Seven-Tenths (22 page)

A vivid demonstration of what deep-sea pressure can do is shown in the experiment beloved by modern oceanographers of sending down with a piece of high-tech equipment an ordinary empty polystyrene coffee cup. It comes back in miniature, a tiny white thimble, all its insulating air cells having collapsed. Yet there seems to be a reluctance to perform this experiment with the body of an animal. I scoured the
Farnella
for a ship’s rat, hoping that if we could kill a brace we might send them down a couple of thousand fathoms to see what ruptured, but this piece of curiosity was greeted with cries of distaste and accusations of being a ghoul.

In all, the
Challenger
covered 68,930 nautical miles and at the end of three and a half years brought back so many samples of marine plants, animals, seawater, sediment dredgings and corings that it took the next nineteen years to process them. By then Wyville Thomson was dead and his place had been taken by his assistant John Murray. The subsequent report, which by 1895 had reached fifty volumes, has been described as ‘the most complete expression of man’s knowledge of the deep sea’.
*
Perhaps as importantly, the enterprise encouraged
similar expeditions by other nations, principally the USA, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. Even Monaco came to hold an honourable position in marine research since Prince Albert I was himself an expert yachtsman and oceanographer who financed his own expeditions. Among his most valuable contributions was a collection of specimens from the intermediate zone which Thomson had thought might be azoic.

Part of the
Challenger
’s achievement was to have laid to rest various misconceptions and to have settled theoretical disputes. Prominent among the latter were post-Darwinian issues concerning living fossils and the Earth’s geological evolution. The short answer to the expectation that the deeps concealed living fossils was that they did not. What they revealed was absolute proof that even the greatest depths were neither immobile nor sterile, and that they supported species which, far from remaining unchanged for 60 million years or more, had evolved their own range of special adaptations.
*
In the mean time, other professional judgements were painfully exposed as incorrect. A few years before the
Challenger
expedition set sail Darwin’s friend and champion, T. H. Huxley, had formulated two hypotheses which became
causes célèbres
, one concerning a notional living fossil of the most primitive kind, the other geology.

In June and July 1857 HM frigate
Cyclops
, while sounding down to 2,400 fathoms, brought up some sediment samples which in due course arrived back in London for examination. Huxley, at the time Palaeontologist at the London School of Mines, had them preserved in strong alcohol and appeared to forget about them until 1868. On re-examining them after eleven years he found a transparent jelly and became convinced that this was a living slime which carpeted the deep ocean floor, ingesting ooze and forming a rich layer of protoplasm which became a food supply for other life forms. As such, he gave it the name
Bathybius haeckelii
in honour of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel had been much struck by Darwin’s theories and was preoccupied with finding a primitive organism which might provide the missing link between inanimate matter and life. The catchphrase of the day was ‘abiogenesis’ or ‘spontaneous generation’, to describe the belief that living organisms could develop from non-living matter. (At a microbiological level this was exploded by Pasteur. In the present century an updated form of the idea was floated when amino acids, the ‘building blocks of life’, were generated in the laboratory by imitation lightning discharges in mixtures of gases thought to approximate Earth’s primordial atmosphere.) Haeckel was convinced
Bathybius
was the basis of all evolution, the original living matter or
Urschleim
. Whatever else, it would have to be a subject for investigation aboard
Challenger
since once Huxley had found and named it everybody else seemed to be dredging up samples and it was important to establish whether this primordial slime could be found evenly distributed throughout the world’s oceans.

