finding in the Sydney Morning Herald! Significantly, Krefft mistakenly described the fish as an amphibian, a characteristic that reinforces how central the lungfish is to understanding the ancestry and evolutionary relationships of the tetrapods.

There are only three genera of lungfish alive today and each is

unique to a single continent. The South American version is called Lepidosiren; the one from Africa Protopterus. Both have twinned lungs and well developed fleshy fins that they use for scrabbling about on the banks of their native freshwater pools and rivers. But the Australian type appears the most primitive, with poorly developed fins and only a single lung sac. The Australian version is very similar to a fossil lungfish known from the Mesozoic era, also named Ceratodus. Because of this use of the same name, and particularly because there is no fossil record linking the two, the Australian lungfish has, since the time of the Challenger expedition, been renamed Neoceratodus (that is, new Ceratodus).

There appear to have been at least seven families of lungfish widely distributed around the world in the Paleozoic era, quite unlike their very restricted toeholds today. But after the big extinction at the Permo-Triassic boundary (the boundary between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, see Figure 8) this number dwindled to two (including the long-ranging and widely distributed Ceratodus). Today the lungfish are restricted still further, to only three genera.

Even today the precise ancestry of the tetrapods remains unclear. The current best estimate is that they evolved from a lobe-finned ancestor also shared by the lungfish and the coelacanth, that strange fish with large fleshy fins discovered off the coast of South Africa in the 1930s and widely hailed as a living fossil. Whatever the lungfish’s evolutionary affinities, though, it is clear that the first fish to crawl out of the sea and onto the land all those millions of years ago during Devonian time cannot have looked very different from the sad relics left behind today. But there is another ancestor of ours even closer to home and it, too, attracted the attention of Challenger’s Scientifics, particularly ship’s naturalist Henry Moseley, in that spring of 1874.

That spring of 1874 Moseley went out on one of three missions from Sydney for the purpose of collecting specimens. He was particularly excited about the possibility of capturing a duck-billed

platypus, Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, which were allegedly common on the banks of the Yarra River. The platypus and its relative, the spiny anteater (the echidna), excited his curiosity because they were the only two species left of the egg-laying mammals, the monotremes. To distinguish them from the marsupials (metatheria) and the placental mammals (eutheria) the monotremes are placed in their own class, the prototheria.

Mammals are characterized by the ability to suckle young with milk produced from special glands (the mammaries). Both the platypus and the echidna can do this, too, though their milk-producing organs are more primitive than those of higher classes of mammals (the marsupials and placentals). Like these higher mammals, the platypus and the echidna also have a jaw composed of a single bone, three inner-ear bones, relatively high metabolic rates, and hair. So apart from their curious ability to lay eggs, their membership in the mammals is well warranted. However, it is this egg-laying ability that demonstrates the monotremes’ close relation to the reptiles, in particular the group of reptiles known as Therapsids or mammal-like reptiles.

The Therapsids thrived in the latest Paleozoic and the early part of the Mesozoic (the Permian and Triassic periods) and gave rise to several lines of descendents including one, the cynodonts, that we believe is the branch that leads directly to the mammals. But the monotremes probably split away from this main line of evolution early on, in the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous. Modern monotremes retain many of the features of their Therapsid ancestors. For example, the girdle of bones that support the shoulders—the pectoral girdle—is complexly constructed and there is only a single common opening, the cloaca, for the elimination of body wastes and for reproductive matters. The cloaca is a distinctly reptilian feature and is quite unlike the separate openings typical of marsupials and placentals. The skulls of monotremes are almost birdlike in appearance and it is well known that birds evolved from reptiles;

indeed there are some who say that the dinosaurs never really became extinct at all but are with us still in the form of the birds.

