The Scientifics began writing the report of the voyage almost as soon as they returned to their home institutions. Their activities were coordinated from the Challenger office in Edinburgh, and subspecialists, such as the noted foraminiferal expert, H. B. Brady, were commissioned to write some portions. But not many years went by before a tragedy befell them that dwarfed even the loss of von Willemoes Suhm. After publishing his own account of the voyage (concentrating mostly on the Atlantic), Charles Wyville Thomson, who had overextended himself for the three-and-a-half years that Challenger circled the globe, died of exhaustion before the first volume of the official report was published. His place as leader of the Scientifics was taken by John Murray who, after consulting with his colleagues, published the first volume under the authorship of Staff-Commander T. H. Tizard, RN, Professor H. N. Moseley, FRS, Mr. J. Y. Buchanan, MA, and Mr. John Murray, PhD, Members of the Expedition.
John Murray was a giant who filled a giant’s shoes. In the end the Report, with all its specialist appendices, ran to 50 volumes, the last published in 1895. By this time the Treasury had wearied of paying for the project and it was Murray who invested a considerable portion of his fortune in completing its publication. Perhaps he felt that this was an appropriate gesture, because his fortune was a direct result of the expedition. While in the Moluccas he had
noticed considerable amounts of phosphate. Returning to the area in later years he founded the Christmas Island Phosphate Company for fertilizer production. This venture became so profitable that before Murray’s own death in a motor vehicle accident (near his home Challenger Lodge, not far from Edinburgh, in 1914) the royalties the company paid to the British government had already surpassed all the costs of the Challenger expedition.
After Challenger’s return, Henry Moseley was immediately elected to a fellowship at his old college, Exeter, in Oxford, where he spent the next several years working up his part of the results of the expedition. During this time he wrote Notes by a Naturalist on HMS Challenger, a charming and sensitive account of the voyage, which was published in 1879 by the venerable London publishing house of John Murray, who had also published Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Moseley’s work on Peripatus, performed during the Challenger expedition, along with his work on corals, was judged so important that he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1887, after which he set off to study the anthropology of the North American Indians of California and Oregon. In 1879 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the highest British honor that a scientist can receive. He was appointed Linacre Professor of Zoology in the University of Oxford in 1881 and immediately threw himself into the task of reorganizing the natural history course and establishing the Pitt-Rivers collection of anthropological artifacts.
In later years anthropology was to become Moseley’s overriding passion. He worked at a feverish pace and eventually his health suffered. Headaches and depression assailed him and complete collapse followed. For more than four years his devoted wife nursed him but on November 10, 1891, four years before the final Challenger report was published, he died of bronchitis at the age of 47. Herbert Swire summed up the man in a letter that he wrote after Moseley’s death: “He brought to his investigations ability and perseverance of no ordinary kind, backed by an originality of mind
and an imperturbable good humor, which made him absolutely proof against all the shafts with which naval wit was never tired of trying the mettle of those whom we called our philosophers. . . . Personally I always looked on Moseley as one of my greatest friends. . . .”
The expedition’s chemist, John Young Buchanan, returned to Edinburgh, where he set up a private laboratory. In later years he had close ties to Christ’s College, Cambridge, and often sailed with Prince Albert I of Monaco on his oceanographic cruises. Buchanan’s chief contribution to the cruise was the debunking of a theory that had been put forward by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, namely that the floor of the ocean was covered in a primordial slime that was even awarded a Latin name, Bathybius huxleyii. Huxley himself was a great proponent of the existence of this mythical creature but it was Buchanan who proved that it was merely sulfate of lime that precipitated in preserving jars when seawater was mixed with the preserving fluid. On hearing the news, Huxley, with characteristic aplomb remarked wryly, “Bathybius has not fulfilled the promise of its youth.” Buchanan died at the age of 82, the last survivor of Challenger’s civilian scientific staff.
Several of the navy men published accounts of their experiences aboard Challenger. To a fascinated Victorian public, certainly the best known of these was William J. J. Spry’s account The Cruise of HMS Challenger published in 1877. It ran to twelve editions, six of them in the first year of publication alone, and was still in print as late as the 1890s.
Lord George Campbell’s account, Log Letters from the Challenger, published by Macmillan in 1876, remains a fascinating and more personal insight into the rigors of such a long voyage.
The letters that Joseph Matkin wrote home were deposited with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as late as 1985 and published in 1993. This is the first time they have been used as the basis for an account of the general and scientific achievements of the voyage of HMS Challenger. As he had promised his mother,
Matkin left the navy and returned home to Rutland before moving to London as a civil servant. In 1880 he married Mary Swift of Oakham who bore him five sons in the 14 years they lived in London. In 1894, the 41-year-old Matkin retired from the civil service and returned with his family to Oakham, where his last son was born. In 1914 he returned to London, having separated from his wife. He died in 1927 from complications following a motor-vehicle accident.
Herbert Swire, despite the illness that assailed him in Tahiti, lived a long and fruitful life. He arrived back at Southampton from South America, having recovered his health during passage aboard the mail steamer Douro, on March 18, 1876, some six weeks before Challenger herself arrived back at Spithead. He was the last of the Challenger men to die, in 1934, and left behind a son who was responsible for the private publication, in 1938, of his beautifully illustrated journal of the voyage.
As we look back from the early twenty-first century, what, then, is the legacy of the Challenger expedition? In truth, its importance can hardly be exaggerated. It set the scene for the plate tectonic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and its discovery of manganese nodules has enabled the exploitation of a vital new resource on the seabed. The cataloging of seafloor sediments by Murray and Wyville Thomson led the way, in the middle of the twentieth century, to the unraveling of the history of climatic change, so vital for our own future on a warming Earth. The appreciation of the importance of missing links found in the antipodes of the British Empire fuelled twentieth-century biology and set the scene for the so-called “modern synthesis” of evolutionary theory, where paleontology and modern genetics were finally welded into a synergistic whole.
But it is the less tangible aspects of Challenger’s legacy that demand attention and respect. It was the first great voyage of scientific exploration, sent out with no other purpose than the
acquisition of knowledge. It was a milestone in the history of humanity, when the importance of learning for its own sake was perceived, not just by a small intellectual elite, but by ordinary people as well. Joe Matkin’s letters show that clearly.
This appreciation of learning answered the God versus Science question too, finally laying to rest the belief that secular questions can be answered by religion. Although the Scientifics, officers, and bluejackets might never have perceived it themselves, in that three-and-a-half-year mission they placed God and the Church in their rightful place: arbiters of the spiritual questions that can never be answered by the methods of science, while showing clearly that scientific questions are properly the province of science.
The most tangible legacy of the voyage of HMS Challenger though must surely be the great ocean drilling programs of the late twentieth century—the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), whose findings I have mentioned throughout this book. There is no clearer indication of the importance of HMS Challenger’s voyage than that the first dedicated scientific drilling ship in history, GLOMAR Challenger, was named after her. GLOMAR Challenger was retired in the mid-1980s when the ODP replaced the DSDP and a new ship, the JOIDES Resolution, was commissioned. Now the Resolution, in its turn, is about to hang up its drill string and the ODP is to be replaced by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) with several drilling ships and platforms, some able to drill in oil-rich areas, places where its predecessors could not go.
Finally, we should remember that two of humankind’s greatest technical achievements were named after HMS Challenger too: the Lunar Module of the Apollo 17 mission, as well as the space shuttle OV-99 that tragically exploded during launch above Cape Canaveral in January 1986, were named after that same, small, Victorian sail-and-steam corvette.
As we honor the Apollo astronauts as well as the crew who lost