Cape York, Australia, September 8, 1874, 10° 56′ S, 142° 40′ E to Yokohama, Japan, June 16, 1875, 35° 28′ N, 139° 38′ E

By the early 1960s Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp’s seafloor maps were revolutionizing geology. The idea of seafloor spreading was catching hold in geology departments around the world and geologists were excited about it. Everybody knew that the old order was changing. The new theory of seafloor spreading was, to the earth sciences, every bit as significant as Darwin’s theory of evolution had been to the biological sciences a hundred years before. But one central question remained unanswered: If new seafloor was being produced at the mid-ocean ridges what was happening to planet Earth? Was it simply getting larger like an inflating balloon, or was that seafloor eventually being consumed somewhere so that the status quo could be maintained?

It was at this point that Heezen’s celebrated geo-instinct failed him, because he chose the expansion explanation. To accommodate the new crust being formed at his seafloor spreading centers, the Earth was simply increasing in size. It was Harry Hess, the chairman of the Princeton geology department, who put the final pieces of the puzzle together correctly. Like Heezen and Ewing, Hess was first and foremost a synthesist as well as being a geologist of wide experience. He solved the spheroidal, three-dimensional jigsaw of

the theory that would come to be known as plate tectonics by announcing the existence of subduction zones, regions of the Earth’s crust where material formed at the mid-ocean ridges is returned to the mantle.

He published his theory in a paper entitled “History of Ocean Basins” in 1962. Crucial to Hess’s synthesis was the memory of a submarine trip he had made as a graduate student to the Puerto Rico Trench (the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean) in 1932. He was accompanying the great Dutch geophysicist, Felix Andries Vening Meinesz, on a mission to measure local variations in the strength of gravity. They discovered that the gravitational field at the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench (and other trenches, as it turned out) was strangely weak. Meinesz suggested that this could be because low-density, continental crust was under these areas, being forced down into the interior of the Earth and displacing the higher-density material of the mantle that should have caused higher gravity in these areas.

In the white heat of the continental drift revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, it occurred to Hess that these trenches at the edges of the oceans were perfect places for the crust being formed at the mid-ocean ridges to be returned to the Earth’s interior. This recycling phenomenon was eventually called “subduction” and the trenches named “subduction zones.” For Hess, planet Earth was like a caldron of boiling water bubbling at the center (the mid-ocean ridges) and then convecting sideways before cooling and falling back into the interior of the pot (the marginal trenches). Quite suddenly, Wegener’s theory of continental drift had the mechanism that it had previously lacked. It was now clear that the continents were carried around the world on the back of the blocks of crust.

As Joe Matkin stared across the Torres Straits at the mountains of New Guinea rising into the haze, he had no idea that he was looking at one of the consequences of these subduction zones, which is that they are almost always accompanied by mountains, specifically, volcanic mountains. This is because as the old oceanic

crust is forced underneath continents—as is happening at the western edge of the Pacific Ocean—water trapped in the rock is released at depths of about 100 kilometers in the mantle. This water, together with gases such as carbon dioxide, accelerates the partial melting of the already-hot crust. The melted rock, being less dense than the surrounding mantle material, starts to rise, forcing its way back up into the crust by locally melting the rocks above it until it bursts out on the surface of the Earth in the form of a volcano chain above the subducting crust.

The formation of volcano chains above subduction zones is almost universal on our planet but the ocean floor is not always subducted simply beneath the edges of continents. In some places ocean floor sinks beneath adjacent areas of ocean floor and the volcano chains form islands. Challenger would arrive at one of the greatest examples of this just a few months later.

On September 8, 1874, Challenger weighed anchor and moved gently out into the Torres Straits. Campbell was not sorry to be leaving the blighted territory of the Cape York peninsula and the difficult circumstances of their anchorage there. “Once more in Australia!” he wrote, “and a horrid country it would be, if it were all like Cape York. The anchorage is in a narrow straight separating a small island from the mainland. Through this straight tides run with the greatest swiftness, necessitating our dropping two anchors, and wearing one’s life out with anxiety during the night watches.”

They were heading north into the Arafura Sea, a broad shallow pocket of water bounded by New Guinea to the east and Timor to the west. Beyond Timor another arc of volcanic islands, barely glimpsed from their current position, curved gracefully northwest. This chain incorporates Sunda, Sumatra, and Java. Between Sumatra and Java, in that year of 1874, lay an island that within a decade would become infamous across the world by blowing its top with a

vengeance and causing spectacular sunsets for years to come: Krakatoa.

Yet as the Australian coast receded into the southern haze, Challenger sailed toward the vestiges of one of the greatest of the European empires, the Dutch East Indies. The heart of this trading enterprise was a group of islands known as the Moluccas. Even in Challenger’s time they were famous across the world as the Spice Islands because of the variety and quality of the spices to be found there. The ship approached Banda, the heart of the Spice Islands, having lingered in the Aru and Ki islands off the west coast of New Guinea, toward the end of September 1874.

Challenger was now in the heart of the Dutch East Indies and for days all aboard had felt the presence of a colonial power that was not their own. It was even more discomforting to know that the heart of that power lay just a handful of miles from England across their own Channel and still more discomforting to be reminded how distant—how very distant—that narrow, precious strip of water was from them now. In this far-flung outpost of the world it was a reminder that the British were not alone in their imperial ambition. Joe Matkin wrote “Our men o’war seldom go this way . . . this route to China is called the Molucca passage and is little frequented by any but Dutch ships, so here they reign supreme and have their own way.” The weather, though, was clement, “calm as a mill pond,” and a welcome relief after the tribulations of the passage to New Zealand.