For two years
Challenger
found no
Bathybius
and finally the expedition’s chemist, John Buchanan, discovered that he could reproduce this jelly-like substance when he preserved bottom samples in alcohol. He came to the conclusion that this famous protoplasm was no more than calcium sulphate precipitated out of seawater by the alcohol. Thomson at once wrote to Huxley who promptly, and with immense dignity, admitted the correctness of this chemical explanation and his own error. From that moment
Bathybius
was dead,
although several scientists tried in vain to discredit the explanation and its discoverer’s retraction.
*

The second of Huxley’s hypotheses also concerned deep-sea ooze, but in a geological rather than biological context. This was his theory of the ‘continuity of chalk’ which, briefly, stated that deep-sea ooze turned into the chalk deposits found on land, so that the continents were formed of the compacted material of the seabed. The essence of this position was the belief of the day that land could only move vertically up and down, for this was long before men like Emile Argand and Alfred Wegener had proposed lateral movement and continental drift. This gave rise to a debate between those scientists who believed the ocean basins and the high continents slowly traded places, and those who thought basins remained basins and continents continents. The
Challenger
soon put paid to the continuity of chalk theory, too. It found that deep-sea oozes were quite distinct chemically from rock formations on land. Besides, geologists had for years been turning up shallow-water fossils in chalk beds on land, showing they could never have been formed in the deep oceans. The upshot was that no evidence was found either for drowned continents or rising ocean basins. This was a particular disappointment to palaeontologists, zoologists, botanists and others who thought they needed a sunken land bridge to explain how they were finding close correspondences between species of animals and types of geological formation in otherwise widely separated land masses. They, too, had to wait for Wegener as well as for theories of convergent evolution which explained how unrelated organisms can evolve similar shapes and adaptations in response to similar environments.

Behind this gathering of knowledge and the dispelling of misconception and superstition grew a desire to visit the deeps in person. In a way, the development of the submarine from the early twentieth century onwards was merely tantalising, since submarines were incapable of descending deeper than a few hundred feet, scarcely beyond the euphotic zone. Compared with reaching the deeps, this was the equivalent of getting a toe wet. Besides, submarines were war machines, not research vessels, and were far too big. They had the inherent problem of needing to support a large volume of air against great external pressure. This could only be achieved by massive construction, otherwise they would be crushed like a ribcage. Not until the 1930s did a true hero emerge prepared to put his trust in a piece of equipment which Alexander the Great would certainly have disdained.

This was the bathysphere, a name coined by its American inventor, William Beebe. The concept was simplicity itself. A thick-walled steel sphere with a circular entry hatch and a tiny porthole would be lowered like a plummet over the side of a ship on the end of a cable. In effect, it was an eyeball on a string. It could do nothing of itself but carry man’s sight into unseen regions. Beebe’s accounts of those early dives are in a sense laconic, even though shot through with terrifying images of the physical forces involved. The bathysphere was once sent down empty on a test dive and when hauled up was much heavier than usual. As the first bolts of the hatch were loosened needle jets of water sprayed out, showing it was partly full and under great pressure. It was clear to everyone that at some point in the loosening process the entire hatch might blow off, yet Beebe and his companion Otis Barton went on unscrewing the nuts with spanners while standing as far to one side as they could. When it finally did blow the heavy steel plate missed them both by fractions of an inch, flew the length of the deck, humming, and dented a donkey winch. Both men eventually felt the technological problems had been mastered, however, and made a historic series of dives cramped for hours in the tiny space, taking it in turns to squint awkwardly out of the peephole and dictate via telephone what they saw, while a female colleague in the ship far above took it all down in shorthand.
A photograph taken on deck of Beebe emerging from the bathysphere shows the physical toll these long dives took. He is barely able to get through the tiny hole, so stiff is he with cold and cramp. There is no clutter of emergency equipment on deck, no officious bustle of rescue teams dressed in special gear; just a thin man with a lined face wearing slacks and canvas shoes being helped out of a steel ball which looks not much bigger than a large mine. In 1934 he and Barton reached the record depth of 3,028 feet off Bermuda.

