Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography, by Doug Macdougall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography by Doug Macdougall Stewart Weaver (bio) Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography, by Doug Macdougall; pp. xvii + 257. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019, $30.00. Doug Macdougall's Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography tells the story of H.M.S. Challenger, a steam-assisted, 2,300 ton, Pearl-class corvette warship of the British Royal Navy. Laid down at Woolwich in 1858, she saw limited service during the Franco-Mexican War in 1862 and was flagship of Australia Station between 1866 and 1870. But her fame derives from her scientific, not military, service. Converted to the work of oceanographic research in 1872, she then set out from Portsmouth on a three-and-a-half-year voyage of discovery that would take her on a meandering course of almost 70,000 miles around the world and through its several seas. The Challenger Expedition (as it is usually called) was history's first major oceanographic undertaking. The brainchild of Charles Wyville Thomson, professor of natural history at Edinburgh University, and jointly sponsored by the Royal Society and the Admiralty, it undertook the first systematic investigations of the physical, chemical, and [End Page 286] biological properties of the deep seas and led to many astonishing discoveries, including that of the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The official expedition report, edited by Wyville Thomson and the naturalist John Murray, ran to fifty sumptuous volumes that in total effectively established the modern science of oceanography and remain touchstones for its study even today. Reflecting on the expedition as he neared the end of the final volume in 1895—some nineteen years after the Challenger had returned to England—Murray felt confident in claiming that it marked "the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (qtd. in Macdougall 241). Macdougall is a retired professor of earth sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the author of several previous books about the earth's history, geological time, ice ages, and the like. He first learned of the Challenger Expedition while studying deep-sea sediments as a graduate student, and over his years as a working earth scientist his interest in the ship's voyage grew, not just on account of its findings—many of which, as Macdougall tells us, have been superseded—but also for its "iconic place in the annals of ocean exploration" (x). The expedition was, he says, the Apollo project of its day, an ambitious, government-funded, "big science" leap into the unknown that captured and then lingered in the public imagination (xii). Many have written about it, starting with some veterans of the expedition itself and, more recently, several historians of ocean science and exploration. But Macdougall is an actual ocean scientist as well as a popular writer; he thus brings both a high level of professional understanding of his subject and a talent for making it accessible. Rather than give us a complete chronological account of the expedition as others have done, he chooses to proceed topically through its various discoveries and particular points of inquiry. We therefore get chapters focusing on extraterrestrial particles, sea-floor sediments, remote island geology, marine shore life (chiefly penguins and crabs), icebergs and glaciers, corals and coral reefs, tropical bird life, and, finally, marine bioluminescence. In each case, Macdougall tends to look forward from the expedition: that is, he takes us from the expedition's discovery or understanding of something—coral reef formation, for example—to how scientists understand it now. Historians might wish for a few more backward glances of the sort in which Macdougall indulges in his discussion of Charles Darwin and coral reefs. But the merit of the forward-looking approach is that it allows Macdougall to educate his readers in marine science and give some context to such contemporary concerns as coral bleaching, polar melt, and ocean acidification. In a quite...