The monotremes’ curious combination of very primitive and very advanced features (for example both the platypus and echidna use advanced electrical-current-sensing apparatus to track prey) is an excellent example of what has come to be known as mosaic evolution, where different structures within the body evolve at different rates. We know today that mosaic evolution is powerful support for the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It shows that evolution acts upon structures that must be upgraded to allow species to successfully colonize different niches while leaving organs that are irrelevant to this process unchanged. In the same way that the lungfish is a missing link between the proper fish and the tetrapods, the monotremes are missing links between the reptiles and the mammals.

However, it is important to recognize that neither is a living fossil. Both have been highly modified by subsequent evolution. Their retention of these primitive characteristics suggests that evolution has not acted to change them as it has with certain other features. The lungfish and the monotremes are missing links in only a limited sense: They are a distorted reflection of the true, now long extinct, missing links between fish and tetrapods, and between reptiles and true mammals.

However, before we leave the monotremes, it is worth noting that Moseley and the other Scientifics must have been well aware of their importance. Moseley reports disappointment that he was not able to examine the eyes of the platypus “to see if the retina contains brightly pigmented bodies, as in the case of reptiles and birds. . . .” In all the time he was in Australia he was destined never to see a live platypus or even a kangaroo. The only platypi he came across were delivered to him by the Aboriginals and they decomposed in the heat before he could get them back to his dissecting bench aboard Challenger.

The voyage from Sydney to Wellington was fraught with difficulty. Their first attempts to leave Sydney Heads on June 8th foundered in bad weather and despite an emotional farewell from their many Australian friends as well as the other two British ships in port—Dido and Pearl—on June 10th Challenger was forced to make a humiliating about face and return to Sydney. On June 12, 1874 though, she finally left Australia.

Despite the continuing bad weather, for the next two weeks they dredged and sounded, trying to find the best route for an undersea telegraph cable from Sydney to Wellington. About 200 miles from the Australian coast they found that the bottom shoaled to a depth of less than 1,700 feet and became exceedingly rocky. This meant that when it came time to lay the cable a more robust one would be needed. The crew congratulated themselves; this would be important news for the cable engineering teams.

By the time they sighted Cape Farewell in New Zealand, the weather had worsened and Challenger was forced to take shelter for a night and a day in Port Hardy, an inlet in the northern end of D’Urville Island in Cook Strait. The next day they managed only another short run of some 20 miles before being forced to shelter in the lee of Queen Charlotte Sound’s Long Island. The following day they made it across Cook Strait, Challenger creaking and groaning in the high sea. When the towering pinnacles of Ben Mor and the Karakora Ranges loomed up across the spume, all aboard felt relief.

They were only 10 miles from harbor when tragedy struck. With the heavy sea still running and shallow water under the ship’s keel, Captain Nares set a young seaman named Edward Winton to sounding. At 12 o’clock, lunch was piped and all but a skeleton crew went below for their midday victuals, leaving Winton perched precariously out on the narrow platform known as the fore-chain.

It was then that Winton’s sounding cable caught round the anchor. One of the marines still on duty reported later that in a frantic effort to free the fouled line, young Winton—25 years old and married only days before he left England—climbed up the anchor chain. At that moment a heavy wave struck the ship, smashing plates in the mess and shaking the ship from stem to stern, causing much hilarity in the mess; but up on deck poor Winton had vanished. It was almost 10 minutes later that the marine noticed the vacant fore-chain. Nares immediately telegraphed the engine room to stop and had the ship put about and set off back over its track. It was to no avail. Winton had been wearing a complete set of thick winter woolens, oilskins, and sea boots, and despite being a strong swimmer had not stood a chance in the heavy sea. After steaming back and forth for an hour the search was abandoned.

Just before sunset Challenger, with a stunned and saddened crew, entered the great sea lake known as Port Nicholson. They made anchor among the other ships at the Queen’s Wharf in Wellington. Joe Matkin wrote, “The passage is over at last and so is the long voyage for one poor fellow . . . drowned in broad daylight whilst performing his duty, and not one of us to see him go or to throw him a life buoy; the ship went steaming on for Wellington and he to his last home.”

