Seven-Tenths (21 page)

If it caused a scientist shame in the 1870s to recall the cant of his youth, it is not easy to know how to treat an episode which took place in the House of Commons nearly a century later. On 12 April 1961 the MP Hector Hughes asked the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, Ian Orr-Ewing, certain questions about recent ‘experimental missions’ beneath the Arctic ice cap by the Royal Navy submarines
Finwhale
and
Amphion
. The Civil Lord would give no details, explaining ‘It would not be in the national interest.’ His questioner shifted to the less classified ground of schoolboy physics and the following exchange took place:

The ‘azoic’ theory held into the second half of the nineteenth century. When HMS
Bulldog
resurveyed the transatlantic route for a telegraph cable, soundings were taken down to 2,000 fathoms. When the sounding lines brought up starfish, everyone maintained that the creatures must somehow have become entangled as the lines were being pulled through shallower levels. It was only in 1860 that the theory was finally and unequivocally exploded when a section of telegraph cable was fetched up for repair off the coast of Sardinia. The cable had been laid three years earlier in more than 1,000
fathoms of water (i.e. over a mile deep) and it was found that various marine animals were encrusted on it, their anchoring filaments having worked their way into the outermost layer of insulation. It was quite impossible to argue that they had ‘become entangled’; they had quite evidently grown there. Thus it turned out that the abandoning of the ‘azoic’ theory happened neatly to coincide with the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Practically overnight the almost universal conviction that the deeps were sterile changed to intense speculation that they might actually conceal life forms as well as mineral wealth. As Wyville Thomson was to observe, ‘the land of promise for the naturalist … was the bottom of the deep sea.’ It is perhaps hard now to imagine the ferment which the scientific method was causing in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s wild speculation became common when the abyss was considered in the new Darwinian light which made necessary a complete revision of prevailing ideas about the planet’s history, about man’s position in the ‘natural’ world and about his relationship to a ‘creator’. Two fields of study, geology in general and the fossil record in particular, had an especial bearing on oceanography. In his
Principles of Geology
Charles Lyell had avoided tackling head-on the six-day, Genesis version of creation. Instead, he confined himself to pointing out that the Earth’s features could all quite adequately be explained in terms of the simple physical processes which were visibly still shaping it: tension/compression and erosion/sedimentation. This was elegant and satisfactory. The implications might have raised some eyebrows but few hackles since it concerned only the inanimate world of petrology. The real furore was to come a quarter-century later when Darwin made man and the animals also subject to an evolutionary process which led to notions of trial and error, sports and dead ends, casual extinctions, uncomfortable family connections and – worst of all – to the logical conclusion that
Homo
, far from having been perfected as Nature’s last word, must himself still be evolving. Darwin’s theory also made plain the crucial evolutionary role played by environment. Where conditions were (in geological timescales) fickle and changing rapidly, the species that survived were those which best adapted and
evolved to keep pace with them. It was this idea which, coinciding with the demise of the ‘azoic’ theory of the deeps, generated speculation as to what kind of creature might have adapted itself to conditions hitherto considered inimical to life. All the factors which until so recently had indicated sterility – absence of light, intense cold and pressure, no movement – now suggested the one place on Earth in which to look for unmodified ancient creatures, ‘living fossils’. (The terrestrial equivalent was the search for the ‘missing link’, a hypothetical extinct creature midway between the anthropoid apes and man. Storybook quests such as Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
grew directly out of the notion that living fossils might yet be found on dry land.)

It was as if Darwin’s intellectual leap had caused natural laws to rewrite themselves and the invisible ‘floors’, which until so recently had prevented sounding lines from reaching the deep ocean bed, all collapsed at once – like adamantine membranes – and began letting through an array of plummets, grabs, dredges, corers and other sampling devices. Now dredging expeditions began finding sea animals which resembled fossils. Specimens of a stalked crinoid,
Rhizocrinus
lofotensis
, were brought up from the deep off Norway. No known modern coastal species of this sea lily had a stalk. This was followed by all kinds of hitherto unknown varieties of starfish and sponges from the world’s oceans and further reinforced the idea of ‘living fossils’ which would presumably be more and more archaic the further down they lived. Though completely wrong, this notion did at least give oceanography the last impetus it needed to begin the systematic exploration of the deep.