Banda Island lies just to the south of the island of Ceram (Seram as it was in those days) and was well liked by Challenger’s men despite its use by the Dutch colonial administration as a convict settlement, for it was beautiful. They anchored on September 30, among wooded islands of vivid green. Their anchorage was landlocked between three islands, two tiny and one a “grand volcano cone” said Campbell. The Dutch colonial houses were graceful and large, set back amid cocas, kanary, and nutmeg trees, while the rest of the small town lay half hidden in the foliage of palms. But it was the

volcano that impressed them most, rising 2,200 feet above the tranquil scene, the vast secret bulk of the “ever burning” volcano, Gounong-Api.

The cone was a reminder, if one were needed, that they were still in a land of tectonic unease, “People here expect small earthquakes continually and severe ones occasionally, during which last they are not surprised if all the ships in the harbor are chucked up on to the land, and if all the houses come tumbling down,” wrote Campbell.

The Dutch might have been imperial rivals but the aristocratic young officer was charmed by them. He loved the brightly attired people and the trim, whitewashed houses, each surrounded by its own garden where, in the shade of evening, Dutch families assembled. But he saw too that these same houses were surrounded by high walls, all heavily buttressed against the regular earthquakes.

Challenger departed Banda and its vast nutmeg plantations on October 2, arriving in the Spice Island capital, Amboyna, two days later. There they stayed until the 10th, when they moved on for the island of Ternate to the north. On either side, striding to the north were lines of volcanic sentinels, grim reminders of the fiery temperament of this part of the world.

They made their way through the Molucca passage, past the islands of Obi and Batchian where the clove trees grew in glorious abundance, then past Makian, the old volcano that had exploded in 1646, splitting the peak in two and destroying villages wholesale. On the 15th they passed between the great symmetrical volcanoes that dominated the islands of Ternate and Tidore, and anchored off the town of Ternate in the evening.

Despite the looming presence of the gently smoking peak of Ternate, Campbell’s enthusiasm for yet another earthly paradise fairly bubbled over.

However, earnest Henry Moseley’s scientific interests were not so easily derailed by earthly paradise. He was determined to climb the peak and did so in the company of four Malayan guides and one of Challenger’s sub-lieutenants, A. F. Balfour. They climbed through the cultivated lands of the lower slopes after spending the night in the house of a Dutch plantation official. From two to four thousand feet they ascended through tracts of verdant deep-green forests before entering a region of dense reed. At 4,800 feet they reached an ancient outer crater of Ternate, the quiet home to nothing but bushes, tree ferns, deer, and wild pig. Above them, though, were fields of recently erupted lava. Bypassing these, they eventually came upon the active caldera. As Moseley and Balfour began their final ascent, the native guides’ nerve failed them and they turned tail and ran. Moseley wrote, “We were told afterwards that they have strong superstitious fears concerning the volcano, and believe that if anyone climbs the terminal cone, a terrible eruption and earthquake are certain to ensue.” Moseley appears to have harbored certain doubts of his own about the wisdom of entering the caldera, because he wrote wryly, “It appears as if there might be some real risk in the ascent.”

The view inside the cone was of another world. Billowing clouds of steam and smoke drifted and eddied, obscuring then revealing the tormented reddish rock of the opposite wall. Moseley

and Balfour tried to climb down toward the caldera’s floor but the noxious brew of gases billowing around them forced them back. “It was only possible to descend about twenty yards into the crater,” Moseley wrote later, “and even then the vapors inhaled were very trying. Steam and acid vapors issued from cracks everywhere, decomposing the lava amongst which we passed. In most of the cracks were small quantities of sulfur.” It was some compensation, though, that the view from the top of Ternate was truly spectacular, and Moseley and his companion enjoyed a sight not often seen, because the volcano was seldom climbed. Below them and to the south, the island volcanoes of the Dutch East Indies stretched back along their course, an arrow pointing toward Australia and a crown jewel of their own empire.

But it was time to leave this ailing remnant of another nation’s imperial ambitions, and on October 17, 1874, they left the Moluccas and headed for the Philippines. They arrived in Zamboanga late in the evening of the 23rd. Campbell enjoyed the town, being impressed with the diversity of the Chinese shops there as well as the quality of the wares. “Everything can be got and of the best quality,” he wrote, “from portmanteaus to pate de foie gras, from bewitching velvet—silver, gold and silk embroidered—slippers to Bass’s bottled pale ale. . . .” The romantic and impressionable Herbert Swire was particularly taken with the diminutive ladies of the town. “These young ladies,” he wrote, “. . . had such slender waists, such graceful limbs, in fact were so perfectly formed, that one would never think of saying ‘she is too short for a beauty.’”

At daybreak on Monday October 26, 1874, they left Zamboanga and steamed out into the Basilan Channel bound for Manila, the capital of the Philippines. After pausing briefly at the island of Ilo-Ilo, they reached Manila on November 4. For the first time in several weeks, Campbell was disappointed with a port of call.