When Beebe’s accounts were not laconic they were filled with the excitement of a man who knows he is seeing things which no other human has ever seen and who responds with the keenest aesthetic pleasure. ‘If one dives and returns to the surface inarticulate with amazement and with a deep realization of the marvel of what he has seen and where he has been,’ Beebe wrote, ‘then he deserves to go again and again. If he is unmoved or disappointed, then there remains for him on earth only a longer or shorter period of waiting for death …’.
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Beebe and Barton did go again and again. After their record descent, Beebe observed, ‘When once it has been seen, it will remain for ever the most vivid memory in life, solely because of its cosmic chill and isolation, the eternal and absolute darkness and the indescribable beauty of its inhabitants.’
†
He was particularly attentive to colour and the changes associated with depth. As the bathysphere was lowered through the fathoms Beebe relayed the vanishing of the comforting, warm rays of the spectrum as the colours from red through yellow to green were progressively filtered out, leaving the rest to ‘chill and night and death’. He tried to describe what was left, a paradoxical and strange illumination which was both twilight and brilliant.

I quote Beebe because he is both scrupulous and imaginative, and his text is full of small observations which anyone who is thoughtful about the sea will immediately recognise as authentic, such as that you don’t get wet when you dive, only when you surface. He was much taken by the luminous fish that swam past his window and lamented how much more he must be missing. Alexander the Great, scopic prodigy that he was, had watched a fish so huge it had taken three days to pass. Beebe merely records sadly, ‘A gigantic fish could tear past the window, and if unillumined might never be seen.’
*

Years later in 1949 Otis Barton made a descent off California which increased the world depth record to 4,500 feet, but the day of the bathysphere was done. The next step was taken by Auguste Piccard in his bathyscaphe. This device, which gave him the independence of not having to dangle helplessly on a hawser from a mother ship, was the undersea version of the balloons in which he had been setting world altitude records at the time Beebe was making his first pioneering descents. The bathyscaphe consisted of a pressurised chamber not unlike the bathysphere but slung beneath a large, lightly built tank full of petrol. Since petrol is lighter than water this was the equivalent of a gas envelope, and because the contents were incompressible there was no need for great strength and weight. Ballast took the bathyscaphe down and, once that had been released at the required depth, the flotation chamber brought it back up again. Piccard emphasised the ballooning pedigree by naming his first bathyscaphe the
FNRS 2
. (The original
FNRS
was a balloon named for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research which had supported the project.) Piccard’s account is more technical than Beebe’s, mainly because the engineering problems he had to solve were far more complex.
†
Although its manoeuvrability was very limited, the bathyscaphe was untethered and independent of a mother ship. It might very easily have stuck on the bottom without the remotest hope of rescue, particularly if its flotation tank were holed. Its inventor’s story is a triumphant record of doggedly
surmounting each new technical problem as it arose. His ingenious answer to the question of how to jettison ballast was a case in point. He needed to be able to dump weight in accurately controlled amounts but the pressure outside the capsule precluded any mechanical device passing through it. Apart from the additional danger of leaks, boring holes in the steel shell (which was cast and milled in two hemispheres) would weaken it. His solution was to use steel instead of lead shot as ballast and to jettison it through a separate chute around whose circumference were electromagnets. By pressing a switch Piccard could energise the magnets outside and lock the balls solid, blocking further release.

The bravery of these men seems extraordinary now, and it would be churlish to complain that Piccard was no Beebe when it came to describing what he saw when he went down. The fact is, his brilliantly engineered invention took him down very much further. In 1960 the
Trieste
, the latest version of the original bathyscaphe, reached the bottom of the Marianas Trench at 10,916 metres, some 35,800 feet or better than 6.75 miles. This is as deep below the ocean’s surface as the highest-flying passenger aircraft leaving its white contrails is above it. Effectively, it was the deepest point in the oceans. Quite possibly there are places where this is exceeded by a few metres,
*
but to all intents and purposes man had gone as deep into the oceans as he ever would, just a century after Darwin’s
The Origin
of Species
was first published. Since then, the technology of deep-sea descent has become ever more refined and flexible, permitting proper, if limited, exploration. As with air travel, systems have become very much safer. This is by no means to belittle the courage of men like Robert Ballard, since the possibilities for disaster are still endless, miles beneath the last glimmers of daylight and with prodigious pressures ready to slam shut the tiny bubble of living space at the first sign of a weakening rivet.