The next day both officers and ordinary seamen sent the hat round for Winton’s widow and raised £50. Eventually the memory of the nightmare passage from Sydney began to fade, but if those on board needed any reminder of the treachery of these waters, they got it only a week later when news reached them that the British Admiral, an iron steamer on its maiden voyage out of Liverpool, had struck a reef near Melbourne and went down like a stone, taking with her nearly all of her 80 passengers and crew.

Challenger did not linger in Wellington. The Admiralty wanted her back in Spithead by the spring of 1876 and still she had the vast bulk of the Pacific Ocean ahead of her. But Challenger’s encounters with missing links were not yet over, because Moseley found, among

a pile of rotting wood in the forest outside Wellington, one of the most extraordinary examples in the animal kingdom.

Peripatus is one of those creatures that really do make you believe in evolution, because it is an animal with the body of an earthworm but the appendages of an insect. It is the missing link between the Annelids and the Arthropods. There are about 70 known species of Peripatus from New Zealand, South Africa, South and Central America as well as Australia. The group is normally confined to the tropics but some species are found in the temperate latitudes of the southern hemisphere. There are no northern-hemisphere, temperate-dwelling species.

The formal name for the group to which the species of Peripatus belong is the Onycophora, derived from the Greek word for claws (onychos) and bearer (phoros). The animals range from 1.5 to 15 centimeters long, have between 14 and 43 pairs of walking legs, and exhibit a wide range of color. The name “velvet-worm” is often used for Peripatus because of its soft, flexible cuticle. This soft cuticle allows it to burrow into dark moist crevices and protect itself from the water-loss to which it is especially vulnerable, and its hydrostatic skeleton, which is common to all annelids, supports and maintains its shape. The hydrostatic skeleton is a fluid-filled cavity in the body wall, supported by a layer of smooth muscle, which holds the animal rigid in much the same way the air inside a balloon holds it rigid. Having this skeleton is a major clue that the onycophorans are related to other annelids such as the common or garden earthworm. The other similarity is in the way that Peripatus excretes waste from its body: through a pair of hair-lined ducts called nephridia.

Like other annelids, Peripatus has a truly segmented body (so called metameric segmentation) that confers multiple redundancy on certain body components such as muscle systems. Metameric

segmentation is found in all animals more advanced than the annelids but might be so modified as to be almost unrecognizable externally, as is the case with arthropods. Metameric segmentation of the body into functional units should not be confused with superficial segmentation (for example of legs or other appendages) that is commonly seen in animals such as the arthropods. The legs of Peripatus are quite unique and do not show the arthropod design.

The features that do link the Onycophora to the arthropods are the haemocoel, a blood-filled cavity in the center of the body that serves as the circulatory system for distributing oxygen and nutrients; legs; blood sinuses divided lengthways along the body; a heart structure similar to other arthropods; and jaws derived from modified walking legs.

The Onychophora have a long and distinguished fossil record and indeed are known from that most celebrated of all fossil localities: the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. The rocks in this locality are slightly more than 500 million years old and are a snapshot of the time soon after the Cambrian radiation. The Cambrian radiation is the name given to the explosive increase in the diversity of animals and body plans that occurred soon after the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary (the end of the Proterozoic eon) 540 million years ago. A feature of the Cambrian radiation was the evolution of fossils with hard limey skeletons, which greatly increased their chances of preservation in the fossil record. As a result, the Cambrian radiation marks the beginning of the Phanerozoic eon, the age of visible life.

The Burgess Shale fauna was discovered in 1907 by Charles Walcott, geologist and secretary of the Smithsonian Museum, while on vacation with his family in the Canadian Rockies. One day, while riding along a little-used path, he discovered several blocks of limestone with exquisitely preserved invertebrate fossils in them. He eventually traced their origin to a rock layer high above the path and over the next several summers excavated a quarry there that is still known as Walcott’s Quarry.