Much to his relief, they left Manila on the 11th of November, arriving in Hong Kong on the 16th, where a tremendous shock awaited the ship’s company: Captain Nares had been ordered back to England to take command of the forthcoming Arctic Expedition. Accompanying him from Challenger would be Lieutenant Pelham Aldrich. It was a bitter blow for Scientifics, officers, and crew, but especially for Wyville Thomson. “Professor Thomson was in a great way about it,” wrote Joe Matkin, “and talked about throwing up the whole affair and coming home, but the captain persuaded him not [to]. . . .” In Nares’s honor they threw a grand farewell dinner during which he made a speech saying how sorry he was to go and that he owed his promotion to the zeal of his officers and men. It was with a heavy heart that they said goodbye to the man who had brought them from England to the Far East with such facility and dispatch. But, at least one man aboard harbored lingering doubts about the wisdom of sending Nares to the Arctic. “I don’t think Captain Nares is quite strong enough for such a voyage,” wrote Matkin, “he suffered from “Rheumatics” on the Antarctic trip and he is rather a timid man I think—not enterprise enough for such a command.”

Captain Frank Thurle Thomson of HMS Modesty, and Lieutenant Carpenter of HMS Iron Duke, both frigates on the China station, were to be their replacements. Thomson was due to arrive within days from Shanghai and his arrival was viewed by some aboard with a trepidation succinctly summed up by Matkin, who wrote, “He bears a bad name for tyranny on this station.”

They stayed in Hong Kong for more than two months and on January 6, 1875, headed south again toward the Philippines. South of Mindanao they turned east for Humboldt Bay on the coast of New Guinea. Finding the natives hostile they elected not to prolong their visit. Instead they pushed on for the Admiralty Islands where, arriving on March 3rd, they found a friendlier reception as well as some of the most exquisite native artwork that they had yet encountered. The woodcarving was especially good and because the natives were keen to barter, members of the ship’s company acquired several examples. They stayed in the Admiralty Islands, anchored in the newly named Nares Harbor, for a week, after which they were pleased to be on their way. The islanders, although friendly, lived a life pinned between impenetrable rainforest in the center of the island and the vast Pacific Ocean on the other. Their life was narrowly circumscribed and completely unattractive to denizens of an empire on which the sun never set.

William Spry summarized the feelings of many of the crew, “In the natives of Humboldt Bay and Nares Harbor, we had had an opportunity of seeing man uncontaminated by civilization, and free to follow the bent of his own free will utterly untrammeled by society or customs. Under such conditions man is a degraded animal, and the noble savage as great a myth as the elixir of life.”

For all that, the Scientifics found their time in the Admiralty Islands especially rewarding. Moseley, with his appetite for anthropology, found it among the most interesting places they had yet visited. He couldn’t have guessed that within a century the Admiralty Islands would be converted into American military bases for the U.S. war effort in the Pacific and the native culture totally swallowed up.

The next leg of the voyage infected all aboard with its tedium. Moseley wrote, “A fact often brought home to me before, during the Challenger’s cruise, was tediously forced on our notice on this voyage to Japan, namely that the inmates of a sailing ship on a long voyage suffer far more from too little than from too much wind. We

were constantly becalmed, and our steam power being only auxiliary, and coal being short, we had to lie still and wait, or creep along occasionally only at the rate of a mile an hour.”

Swire noted the tedium, too, and also wrote of its consequence: that tempers were frayed and faces sullen in the wardroom. However, as they approached the Mariana Islands of the western Pacific, he was just about to encounter the one incident on his long journey around the world that would in future years afford him the greatest pleasure. On March 23, 1875, 13 days after leaving Nares Harbor, soundings indicated a depth of 4,475 fathoms or about 27,000 feet. This staggering abyss, now known to be almost 7 miles deep, was by far the deepest part of the seafloor that Challenger encountered. To honor both the occasion and the popular young sub-lieutenant, the Scientifics named it Swire Deep (although sadly, after they had returned to Britain, the name was later changed to Challenger Deep).

We have already mentioned that subduction zones are not restricted to areas where an oceanic tectonic plate is sliding under a continent. Oceanic crust can also be subducted under other oceanic crust, and the Marianas are just such a region. Here the Pacific Plate is being subducted under the Philippine Plate and, like the islands of the Dutch East Indies, a chain of volcanoes has formed above the subducting slab. There are 14 islands in the Marianas chain, which stretches for a thousand miles from Guam in the south to Farallon de Pajaros in the north. The Marianas, like all volcanic chains above subducting slabs, is arced in a vague crescent shape. Why is this? To answer the question, simply imagine that planet Earth is a ping-pong ball. In this mental experiment, press the ball with your thumb to represent the subducting slab. The result is a circular dimple. On a larger scale, volcanic arcs form around the margins of similar dimples on the surface of the Earth. These are the regions where subducting slabs slide back into the interior of the planet.

The Challenger expedition had discovered the deepest part of the world’s ocean at the bottom of one of these arcs. The two

thermometers they sent to the bottom of Swire Deep were retrieved broken by the stupendous pressure of 7 miles of water. Yet when they recovered the sounding tin, it contained traces of mercury from one of the broken thermometers. The implication was obvious: So placid were the bottom-water currents that wherever in the water column the thermometers broke, their mercury dropped so perfectly vertically that the sounding tin landed in the same spot. Many of the crew wondered what it could be like in that unimaginable world, so close—only 7 miles away, after all—yet so resolutely remote. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Swire Deep is that within 90 years, for the first time in its long history, its endless night would be dispelled by a personal visit from the sunlit realms above.