Now that the problem was no longer conceptual, the major difficulty lay in designing equipment for taking deep soundings and samples. Where sounding was concerned, it was one thing to pay out a weight on the end of a line over the side of a ship but quite another to know when it had reached the bottom, since even the thinnest sounding wire weighed a lot with 2,000 fathoms deployed. Men became expert at judging when the plummet had stopped, keeping a sensitive finger on the line as it vanished overboard. However it was done, it was a laborious process. Thomson recorded that in 1868
aboard the
Lightning
a ‘Hydra’ sounder was used which, weighted with 336 pounds, took 33.5 minutes to reach 2,435 fathoms off Biscay and 2 hours and 2 minutes to heave back up again with a few ounces of grey Atlantic ooze. This system was much modified in detail but little changed until the invention of sonar depth-sounding. Even forty years after Thomson, the young Boyle Somerville aboard the
Penguin
was using a more or less identical process. ‘Birmingham Wire gauge no. 20, galvanised’ was paid out over a 9-inch diameter wheel from a huge drum holding about 6,000 fathoms. The little wheel was connected to a counter graduated in fathoms. There was a complex system of inertia brakes acting on the big spool, automatically gripping and releasing it according to the ship’s motions, thereby maintaining a safe and even tension in the wire. The weight on the end was called a ‘driver rod’, actually an iron tube, and was supplemented by two cone-shaped lumps of cast iron. Despite the brakes on the drum the entire process had to be watched ‘like a hawk’, and in fact they lost 10,000 fathoms (nearly 11.5 miles) of wire, two driver rods and two deep sea thermometers before they were successful. Then, ‘We were the first to see land that came from a depth below sea-level which was just a little more than the height of snow-topped Everest is above it.’
*
The
Penguin
’s skipper had been on the
Challenger
with Thomson and related a story which showed that where certain things were concerned, oceanographers had from the beginning had a sense of the priorities. At first, he remembered, the scientists had attached bottles of beer to their sounder in order to cool them. When they came up again from the icy depths the seals were intact and the corks still in place but the contents found to be ‘the very best seawater’. This method having failed, the beer was set to cool in the samples of ooze dredged up from 2,000 fathoms. This was very cold, about 35°F, and no scientific investigations were made of the sample until the beer had reached its optimum coolness.

Pranks aside, that earlier expedition had marked the high point of nineteenth-century oceanography. At Christmas 1872 HMS
Challenger
had sailed from Portsmouth for what turned out to be a three and a half year voyage. At the time it was the best-equipped (at government expense) scientific expedition ever mounted. Some would argue it remains the greatest of all such voyages of discovery. One of the expedition’s specific hopes was to find ‘living fossils’, and the scientists aboard vainly sifted ton after ton of bottom samples in search of wriggling trilobites. What they did find was life in even the deepest parts of the ocean. The ‘azoic’ theory was by now officially dead, of course; yet it lingered on in vestigial form owing to the technical inadequacy of the sampling instruments of the day. That is, the expedition’s director, Charles Wyville Thomson, observed there was life both at the top and the bottom of the ocean for the simple reason that it was sustainable there. Even the deepest sediments were colonised by organisms such as worms, echinoderms and omnivorous crustaceans, so it was not surprising that abyssal and even hadal (the deepest of all; that is, over 6 kilometres) ecologies could also support highly specialised types of fish. Yet Wyville Thomson still felt sure that the oceans’ middle layer would turn out to be sterile because it lacked nutrients. Such particles as there were fell straight through it and down to the seabed. His problem lay in proving or disproving this. There was as yet no reliable way of taking samples from these intermediate zones without also catching specimens from the upper layer through which a net had to pass twice.

During this long voyage there came a reminder of another enduring myth, and in sad circumstances. William Stokes, a young sailor aboard
Challenger
, was killed in an accident on deck. On the day of his burial at sea, a delegation of his shipmates approached Wyville Thomson and enquired anxiously whether their friend’s body, when suitably weighted, would truly reach the bottom or, as tradition had long maintained, would float at some indeterminate depth. Wyville Thomson was able to reassure them that his remains would indeed reach the bottom. A sounding taken shortly before Stokes’s funeral read nearly 4 miles, at that time the deepest ever measured.

What would happen to the boy’s body on its long fall of over 21,000 feet? A 2-pound cannon ball would take well over half an
hour to reach the bottom. A corpse, far less dense and streamlined, might take hours, assuming it was not attacked and dismembered on the way down. Just as it is impossible at any funeral entirely to suppress anxiety and not wonder, in however fleeting and censored a fashion, exactly what the worms or flames will shortly do, there must have been scientists on deck that day wondering about the effects of pressure on the late William Stokes. (It is most likely that a human body has never been retrieved from such a depth. Although corpses must have been subjected experimentally to enormous pressures to see what happens, the results are presumably buried in the files of naval research institutions.) Wyville Thomson had already written in musing manner: ‘At 2,000 fathoms a man would bear upon his body a weight equal to twenty locomotive engines, each with a long goods train loaded with pig iron.’
*
By now he had got his facts straight about the incompressibility of water.

At some point the air-containing parts of Stokes’s body would have ruptured, principally those of his face, chest and abdomen. The head would not have burst because the cranium contains no air, only incompressible liquids, but the delicate bone honeycombs of his sinuses probably collapsed before water could leak in to equalise the pressure. Sooner or later the chest could have imploded, the broken ends of the ribs coming through the skin. Any air in the gut would probably rupture the abdomen, so if Stokes had been a flatulent boy
it would in the end have been his literal undoing. The pressure would also have been likely to cause stress fracturing of certain parts of his skeleton. There might, for example, have been some splitting around the pelvic crest since the abdominal wall is highly compressible whereas the pelvis is not. The same would have applied generally to any structures of finely divided bone (i.e. not solid and thick as in the femur). Stokes would have arrived on the bottom somewhat smaller than he had been on the surface, especially if he was fat, since fat is more compressible than water. The creatures of the seabed would make short work of his flesh, of course, once they had found their way through the holes his rib-ends had poked through the canvas; yet even his skeleton would not last as long as in a conventional earth burial since bone softens in seawater as its salts are leached out by osmosis. Thus softened, the boy’s remains would have crumbled away beneath the pressure.