The Burgess shale fauna lived on the seafloor in the shadow of a massive carbonate reef, which itself sat just off the western margin of the ancient continent of Laurentia (part of present-day North America). Periodically the reef shed large quantities of mud in the form of slides and it was one of these that entombed the fauna now found in Walcott’s Quarry.

The range of fossils found in the Burgess Shale is extraordinary and many exhibit body plans that have no living counterpart today. It appears that the early Cambrian was a time when evolution experimented with several different body designs and discarded many. Many that did survive are now but a vestige of their former abundance, represented by only a few species. One such group is the Onycophora. All the various species of Peripatus alive today are grouped in a single genus and all live on land. However, the Burgess Shale boasts two marine species of onycophoran, the common Aysheaia and the extraordinary Hallucigenia.

Hallucigenia caused much controversy when maverick Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris first described it in 1977. As you can see in Figure 9, the creature was portrayed as standing on two rows of inflexible spines, its back bearing a row of tentacles that were thought to be some form of feeding apparatus.

It was one of the organisms that defined the Burgess Shale’s reputation for weirdness and was thought to have no living relative—one of the Cambrian’s failed experiments in evolution. A decade later Hallucigenia was compared with a new fossil from a Cambrian site in China. The two looked very similar except that the Chinese fossil had the twin row of spines along the back and the mobile appendages were found to be paired. These were interpreted as legs. Re-examination of Conway Morris’s type specimen (that is, the single fossil declared to be representative of the species as a whole) showed that there was evidence for another row of flexible appendages. They, too, were paired. Hallucigenia had been reconstructed upside down and when it was turned on its head it bore a remarkable resemblance to other fossil onycophorans as well

FIGURE 9 Hallucigenia as originally constructed by Simon Conway Morris. From S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life.

as Peripatus itself. The only unique thing about Hallucigenia were the two rows of stiff spines along the back, which were probably a defense against predators. To put it loosely, Hallucigenia was nothing but an armored Peripatus.

Today, although the onycophorans are merely a remnant of their former diversity, they show several fascinating features. Because they forage mostly at night, they evolved only primitive eyes and use stubby antennae to feel their way about. They have another set of modified limbs, called oral papillae, which secrete a sticky substance that dries on contact with the air but that they can squirt as far as 50 centimeters. They use this to deter predators as well as to capture their prey, insects and other small creatures. The third set of modified limbs on their heads are jaws. With these they break open the cuticle of their prey and inject a corrosive saliva. They then ingest the partially digested flesh through a sucker-shaped mouth.

Little is known about onycophoran reproduction except that the male packages his sperm into a bundle and attaches it to the female’s cuticle. The female’s white blood cells break down the body wall beneath these spermatophores, allowing the sperm to enter her body, where they find their way to her ovaries. Some onycophorans lay the fertilized eggs outside the body but most retain them inside. Certain species even nurture their growing young with a form of placenta, a common strategy in mammals, but rare in invertebrates. The young of these placental onycophorans leave the mother’s body as fully formed juveniles.

Onycophorans, like other arthropods, have a system of narrow pipes or trachea that branch inward from the surface of the body for gas exchange. Above the pharynx they have a well-developed brain that links with the rest of the central nervous system via a pair of nerve cords. These nerve cords reunite near the rear of the animal to form another small brain, an anatomical feature considered primitive among invertebrates.

Although onycophorans have a mixture of traits that effectively make them a cross between annelid worms and the arthropods, they, like the monotremes and the lungfish, are highly modified missing links and, like the monotreme, and the lungfish too, diverged from the main evolutionary line (in this case the line leading to the arthropods) early on.

Challenger’s visit to Australia and New Zealand was an eye opener for the Scientifics. The region was without question rich in the evidence that Mr. Darwin so longed for, intermediate forms between major animal groups. The Antipodes were indeed lands where missing links were no longer missing. In this place the Challenger expedition had found a large part of what it sought, the very echoes of evolution.