At 4:56 in the afternoon of January 23, 1960, two American navy jets screamed over the water only a handful of miles from the site of Challenger’s position 85 years before. But bobbing on the swell below them as they banked away was not the wood and iron bulk of Challenger but an alien-looking bubble of aluminum, below which was suspended a massive iron sphere. It was the Trieste, the first submersible to reach this deepest part of the ocean floor. Aboard were two men, American naval lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard. Piccard was the son of the man who had invented this strange craft, a bathyscaphe. They had just completed an extraordinary journey, 7 miles straight down to the bottom of the Swire Deep (Challenger Deep, as it was by then called) using the revolutionary new technology of this greatest of deep-sea submersibles. But in truth it was a journey that had started just a year after Challenger returned to Spithead in 1876.

William Beebe was born in 1877 in Brooklyn, New York, and from his very earliest days had an overwhelming interest in natural history. His family often visited the American Museum of Natural

History in New York. So frequent were Beebe’s visits, and so obvious and sincere his enthusiasm, that he soon struck up a friendship with the noted paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Osborn was not only the president of the New York Zoological Society (and, therefore, the museum’s chief executive officer) he was also a full professor at Columbia University and, at the time he befriended Beebe, one of the most influential men in the natural sciences in America. He was also one of the prime movers in the plan to build a zoological park for the City of New York.

In 1896, after Beebe graduated from East Orange High School, Osborn arranged for him to be accepted into Columbia as a special student. Although he spent the next three years there, despite an agreement with Osborn that he would receive school credit for his work for the museum, Will, as he liked to be known, never officially graduated. For the rest of his life Will himself never disabused anyone of the notion that he had received a bachelor’s degree in science from Columbia, but it was not until the late 1920s that he received honorary doctorates from Columbia and Tufts Universities. It was also at about this time that he began to shift his interests away from ornithology into marine natural history. With the aid of a crude helmet, he dived in the ocean and trawled from his yacht, Arcturus, just off the coast of Bermuda.

As a now wealthy scion of American intellectual society Beebe had friends in high places, one of whom was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt listened sympathetically one evening at dinner as Beebe expressed his frustration that so many fascinating specimens were arriving on deck destroyed by decompression (a problem that had also dogged Challenger’s Scientifics). Decompression occurs when animals from the abyss are brought to the surface. Dissolved gases in the animals’ bodies, immensely pressurized in the deep, expand and destroy them as they are brought up. Roosevelt sketched on a napkin a vessel that could go to the bottom of the sea. It was vaguely spherical and looked like a heavily armored bathtub that was sealed at the top. Even in that early version Roosevelt’s vessel had many of

the features that would later come to be associated with the craft known as the bathysphere.

Beebe decided to pursue the idea of building a bathysphere and in 1926 the New York Times published an article publicizing his interest. As a result, his office was inundated with designs for the deep-sea vessel that ran the gamut from a Jules Verne fantasy to plausible design. It is here that the strange and enigmatic character of Otis Barton enters the story.

Barton, an American engineer, was an intensely private man and even today there is virtually no information about his personal life. From an early age he was interested in investigating the deep sea. As early as 1917 he made his own primitive wooden diving helmet complete with glass windows and, weighing himself down with rocks and breathing air pumped down to him from a bicycle pump operated by a friend, used it to investigate the rocky bottom of Cotuit Bay near his home in Massachusetts. Barton’s interests, unlike Beebe’s, were more in overcoming the engineering problems than in natural history. However, recognizing that deep-ocean exploration would inevitably be driven by biological concerns, he studied both engineering and natural sciences at Columbia University. Unlike Beebe again, Barton did not need a conventional job, because he had inherited a large amount of money on the death of his grandfather.

Like much of the American public, Barton was a great fan of Beebe’s exploits and read his books avidly. When he heard of Beebe’s plans to explore the deep ocean, Barton wrote to him expressing interest and informing him that he had a design for a submersible. Beebe ignored the letter because by now he was mightily tired of crank mail containing unworkable designs. Then by a strange stroke of good fortune for science, a mutual friend who knew of their shared interests persuaded Barton and Beebe to meet. They got together on December 28, 1928, in Beebe’s New York office and immediately hit it off. Beebe was impressed by Barton’s design and the great amount of thought that had obviously gone into it.

Barton’s vessel was spherical, an arrangement that combined the maximum strength (because of the even distribution of pressure) with the minimum weight.

They agreed to work together, with Barton funding the design and manufacture of the sphere himself. The New York Zoological Society and National Geographic Society provided additional funding, the latter gaining exclusive publication rights to their expeditions for the next 10 years. The bathysphere, as it came to be known, was manufactured by the Watson-Stillman hydraulic machinery company of Roselle, New Jersey.

It was 5 feet across, had cast iron walls one-and-a-half inches thick, which Barton calculated would withstand the pressure at four-fifths of a mile, and could hold two people. The sphere was tethered to the mother ship, Ready, by a single non-twisting cable seven-eighths of an inch thick and 3,500 feet long. It had a breaking strain of 29 tons. Electricity and communications ran through a metal-cored rubber cable beside the steel support cable and entered the sphere through a specially constructed port.

