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The
Silent Landscape
Prologue
In the early spring of 1990 I flew all
the way around the world.
“There's nothing remarkable about that,”
I hear you say, “in this day and age lots of people
fly around the world.” True enough, but what made
my trip remarkable was that it took me two months despite
being carried by jet airliners almost all the way. In this
age of high technology, my trip took almost as long as Phileas
Fogg's in Jules Verne's epic Around the World in Eighty
Days, and he had been borne by ship, train, balloon, and
camel. The reason for the long delay in my returning to
Britain was that I had spent two months at sea in the southwestern
Pacific Ocean. I joined the JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic
Institutes for Deep Earth Sampling) Resolution, the drilling
ship of the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) in Guam and then
set out on a two-month journey of undersea scientific discovery.
Our brief was to drill into the seabed in the vicinity of
the Caroline Islands, penetrating the submerged yet massive
topographic high known as the Ontong Java Plateau, an area
larger than New York State.
For two months I labored at a microscope,
identifying tiny fossils retrieved by the drill cores from
the ocean floor 2 miles beneath us, working 12-hour shifts,
7 days a week, for 63 days without respite. It was hard
work, I was seasick and there was no privacy. Also there
was the dispiriting knowledge that once the ship left port
there was no way off save in the event of a life-threatening
emergency, in which case the million-dollar drill string
would be abandoned like a discarded syringe and the ship
would sail under full power for the nearest point a helicopter
could reach us. All the time the ship was at sea, it cost
the worldwide consortium that ran the ODP $2,000 an hour
just to keep it operating, so you can understand that they
would not abandon their scientific objectives without good
reason. Knowing that I was effectively a prisoner aboard
a mobile drilling rig, literally on the other side of the
world from friends and family, I count among the hardest
things I have had to endure in my entire life.
When I got off the ship I remember quite clearly
kneeling down on the quayside among the massive containers
in the container port at Agana in Guam, and kissing the
hot concrete in the tropical sun. I felt the freedom of
the condemned man released, the sun shone brighter than
I had ever seen it, the vegetation looked greener than I
had thought possible, and the ground felt so good; so reassuringly
firm and solid. I was never so pleased to be off a ship
in my life and within 48 hours I was home again, safe and
sound in Oxford. Yet that voyage of the ODP, like almost
all its voyages—and those of its predecessor the Deep
Sea Drilling Project (DSDP)—was hugely successful,
adding immeasurably to our knowledge of the way the deep
ocean and the seafloor operates. From the voyages of the
ODP and the DSDP we now know about the intricacies of seafloor
formation, the way that the deepwater in the ocean circulates
and controls the world's weather and climate, the location
of vital energy reserves as well as the places where new
forms of life—and new medicines—are to be found.
My discomfort had actually contributed some
good, added some tiny morsel to the sum total in the human
knowledge database. In the intervening years I have become
proud of what I endured and achieved. Yet with that pride
has come the knowledge that my 63 days at sea were as nothing
compared to the hardships endured by the marine scientists
of another age. Darwin's voyage aboard Beagle lasted five
years after all, and Huxley's aboard Rattlesnake not much
less. Yet there is another voyage of the nineteenth century—indeed
it was the last such voyage of the Victorian era—that
is not so well known, and it single-handedly founded the
sciences that we today know as oceanography and marine geology.
That was the voyage of HMS Challenger.
The Challenger expedition was a scientific
circumnavigation of the world that lasted almost four years
and traversed 69,000 miles. Challenger left Portsmouth,
England, in December 1872 and returned in May 1876, having
traveled as far as the Great Ice Barrier of Antarctica,
visiting Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and South Africa in
the process, before pushing on into the Pacific, visiting
Indonesia and passing not far from the Caroline Islands
where I would one day undergo my own personal and scientific
voyage of discovery. From the southwestern Pacific, Challenger
headed north to Hawaii, then south again before passing
back into the Atlantic through the narrow straits at Tierra
del Fuego. The homeward stretch took her up through the
Atlantic, into the Channel and then, finally, home again.
In the course of its epic 69,000 mile voyage fully a quarter
of Challenger's crew complement of 269 deserted, distressed
by confinement in a ship that was only 200 feet long and
40 feet wide and demoralized by the endless repetitive grind
of dredging the seabed and retrieving what looked to the
untutored eye like lumps of mud.
Despite the stresses and strains of Challenger's
epic voyage, the result was a resounding success. The scientific
report eventually ran to 50 volumes and took 20 years to
complete. A copy of it is deposited in the Bodleian library
of the University of Oxford and it was a chance encounter
with it in the stack room there that first gave me the idea
for this book. But perhaps even more fascinating than the
official 50-volume report are the diaries kept by members
of Challenger's crew. It is from these particularly that
I have drawn the narrative of The Silent Landscape. Several
crewmen and scientists wrote movingly about their experiences
aboard Challenger during those four years: the terrestrial
naturalist Henry Moseley, whose interest in the lands they
visited and vexation with the boredom of continual dredging
was so obvious that he relegated discussion of the dredging
to a single chapter at the end of his book; Engineering
Sub-Lieutenant William J. Spry, whose detailed observations
of land, wind, and sea breathe life into Moseley's scientific
narratives; Navigating Sub-Lieutenant Herbert Swire, whose
irreverent take on the life of the upper decks pricked the
pomposity of the scientists; Lord George Campbell, whose
own diaries illuminate life at sea from the perspective
of a member of the British aristocracy; and finally, and
perhaps most extraordinarily of all, the only surviving
account (indeed perhaps the only account ever written) of
life below decks: the diary of Joseph Matkin, ship's steward's
assistant. Only Matkin wrote about the downside of life
aboard Challenger, the tensions that were the plight of
so many men in close proximity and the effort it took to
stay interested and alert for four long years in a science
that only a handful on board were educated enough to understand.
These accounts, together with the Challenger's 50-volume
report, form the narrative backbone of The Silent Landscape.
But I could not be satisfied with writing
only a historical account of the Challenger expedition,
because if there is one lesson that science teaches us,
it is that it stands still for nobody. It moves forward
inexorably and with increasing rapidity. So The Silent Landscape
is also the science of the Challenger expedition updated,
focusing not just on what the expedition did find but what
it would have found if it had on board someone with a knowledge
of early twenty-first-century biology, physics, and chemistry.
And that person, suitably helped with up-to-date accounts
of modern oceanographic and marine science, will, I hope,
be you.
So prepare to join Henry Moseley, William
Spry, Herbert Swire, Joseph Matkin and the others on board
HMS Challenger on their epochal journey around the world.
Only you have the 20:20 scientific hindsight to fully appreciate
what they found.
Have a good trip.
Richard Corfield
Oxford, 2003
Now
click here to enter Chapter 1. Threshold of the
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