Edinburgh and the Rise of Oceanography1

Abstract

EDINBURGH may be regarded as the birth place and the early home of modern oceanography, and Edinburgh men and Edinburgh ideas played a leading part during the nineteenth century in establishing this comprehensive science of the sea. Oceanography, if of modern development, is of ancient origin. The foundations upon which it has been recently built can be traced back to very early times, to the records of naturalists and the observations of seamen from the voyages of the Phœnicians onwards, and maps have been constructed to show the growth of our knowledge of the oceans from the shores of the Mediterranean in the time, say, of Homer, and later of Aristotle, on to the Atlantic voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the circumnavigation of Magellan in 1522, when the first attempt, so far as we know, was made to sound the Pacific with a 200-fathom line at a spot we now know to be about 2000 fathoms deep. Pytheas, who first passed the Pillars of Hercules into the unknown Atlantic, and penetrated to British seas and brought back reports of Ultima Thule and of a sea to the north thick and sluggish, like a jelly-fish, was an early oceanographer in the fourth century B.C.; and so, coming to later times, was that truly scientific navigator, Capt. James Cook, who sailed to the South Pacific on a transit of Venus expedition in 1769, with Sir Joseph Banks as naturalist on board, and later circumnavigated the Southern Ocean about lat. 60° S., and so finally disproved the existence of a great southern continent.