Entry and exit for the two occupants was through a narrow circular opening whose hatch was secured by 10 large steel bolts with another wing nut placed centrally to allow for quick opening in the case of an emergency. Opposite the door were three circular windows constructed of fused quartz. Each was 8 inches in diameter and 3 inches thick and they were manufactured by the General Electric Company to a design by Dr. E. E. Free of New York University. Free, an expert in the optical properties of materials, chose quartz because it allowed light waves to pass through the glass without distortion. Although five quartz pieces, each costing $500, were initially constructed, only two passed Barton’s stringent fitting and pressure tests, so a steel plug replaced one of the windows on their first dive.

The interior of the bathysphere was cramped and spartan. Two small oxygen tanks, placed on either side of the windows, kept the air fresh for up to 8 hours. Above the windows were wire-mesh

trays filled with soda lime and calcium chloride to remove exhaled carbon dioxide and moisture from the air. The entire apparatus had cost Barton a colossal $12,000. In early May 1930 all was finally ready and Barton sailed with his 11 tons of equipment for Nonsuch Island, Bermuda where Beebe based his operations.

The early dives of the bathysphere were unmanned but not without incident. On the first dive, on June 3, 1930, the massive steel supporting cable and rubber utility cable became so badly entangled that the cable could not be rewound on its reel. They feared that they could not retrieve it but slowly the winch pulled up the massive bathysphere while, inch by inch, the crew pushed the rubber hose down the steel hawser like a vacuum cleaner cord that had become entangled around a garden hose.

When the sphere arrived back on deck they found that the “nontwisting” cable had rotated about itself no fewer than 45 times. On another unmanned test the sphere took on water at depth and when the central bolt was loosened, a stream of water shot out with enough intensity to cut in half anyone who ventured into it. Almost immediately after that, a side bolt came loose and blasted across the deck with the velocity of a cannon shell, gouging a two-inch curl of cast iron from one of the winch housings. It was a sobering reminder of the colossal forces that lurked in the deep.

Eventually all these technical difficulties were overcome and Beebe and Barton, in what must remain as one of the most intrepid explorations of the twentieth century—certainly ranking with Armstrong and Aldrin’s later foray on an equally alien world—were ready to take on the silent landscape. At 1 P.M. on June 6, 1930, Ready’s captain signaled to the bathysphere’s crew chief that he was ready to begin the dive. As the capsule sank below the surface Beebe wrote, “We were lowered gently but hit the surface with a splash that would have crushed a rowboat like an eggshell, yet within we hardly noticed the impact until a froth of foam and bubbles surged up over the glass.” At 400 feet—the greatest depth achieved by the submarines of that era—Barton exclaimed and Beebe turned to see

water trickling in from the seal around the main hatch; but rather than cancel the descent, Beebe requested that their rate of dive be increased. At 525 feet they passed the greatest depth attained by a deep-sea diver in an armored depth suit. They were now deeper than anyone had ever gone before, truly in uncharted waters. At 600 feet Beebe called a halt so that he and Barton could assess the problem of the leaking hatch. Although it seemed no worse, some sixth sense warned Beebe not to continue farther that day. He later wrote, “Some mental warning which I have had at least a dozen critical times in my life spelled bottom for this trip.”

Four days later, after Barton had packed soft lead into the groove around the leaky door’s periphery, the expedition was ready for another attempt. The sphere was lowered empty to 2,000 feet, and brought back to the surface, returning unsnarled and with no evident leaks. On June 11 the team decided that they were ready to go again but this time determined to reach serious depths. At 10:00 A.M. they were winched overboard.

Beebe, by this time an accomplished writer, and mindful of his funding by the National Geographic Society, wrote eloquently and accurately of their descent. They passed through regions where long strings of salp drifted slowly past, “lovely as the finest lace, while schools of jellyfish throbbed their energetic way through life.” At 800 feet Beebe got his first glimpse of a hatchet fish. At 1,000 feet the deep ocean had begun to resemble the night sky, as schools of glowing creatures drifted past the descending capsule. Like the crew of Challenger, Beebe noticed that this bioluminescence was not static but rather shifted and changed. Inside the sphere they found that that were now sitting in a pool of water as the balmy Bermudan air condensed on the cold walls of the sphere.

At 1,250 feet the sphere entered an apparent dead zone where no life was to be seen. For a few startled moments it seemed to the explorers like a strange echo of Forbes’s azoic theory that Charles Wyville Thomson and William Carpenter had confounded 60 years before. At 1,400 feet they stopped. Both were now uneasy. Beebe

wrote, “The water below looks like the black pit-mouth of hell itself.” The pressure at this depth was a staggering 650 pounds per square inch and the view ports were now experiencing a pressure of 9 tons but still the bottom of the ocean was thousands of feet below them. Beebe and Barton had approached closer to the silent vastness of the seafloor than any man alive. They returned from a recorded depth of 1,426 feet to a rapturous welcome.

On September 22, 1932, Beebe and Barton set a new depth record of 2,200 feet. Beebe described “a feeling of utter loneliness and isolation akin to those which might grip the first to venture upon the moon or Venus” as he and Barton dangled alone and helpless in the trackless depths of the Atlantic Ocean. On this series of dives, Beebe and Barton made broadcasting history by transmitting a narrative of their adventures to a spellbound world via NBC radio.

