Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea

  • Helen M. Rozwadowski
Belknap: 2005. 304 pp. $25.95, £16.95, €24 0674016912 | ISBN: 0-674-01691-2

The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist

  • Carol Grant Gould
Shearwater: 2004. 416 pp. $30 1559638583 | ISBN: 1-559-63858-3

Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss

  • Brad Matsen
Pantheon: 2005. 286 pp. $25 0375422587 | ISBN: 0-375-42258-7
The descent of man: William Beebe (left) and Otis Barton used their bathysphere to explore the ocean depths. Credit: WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY

Deep-sea science is big science. Ocean covers 365 million square kilometres, and most of it is more than two kilometres deep. To understand what goes on down there, you need a ship to brave the high seas and equipment that can reach into the abyss. As today's researchers agonize over grant proposals and publication records, some may yearn for the time when they could chart the depths without worrying about tenure or research assessment exercises. But as these three books charting the history of deep-sea science reveal, that golden age never existed.

Fathoming the Ocean by Helen Rozwadowski chronicles the birth of deep-sea oceanography, from early observations by Benjamin Franklin to the voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s. She weaves a rich narrative from the work of renowned as well as lesser-known oceanographers. While unearthing the foundations of the subject, she reveals some striking parallels with modern research careers.

Like today, there was plenty of job-hopping, with worries about money and research output. When Edward Forbes accepted a chair in botany at King's College, London, in 1843, he also became curator of the museum at the Geological Society of London to boost his income. But he was concerned that he no longer had any time for research, and jumped ship just a year later for a job with the Geological Survey. This strategic jockeying paid off, and he was later appointed regius chair in natural history at the University of Edinburgh.

Then there is the tale of George Wallich, who sailed as a naturalist on the cable-surveying voyage of HMS Bulldog. Wallich hoped the expedition would make his name in scientific circles, as other voyages of discovery had done for T. H. Huxley and Darwin. But it was not to be. Despite initial enthusiasm about his results, Wallich failed to secure election to the Royal Society. Under the financial pressures of supporting his wife and children, he became a photographer instead. He described the prospects of his new career as “more than I could venture to hope for in that muddy sea of science”. His story may sound familiar to today's postdocs-turned-plumbers.

Worrying about funding also occupied the mind of deep-sea pioneer William Beebe. To write The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, Carol Gould was granted unprecedented access to Beebe's personal papers that he had bequeathed to his colleague Jocelyn Crane. Grant's detailed and well organized biography is a treasure. From the waters of Bermuda to the jungles of Venezuela, Beebe was tireless in his enthusiasm for understanding the living world, and he provided the inspiration for many scientific careers.

Brad Matsen's Descent focuses on Beebe's collaboration with Otis Barton and their bathysphere dives. In the 1930s, they plunged six times deeper than anyone before and became the first people to see deep-sea life in situ. “No human eye had glimpsed this part of the planet before us,” wrote Barton, often considered the more prosaic of the pair, “this pitch-black country lighted only by the pale gleam of an occasional spiralling shrimp.” Matsen offers a worthy tribute to their remarkable achievement, and explores the tensions between them. His account is captivating, although not as lavishly referenced as Gould's biography.

In the days before research councils and national science foundations, Beebe was using publicity and popular accounts of his work to charm funds from philanthropists. Like some who popularize their research today, he sometimes encountered snobbery from his academic peers. But deep-sea research has always been newsworthy and captured the public imagination. On 26 April 1857, the front page of The New York Herald hailed the laying of the first transatlantic cable as the “great work of the age”, and illustrated the story with microscope drawings of seafloor sediments. Seventy-eight years later, radio listeners right across the United States and Western Europe tuned in to hear Beebe's voice live from the bathysphere at a depth of 670 metres. Beebe vividly described his visit to another world, three decades before the televised Moon landings.

Most modern grant proposals require applicants to describe the wider benefits of their work to society. Those studying the deep sea can point to examples of medical treatments, industrial enzymes and even tips for making better optical fibres based on the glass skeletons of deep-sea sponges. Rozwadowski describes how early workers highlighted the benefits of seafloor dredging for cable surveys when lobbying for the use of HMS Lightning, HMS Porcupine and HMS Challenger. But Gould and Matsen show that Beebe got funding by promising a payback in the joy of knowledge itself. At the age of 16, he wrote that “to be a Naturalist is better than to be a King”. Taken together, these books reveal how far we have come in understanding the largest habitat on our planet — and how much further we have to go.