Challenger stayed less than a week in New Zealand and forewent the planned trip to Auckland. The weather was foul and Campbell was singularly unimpressed by this depressing outpost of empire. “At Wellington we found the governor staying, so instead of remaining only a couple of days, and then going on to Auckland, we stayed the whole prescribed New Zealand time there, where there was nothing to be seen and less to be done. . . .” The weather was wet and windy and nobody was sorry when they set sail again, on July 7th, for Fiji and the Friendly Isles. Before they left New Zealand, though, Campbell noted one peculiarity of New Zealand house construction. “Earthquakes necessitate building of houses out of wood, slight shocks frightening Wellington occasionally; one in particular 26 years ago partially shook the town down, thereby causing panic.”

On July 10, 1874, Challenger crossed the International Date Line for the first time, arriving in Tonga on July 19. It was a Sunday and the natives, stark naked, flocked out to meet the ship, paddling their outrigger canoes with enthusiasm. But they would not trade on the Sabbath, preferring instead to attend no fewer than five church services. John Wesley’s missionaries had been active on the island for 50 years and the men of Challenger were gratified to observe this successful importation of western culture.

On the Monday Challenger took on board supplies of fresh fruit and meat and then departed the Friendly Isles, heading for Kandavu in the Fiji Islands. En route they spied flying fish of the genus Exocetus as well as humpbacked whales, and enjoyed some of the most spectacular sunrises and sunsets of their entire voyage. At Levuka in the Fiji Islands, Captain Nares granted shore leave to those who wished to go and many of the ratings became involved with the local rum, a noxious brew of such potency that several had to be hoisted back on board like cattle. One young man who had come aboard at Sydney to help make up the deficit left by deserters, drank so much that he became quite mad with the alcohol and had to be put in chains. He was left just outside Joe Matkin’s door. All night long he raved but the next morning was in a pitiful state, with

a black eye that he could not remember acquiring, apologizing to all and sundry and foreswearing drink for evermore. Matkin, though, was not convinced by the young man’s alleged repentance, and noted with some irony, “It is easy to see that his years are numbered for this world.”

On Sunday, August 30, 1874, Challenger returned to Australia, passing through the Great Barrier Reef not far from the low-lying, three-quarter-mile-long hummock known as Raine Island. She was now in the Coral Sea, a body of water that less than a hundred years later would become infamous as one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Second World War. In May 1942, the Japanese Fleet under the command of Admiral Inouye was pressing hard to gain a foothold in northern Australia. But after the debacle at Pearl Harbor the Americans were now ready to put up a fight. Admiral Nimitz directed the carriers Yorktown and Lexington into the Coral Sea to defend not only northern Australia but also Port Moresby in New Guinea. Throughout the first week of May the battle raged and ended with an American victory. It was an important point of the war in the Pacific and thereafter the Japanese were forced, little by little, back to their home islands. To this day the Coral Sea is littered with the wrecks of the warships sunk there. To scuba enthusiasts it makes some of the best diving in the world.

But even in Challenger’s time the Coral Sea was hazardous because of the reef density. She stayed there for only a week at the end of August 1874 before turning west and traveling the last 120 miles that would take her to the most northerly point of Australia, Cape York. She arrived there on September 1, 1874, and anchored off the small community of Somerset. Joe Matkin was unimpressed with the area, describing it as having a “flat sterile appearance” with “not a hill over 600 feet high.” What did impress him, however, was the contrast between the flat monotony of the northern Australian scrubland and the huge mountains, some more than 13,000 feet high, that loomed only 120 miles away, across the Torres Straits, on the island of Papua New Guinea. Not only did those mountains fasci-

nate him, but he knew exactly what they were, describing them as part of a

Joe Matkin knew what he was looking at all right: one of the biggest and most extraordinary marvels that Challenger would encounter in all her epic voyage, the most westerly point of the ring of volcanoes that rim the Pacific Ocean, the so-called Ring of Fire.