In 1934 Beebe carried out his final series of dives, which achieved a depth of 3,028 feet, more than half a mile down. That was close to the sphere’s limits. It had served them well but at this depth the cable was almost completely unwound on its reel and the captain was terrified that it would slip off the drum and drop the explorers to the bottom of the ocean. Doubtless the sphere would have failed before reaching the seafloor, crushing his friends flat in a second as the pressure of the deep snuffed out the upstart bubble that had invaded the silent landscape, but the thought of Beebe and Barton dying a lonely, long-drawn-out death of asphyxiation must have haunted him too. He allowed them to stay at this depth for only a few minutes before hauling them back. There was a tense moment when a sharp snapping sound rang through Ready but it was only one of the guide ropes that guided the steel hawser back onto the drum giving way.

Despite the radio broadcast, the dives were much more than mere showmanship. After each series of dives Beebe compared his direct observations with those he had made during trawling and dredging operations. He was able to show that certain regions of

the deep were much more populated, particularly by large vertebrates, than tows at different levels would suggest. Clearly the fauna of the deep could see dredging nets coming, and the tows made by Challenger could not have brought up many organisms that were fully representative of the life of the deep.

In 1934 Beebe summarized his dives and observations in a book, called Half Mile Down, which remains a classic. Why he halted his dive program in that year remains something of a mystery. Perhaps, at 57, he felt too old to continue to work in the cramped confines of the sphere. His retirement from the field marked a hiatus in the manned exploration of the deep ocean, which was not resumed until after the Second World War. The craft that resulted from this later phase was the one that eventually lighted the eternal darkness at the bottom of Challenger Deep

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Otis Barton decided to build another sphere and resume exploration. He called the newly constructed sphere a benthoscope and started testing it in August 1949 off the coast of California. Although he set a new record with a dive to 4,500 feet, that signaled the end of tethered deep-sea diving vehicles. To go deeper, progressively thicker walls were needed, and longer cables. For each foot of depth gained, the craft became heavier until eventually no surface vessel could support its weight. Something more versatile was needed, and even as Barton was testing the benthoscope, a Swiss scientist named Auguste Piccard was putting the finishing touches to a deep-sea diving vessel with no need of tethers, the bathyscaphe.

The biggest difference between a bathysphere and a bathyscaphe is that the bathysphere is heavier than water and the bathyscaphe is lighter. While the bathysphere dangles underwater passively at the end of the metal rope, the bathyscaphe, whose living

chamber is still a heavy sphere like that of the bathysphere, is attached to a massive thin-skinned steel tank filled with gasoline. Because gasoline is lighter than water the craft has an innate buoyancy. Only a thin-skinned chamber is needed to contain the gasoline because, like all fluids, it is effectively incompressible.

Auguste Piccard conceived the bathyscaphe in the 1930s but became distracted by the allure of high-altitude ballooning. But in the late 1930s, after meeting Beebe at the World’s Trade Fair in Chicago, Piccard decided to build his craft. He was encouraged by the King of Belgium, who helped secure funding from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), the Belgian scientific research funding council. The bathyscaphe construction program was put on hold during the Second World War but was taken up again immediately afterwards.

The “scaphe” (as it is commonly abbreviated) FNRS 2, was tested on November 3, 1948, off Dakar, North Africa. It suffered damage in the heavy Atlantic swell and 6,000 gallons of gasoline had to be jettisoned, triggering a funding crisis. Auguste Piccard turned to the French government for help. Although interested, they were unwilling to countenance a foreign scientist as the head of the research program. Devastated but desperate to prove the worth of his idea, Piccard handed his brainchild over to the French.

At about this time his son Jacques was finishing university in Trieste, Italy. A professor there heard of Auguste’s plans, became interested, and offered to help him find funding for a new vessel provided that it bore the name Trieste. Overwhelmed, the Piccards agreed and by 1953 the Trieste’s pressure sphere was beginning to take shape in the Terni steel mills just north of Rome. The new pressure sphere was made of a forged steel alloy and was stronger than the cast steel used in FNRS 2. With a diameter of 7.25 feet, and walls 3.5 inches thick, the new sphere could resist a pressure of 10 tons per square inch. The windows of the new vessel were made, not of fused quartz, but of a radical new flexible plastic called plexiglass. The flotation tank contained 22,000 gallons of gasoline,

imparting enormous buoyancy to the craft. Electromagnets at either end of the craft held 9 tons of shot to be released before ascending. The sheer size of the craft made it extremely hard to maneuver and its maximum speed was only 1 knot. Unlike Beebe, who kept the inside of his craft as spartan as he could, Piccard filled his crew compartment with equipment.

So now there were two bathyscaphes: the original that the French had wrested from Piccard, the other built by an unlikely Italian-Swiss consortium. The two were engaged in a race to the bottom. Barton’s benthoscope record was broken in the summer of 1953 when, on August 1, Trieste reached the bottom of the Mediterranean, a depth of 10,390 feet or almost 2 miles. To continue their race, both parties would now have to move to deeper ocean basins.

In January 1954, just off the Cape Verde Islands, the French, in FNRS 2, reached a depth of 13, 287 feet, the floor of the Atlantic in that region, and had just time to survey a field of swaying sea anemones before an electrical fault caused the electromagnets holding the ballast to trip and send them back toward the surface. With true gallic exuberance, the French crewmen aboard, Willm and Houot, celebrated their achievement by opening a bottle of wine and feasting on a packed lunch as their released machine shot them back to the surface.

