Atlantic (14 page)

Perhaps the most memorable event so far as Darwin was concerned occurred as he was about to leave his home ocean and round the Horn into the Pacific: Fitzroy had aboard the ship three extremely large Fuegian natives, captured two years before as specimens
²⁴
and brought to London to be taught English, clothed, instructed in basic Christianity, and in other ways “civilized.” Now they were being taken back home. Despite their London tailoring, fine manners, and good knowledge of English, Darwin regarded them as little more elevated than animals, and was not entirely surprised when one of them, Jemmy Button (the others were a woman named Fuegia Basket and a man, York Minster; a fourth, who was named Boat Memory, had died of smallpox), reverted to his aboriginal state within days of being dropped near the Horn. Soon after being left, he was reencountered when the storm-savaged ship had to put back into harbor—and to the surprise of the ship’s company he appeared as shaggy-haired and near naked as when first found, two years before. He could not be persuaded, despite Darwin’s entreaties, to return to the ship and come back to London yet again. Though the finches of the Galapagos Islands would eventually reveal much more, these Patagonian unfortunates offered Darwin lessons for his eventual thoughts on evolution: he could say with some certainty from his knowledge of Jemmy Button that the biblical story of human creation was uncertain, at best—for some kinds of clothed men could always revert to nakedness, whatever Genesis suggested took place in the Garden of Eden.

Two expeditions were landmarks in the winning of Atlantic knowledge: the first was conducted by a flotilla of American vessels that set out from Norfolk, Virginia, in the summer of 1838, and the second was the venture by a single Royal Navy vessel that started out from Portsmouth, Hampshire, in the winter of 1872. The former was known somewhat portentously as the United States Exploring Expedition, and in terms of Atlantic history was made more famous by the absence of one invited member who resigned shortly before sailing. The second expedition has come to be remembered, rather more economically, as simply the voyage of HMS
Challenger.
The convoluted fate of the first is still a matter of discussion to this day; but of the second—in more recent times one of the five American space shuttles was named in honor of the single British ship, which testifies to the success of that pioneering sea voyage undertaken almost exactly a century before.
²⁵

The American venture—known more familiarly at the time as the Ex-Ex—was an ill-timed, ill-organized, and ill-accomplished congressional attempt to divine the mysteries of America’s two neighbor oceans, especially the Pacific. Commerce was Capitol Hill’s driving force: the fast-growing American whaling and fur-sealing industries needed new hunting grounds to exploit, and landlubber traders needed new territories with which to do business. Congress offered funds, and then got itself into the most terrible pickle trying to mediate between competing claims of the scientists and the naval officers from which it had to choose to drive the venture out into the ocean. The figure who because of the endless rows chose not to go—but who would nonetheless become nineteenth-century America’s most celebrated oceanographer—was a young naval lieutenant named Matthew Fontaine Maury. His decision to pass on the expedition (he had been invited along as the official astronomer, but decided the organizing civil servant in charge was an “imbecile”) turned out to benefit his own reputation: few of those on this expedition would win much kudos.

For when the ill-assorted gaggle of six ships sailed off toward Madeira in the late summer of 1838, it turned out that scientifically incompetent professional sailors had been handed most of the venture’s more important knowledge-gathering positions. Not that the professional officers were especially good at sailing, either. One of the ships went down in a river estuary and its crew was saved by an African-American member of another ship’s company who plucked them all from the water with one of the locals’ canoes. A sailor on the
Vincennes,
one George Porter, was allowed to be caught up by a trailing rope and swept up by his neck to the main topgallant sail, swinging there a hundred feet above the sea, being slowly strangled to death. (He survived, his neck unbroken but his face completely black for want of oxygen. His first demand on opening his eyes was for a glass of grog.)

Then there was an almighty fuss on Fiji when the Americans managed to insult someone, had two of their crewmen murdered by enraged islanders, and then, in an augury of policies to come, retaliated by burning down a village or two and killing eighty islanders. And to cap it all off, a second ship was lost, this time with all hands, in a violent storm off the other Staten Island—the rugged and unpopulated island off the southeastern tip of Tierra del Fuego, the last gasp of the Andean cordillera before it plunges into the sea.
²⁶

All told the Ex-Ex was a profoundly disagreeable venture, and when the remaining vessels limped back home into New York harbor nearly four years after leaving Norfolk, the commanding officer, a man named Charles Wilkes (who ostentatiously wore a captain’s uniform even though a lieutenant), was cashiered and successfully court-martialed for having punished his men so harshly—especially by having some miscreants
flogged around the fleet,
a peculiarly cruel punishment that allowed bosuns from each ship to have an opportunity to whip the unfortunate man until he was within an inch of his life. There have been subsequent attempts to rehabilitate Wilkes; but his legacy as a captious and rank-obsessed commander, combined with the slapdash manner in which he arranged for the publication of the expedition reports—the last volume emerged thirty-two years after the ships got home—cast a long shadow over what could have been a spectacular American entrance into the world of oceanography.

Yet the expedition’s best-known no-show, Matthew Fontaine Maury, was to redress the balance and restore America’s oceanic reputation, and in short order.

When Maury was offered the position on the Ex-Ex, he was on half-pay leave from the U.S. Navy and working as superintendent of a failing gold mine in western Virginia, close to home. And soon after he turned it down, and with the six ships of the Ex-Ex battling their transoceanic way from debacle to debacle, he was involved in a stagecoach accident in which he broke his pelvis and his legs. The accident effectively ended his career as a seagoing sailor, at thirty-three years old. The turn of events might well have dissuaded him from ever thinking of the sea again. But in fact the opposite was true.