In the mid-1950s Jacques Piccard was in the U.S. trying to drum up support for a more extensive and scientifically oriented program for Trieste. He was gratified and a little surprised by the level of support he found. But this was the era of the Cold War. Sputnik would soon be launched and the American people were just beginning to wake up to the new and terrifying realization that their supposed technological supremacy was being seriously challenged. America planned to conquer “inner” space with the same fervor with which they were attacking outer space, even if the competitor was not the Soviets but the French.

In February 1957 the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) drew up a contract asking the Piccards to carry out a series of test

dives in the Tyrrenhian Sea between Sardinia and Italy. From July to October of 1957 Trieste made 26 test dives carrying a range of underwater specialists. These tests proved to the Americans the value of bathyscaphes and ONR decided to buy Trieste outright. The Piccards preferred some form of leasing arrangement but ONR insisted on the purchase and eventually they capitulated. Trieste was relocated to the Naval Electronics Research Laboratory in San Diego, California, close to the famous Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla. Infected with space-race fever, the Americans were bullish about their new technological acquisition. Their goal was the conquest of the deepest spot on Earth, the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, off the Pacific Island of Guam, 8,000 miles to the west, discovered 85 years before and originally named for a young sub-lieutenant on an equally epic voyage.

Quietly, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the press, Jacques Piccard began constructing a new pressure sphere. He approached the Krupp Steel Works of Essen, Germany, which had been the principal armaments manufacturer of Nazi Germany, with the project. Although Krupp had lost most of its heaviest steel-making equipment to Yugoslavia as war reparations, the engineers there were confident that they could build the new sphere. It would be made in three parts and joined together so precisely that, they claimed, it would be as though they had forged the sphere in one part. To withstand the staggering pressure of 9 tons per square inch at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the new sphere’s walls were 5 inches thick. It weighed 13 tons in air, 8 in water; the Trieste’s float had to be modified to hold more than 40,000 gallons of gasoline.

Trieste departed San Diego on October 5, 1959. Between November 1959 and early January 1960 she underwent test dives in the waters off Guam, reaching a depth of 23,000 feet—slightly more than 4 miles. The “big dive” was set for January 23, 1960, and Lieutenant Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard were selected as the crew. On January 22, Trieste, towed by the USS Wandank, reached station above the deepest part of the Challenger Deep. Echo-

sounding revealed the depth there, at 11° 19′ 7″ N, 142° 12′ E, to be 35,700 feet, about 10,000 feet deeper than the part of the Deep the Challenger had sounded.

Walsh and Piccard began their 14-hour roundtrip at 8:23 A.M. on the morning of the 23rd. They ran into problems at only 340 feet when they encountered the thermocline layer where temperature and water density change rapidly. The balance between the Trieste’s positive buoyancy and the ballast needed to take it gently down to the seafloor was so delicate that the craft simply bounced off this layer. Piccard had to jettison the gasoline in order to penetrate the layer but in doing so was permanently throwing away a portion of the positive buoyancy needed to return them to the surface. Three more times Trieste had to fight its way through other thermal layers and each time Piccard had to jettison more precious gasoline. With two days worth of oxygen on board they could simply have waited for the gasoline to cool, which would have increased its density and then their journey would have resumed automatically. But the aching cold of the deep ocean was already beginning to penetrate the sphere and Piccard and Walsh were anxious to return to the surface before nightfall.

Navigation was crucial, too. The slot in the ocean floor they were aiming for was less than a mile wide and with the craft’s immense float, they had virtually no maneuvering ability. By 11:30 in the morning the divers had reached a depth of 27,000 feet— more than 99 percent of the water in the world’s oceans was now above them. At 32,400 feet, a massive explosion rocked the bathyscaphe, but they continued their descent anyway, aware that something outside the pressure sphere had broken. But by now they knew that the structural integrity of the mighty Krupp sphere itself was unlikely to be compromised. If it were, they would have known nothing about it. At a pressure of more than 6 tons per square inch, death, in the event of a structural failure, would have been instantaneous.

At 12:56 P.M. a signal registered on the paper scrolling through

the echo sounder. There were only 42 fathoms, 252 feet, to go before they hit bottom. Piccard began releasing steel shot to slow their descent and then, with only 3 fathoms to go, a light-colored ooze came into view. The depth gauge showed 37,800 feet, a depth that exceeded their expectations. They were later to learn that the gauge had been calibrated in fresh water—but their true depth was still a staggering 35,800 feet.

In this amazing place the proof of Wyville Thomson’s and Carpenter’s refutation of Forbes’s azoic theory was immediately apparent, because the first thing Piccard saw as he stared out of the window was a flat fish, its two large eyes staring at him. As the bathyscaphe gently touched down, the fish rose languidly and swam away. The two divers shook hands; they had made it. Then, as Don Walsh stared through an up-angled view port the cause of the explosion became clear. A plastic window in the connecting passage between the sphere and the exit had cracked under the colossal pressure.

After only 20 minutes at the bottom Piccard dropped ballast to start their slow ascent. Gradually they made their way back toward the surface, eventually reaching a maximum vertical velocity of 5 feet per second—almost twice as fast as a commercial elevator. Their rate of ascent was temporarily slowed as Trieste broke through the thermocline layers that had caused so much difficulty on the way down. Even now, the return journey was not without worry, because after many hours of abyssal temperatures the gasoline in Trieste’s float was the same temperature as the water of the Challenger Deep and the craft’s innate buoyancy, compounded by the venting needed to get them to the bottom, was at a minimum. But they reached the surface safely at 4:56 in the afternoon of January 23, 1960. It was then, as they clambered up the scaphe’s ladder to the fresh air and bright yellow sunlight of the western Pacific, that the two navy jets screamed overhead, dipping their wings in synchronized salute to the first humans in history to reach, in person, the deepest part of the silent landscape.

Challenger Deep—Swire’s Deep as it had been originally named—had finally been seen by human eyes.

The good wind that had sprung up 10 days out of Nares Harbor failed again and Challenger inched closer to Japan under all plain sail, to conserve their dwindling fuel reserves. Once again tempers frayed but this time there was nothing to be done, no record “deep” to be found to break the monotony and remind them of the importance of their voyage. It was not until they were almost in sight of Japan on April 11, that the wind picked up and they then made good time up the Gulf of Yedo toward Yokahama, accompanied by sharks, porpoises, and dolphins that had come out to greet the ship. They landed on the 12th and all aboard were immediately impressed with this new land.

Japan had been opened to foreigners only recently, when the empire was reinstated after two centuries of rule by the feudal war-lords known as Shoguns. The last Shogun had been persuaded to resign as recently as 1867 and only since then were certain cities, the treaty ports, open to Europeans. But Japan was embracing contact with new cultures, as well as the numerous trade possibilities, with such enthusiasm that permits for more widespread exploration were not hard to find if one had a good reason and an accredited guide. “You know that Japan is not yet ‘open’ to foreigners,” wrote Campbell, “only in the ‘treaty ports’ and defined boundaries around them and in ‘concessions’ in the towns of Yedo and Osaka, can foreigners come, go, or stay as they list. We, and everybody traveling outside these limits have to get passports which are portentous looking documents and procured through the legations.” For a vessel whose goals were as quintessentially scientific as those of Challenger, there was no question that the officers and Scientifics would be given free rein. Thus began two of the most pleasant months of the entire cruise.

Henry Moseley soon made friends with a Mr. Dickens, a Yokahama-based barrister with a keen interest in natural history. They struck up a firm friendship and together visited Kobe and Kyoto. Moseley’s eye for anthropology remained as keen as his eye for terrestrial biology. He observed how important religion was to the Japanese and how prevalent still was the practice of pilgrimage. “Pilgrimages are extremely popular in Japan” he wrote. “On the journey along the Tokaido (the east sea road), the road was thronged with pilgrims going to the ancient shrine of Ise, the oldest temple in Japan of the Shinto religion, the ancient state religion of the country, of which the Mikado, descended from the gods is the supreme head.” He was delighted to discover the Japanese penchant for the written word and spent a happy few days in the booksellers’ quarter of Osaka. But it was the landscape that attracted his most lavish praise as they traveled. “The land along the road is in the very highest culture. A great deal of it was covered with yellow-blossomed crops of rape, whilst here and there were wheat crops. The straightness of the lines of planting, and the regularity of their distances from one another, was such as I have never seen approached elsewhere in any form of agriculture.”

Herbert Swire’s enthusiasms were more mundane and after a month at sea his libido was, as ever, stirring. “The girls, or rather I should call them Musume (pronounced Moo-ze-me) because I think it is a prettier word, are the neatest little ladies I have ever seen and very many of them are exceedingly pretty. They powder their necks and foreheads and rouge their lips and make no bones about it either.” In Britain in those days make-up was still a rarity so it is easy to see how Swire might have been stirred by such palpably erotic behavior. The Geisha ethos would have been as far away from that of polite London society as the dark side of the moon. Swire was clearly torn between loyalty to the homegrown female and these dusky beauties of the Orient, because he added hastily and with breathtaking condescension, “Of course, I am not going to compare English ladies with these for, setting aside the difference in

brainpower etc there is an immense difference in personal appearance greatly in favor of the English beauty to an English eye.” He was every inch the young empire builder away from home and, like military men through the ages, not above taking his chances, “But the Musumes are so neat and clean, so healthy looking and so good tempered and above all so weak and helpless on account of their delicate build that one really gets quite spoony on them. I don’t get spoony on any one more than another, but I must say I’m very spoony on them all.”

But they were also still in the land of earthquakes. Swire wrote,

Campbell was so keen on Japan that he devoted an entire chapter (entitled “A Peep into Japan”) to it in his Log Letters. However, the word “peep” acknowledges his realization that despite the two months that they stayed, they only scratched the surface of this complex place and culture.

Below decks Joe Matkin reveled in the complexity and richness of Japan even as he wrestled with his grief. Awaiting him when they had arrived was the news that his beloved father had passed away some four months before, while Challenger was still in Hong Kong. He wrote to his mother, saying,

Toward the end of their time in Japan Challenger visited the inland sea, spending time in Osaka before returning to Kobe. Shortly thereafter they returned to Yokahama and then left Japan on June 16, 1875 for the Sandwich Islands or, as they are better known today, the Hawaiian Archipelago. As they left Japan, Campbell summarized the feelings of all on board when he wrote, “Let me advise all those who wish to travel and find real novelty of scene, combined with comfort and cleanliness, to visit Japan.”