After a stagecoach accident, U.S. Navy officer
Matthew Fontaine Maury
devoted his energies to marine cartography and oceanography. His book
The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology
is a classic. All American naval charts owe their design and accuracy to his pioneering methods of survey and organization.

Nine years earlier Maury had been a junior officer aboard the first U.S. naval vessel to circumnavigate the world, the 700-ton sloop
Vincennes.
He had left New York on a brand-new and much larger vessel, the
Brandywine;
he received orders to transfer to
Vincennes
in port in Chile, after he had endured the doubling of Cape Horn and had written extensive notes about the most efficient way to do so. The journey home was nothing short of remarkable for a Virginia farmer’s son who had grown up on a hardscrabble estate in Tennessee. The vessel sailed home first by way of Tahiti, Hawaii, Macau, the Philippines, Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies. It next plowed on across the Indian Ocean to Somalia, doubled Cape Agulhas, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to take on supplies in Table Bay, before finally crossing the Atlantic to St. Helena and following the constant southerly winds—“a Gulf Stream in the air,” as an enthralled Maury was to write—back to Sandy Hook. The
Vincennes
dropped anchor in Brooklyn a full four years after the
Brandywine
had carried Maury away.

The voyage left him a changed man, a man with a mission—a mission that no amount of rejection and injury could apparently deter. On that long circumnavigation he had learned the most complicated aspects of mathematics, and had consolidated in his mind what would be a lifelong fascination with maps, charts, currents, tides, and winds. Though nine years afterward he would have his career as a deck officer brought to a sudden stop, he was now so obsessed by the sea and its physical mysteries that he managed to persuade his superior officers to give him a deskbound job—first as head of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, and from 1844 as head of the newly formed U.S. Naval Observatory. From this position for the next thirty years he would direct America’s mapping of the seas and all the remarkable phenomena found within them.

Maury’s most enduring triumphs involved the ocean on his doorstep, the Atlantic. Their best-known manifestation was the great map he published in 1854:
A Bathymetrical Chart of the North Atlantic Basin with Contour Lines drawn in at 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 and 4,000 fathoms.
This document, based on the soundings he had ordered taken by as many naval vessels as he could find—which was actually not very many, rendering the map less accurate and comprehensive than its title suggests—left two important legacies.

The first was the incontrovertible evidence brought in by his survey vessels that the deep water of the ocean shallowed considerably along a line that seemed to run roughly north-south halfway between the European and American coasts. He named this shallowing the Dolphin Rise, after one of his ships: it was the first hint of the existence of what is now recognized as the longest and most dramatic mountain chain in the submarine world—the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

And second: the revelations in Maury’s map whetted the appetite of a millionaire Massachusetts industrialist named Cyrus W. Field, who had made his fortune in the paper business. Field had long nurtured the idea that it might be possible to extend the principle of the electric telegraph across the Atlantic. And when he saw the extent of the mid-ocean plateau on Maury’s map, he inquired. The reply was just as he had hoped, for Maury wrote:

From Newfoundland to Ireland, the distance between the nearest points is about sixteen hundred miles; and the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau, which seems to have been placed there especially for holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way. It is neither too deep nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that wires once landed will remain for ever beyond the reach of vessels’ anchors, icebergs and drifts of any kind, and so shallow, that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom.

Little did Maury, or Field, know what the “plateau” was really like—a tortured confusion of peaks and troughs, immense canyons and aiguilles of basalt that would snag and stretch any cable that might be laid. Ignorance of what lay beneath the waves was still profound: the cable layers of those early days—sailors on the USS
Niagara
and the HMS
Agamemnon
first of all, egged on by the eagerness of their equally uninformed investors—behaved like blind men tossing wires from a jet flying across the Himalayas or the Alps. They imagined that their cables would drift like gossamer down onto tracts of endless subsea flatland, but never imagined the sharp summits and ridges and rock-strewn chasms that actually lay below. The very earliest cables, some of them evidently hanging in mid-sea between mountaintops that rose more than two miles high from the abyssal plains, promptly chafed, stretched, and snapped with dismaying frequency. It was not until 1866 that the first permanent link was laid, and for decades afterward cable ships had to scuttle around to repair the breaks that even the well-laid plans set down.

There were other early fears about the cables, too. One shareholder of the Atlantic Telegraph Company wrote to a friend of his assumption that the voices of those who spoke across the line, “subject to such uncommon compression, may only emerge as mouselike squeakings.” It was just one misconception among many: Victorian times were abundantly awash with wonderful imaginings about the ocean. One that was widely accepted for far too long held that because the density of water increases with pressure (it essentially doesn’t, water being all but incompressible), there were zones in the deep sea beyond which objects could not sink—a wrecked iron ship, for example, would descend into the sea until it reached the level where the water became just too viscously dense for it to pass, and it would remain there, hovering, for eternity.

Gradation in the water’s density would reserve different levels for different things, the theory went. Buckets of nails would sink lower than holed rowing boats. Horses would underlie frogs. Dead people would descend to a level determined by their obesity or the thickness of their clothing—with perhaps, as some of the more churchly said, the pressing weight of sins or of a guilty conscience forcing the less virtuous ever lower. In the end the submerged miscellanea filed into weight-related strata—with separate layers of lost cattle, drowned children, unpopular office furniture, sunken oceangoing tugs, executed bandits, hastily dumped six-guns, derailed railway trains, unwanted pets—would be fated to wash eternally around the lower reaches of the sea, a template of the world above, marooned forever in the cold and salty gloom.