In Our Time - The Challenger Expedition 1872-1876

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the voyage of HMS Challenger which set out from Portsmouth in 1872 with a mission a to explore the ocean depths around the world and search for new life. The scale of the enterprise was breath taking and, for its ambition, it has since been compared to the Apollo missions. The team onboard found thousands of new species, proved there was life on the deepest seabeds and plumbed the Mariana Trench five miles below the surface. Thanks to telegraphy and mailboats, its vast discoveries were shared around the world even while Challenger was at sea, and they are still being studied today, offering insights into the ever-changing oceans that cover so much of the globe and into the health of our planet.The image above is from the journal of Pelham Aldrich R.N. who served on the Challenger Surveying Expedition from 1872-5.WithErika Jones Curator of Navigation and Oceanography at Royal Museums GreenwichSam Robinson Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute Research Fellow at the University of SouthamptonAndGiles Miller Principal Curator of Micropalaeontology at the Natural History Museum LondonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, in 1872, HMS Challenger set out from Portsmouth on a four-year mission around the world to explore the ocean depths and search for new life. It's been called the Victorian Apollo mission, and its scale was breathtaking.

The team on board found thousands of new species, proved there was life on the deepest seabeds and plumbed the Mariana Trench, five miles below the surface. Its discoveries were so vast that they're still being studied today, offering insights into the ever-changing oceans that cover so much of our planet and into the health of our planet.

With me to discuss this Challenger exhibition are Sam Robinson, SMMRI Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, Giles Miller, principal curator of micropalientology at the Natural History Museum, London, and Erica Jones, curator of navigation and oceanography, Royal Museums, Greenwich. Erica Jones.

It's sometimes called a voyage into the unknown. What was it in particular that those on the challenge you wanted to know? Well, the 1860s was a really exciting time for oceanographic research. I think that in 1866, that's when the first working transatlantic telegraph cable stretched between Europe and the United States. But even then, they really had a lot of

questions about what was at the bottom of the sea. They needed more information about the ocean floor. And so there were these practical questions needed to lay future telegraph cables. But on the scientific aim, they had so many questions about the deep sea. And a lot of them related to evolution. They had this big question about what could live in the deep ocean. It was this idea that it could possibly be this link between modern and ancient forms of life. They thought possibly a creature called Bathabia's Heckli could be on the ocean floor and the origin of all life on the planet. So they really were looking for these big questions about evolution and the ocean. That was one of the big questions Challenger was looking for.

So what was the kickoff? We've talked about a telegraph, and we've talked about seeing if there's the origins of life down there. What kicked the thing into action? Because it was a massive expedition. It was, and I need to go back just a few years to talk about the lead-up. And you think at this time, again, this question of evolution, you had William Carpenter. He was the vice president of the Royal Society. And he was looking for these ancient forms of life and their relationship to organisms today.

And he worked with her. Charles Weivel Thompson. He was also very interested in zoology and evolution, and they were able to work with the Royal Navy on a few shorter voyages. Now, this is in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic, on two little ships called the Lightning and the Porcupine, and they were able to find life at three and a half thousand meters. And that really sent shockwaves through the international community and that really galvanized excitement to put what they called a great circumnavigation expedition to take those techniques of deep sea dredging around the world.

Who put it together? Well, William Carpenter, he had a lot of political influence being the vice president of the Royal Society and friends in government and he worked with the hydrogifer of the Navy at the time and that was George Richards. Richard was interested in those practical questions. of telegraph cable lane. But together, they really were able to convince the Admiralty

that circumnavigation voyage would be a good idea. Again, working with the Royal Society, they took their idea to Parliament. The funds were approved by the British government, and then they allocate a ship HMS Challenger for the voyage. You've just said a phrase, there'll be sweet music to the years of most people applying to Parliament for funds.

I took it to Parliament, and funds agreed for a four-year voyage around the world, just like that. They knew the right people to ask, that's for sure. Yeah, we all know the right people to ask, but it's getting the right people to answer. They seem to have that, don't they? That's right. It was the right place and the right time. Yeah.

Would you buy those standards an enormous amount of money? It was. It was no small thing, the things they asked for. I mean, the application to Parliament was fantastic. They only asked for three things. They asked for a crew. They asked for scientists to go on the voyage. They asked for everything that was needed. to carry out all of their experiments

and a Royal Navy ship and that was it. So they were really drawing on the existing resources of the empire, but that Royal Navy ship and the crew was really essential. Talking about the ship, Sam, Sam Romison, what did it look like before he became

the Challenger, the ship that they took, a ship that they used? So HMS Challenger was built in 1858 as a pearl-class wooden hold corvette. It's got a steam engine, but it's got a vast amount of about 16,000 square feet. And it's armed before they take it with 22 guns,

of which they take all but two off. And then they replace on the main deck a series of cabins that will become laboratories. And this is the nicest part of the ship. This is in the middle and this is towards the aft of this ship, which is about 200 feet long. It's about 40 feet wide. And it's got a crew of about 197, about 20 officers. And they build all of these accommodations to take.

a very small scientific staff of about six. And all of this work is completely very quickly. But the interesting is the challenge has already been around the world. This is not a new vessel. When it was built, it was sent to Mexico. It's been involved in action. It's served on the Australia station. So it's already travelled quite a long way by the time

it's decided that this will be the vessel that would be chosen for the voyage. And it's a combination of steam and sail that is crucial, is it? If so, why? So it is a ship equipped with a steam engine. about 400 horsepower steam engine, which is quite standard for the time. But it is primarily a sailing vessel. And to travel long distances, you would use the sail. And then to hold station, to take these measurements that the ship was going to take

as its scientific survey, you would use the steam engine to hold your stationary in the sea. And you'd also use the engine to get in and out of port, and you would use it in an emergency. And that's common at the time for what steam power is capable of. if you're going beyond what would be deemed a voyage which could be completely steam-powered like crossing the Atlantic. Going further relies on using sail, which is also cheap. It's cheaper to use sail than coal, especially if you need to go somewhere far, but you don't need to get there very quickly, which is what the challenger was going to do. But using coal entailed going to places where there was coal along the way so they could stock up.

Absolutely. There's not a vast amount of space for coal on the ship, So they plot a voyage that will use what is the great advantage of the British and the Royal Navy in the mid to late 19th century, which is its location of coaling stations and naval ports all around the world. And they visit quite a lot of these. Such as? Such as, well, the first one is Lisbon in Portugal, then Gibraltar, Halifax Nova Scotia, Melbourne in Australia, Hong Kong, the Fiji Islands. The British Navy or the Royal Navy has been very good in locating coaling stations. in all of the places that it wants to exert influence. And Challenger as a Royal Navy vessel can make full use of those.

There were six scientists on board. Can you tell us something about them? The director and leader of the expedition is Charles Weyvel Thompson. He's the professor of natural history at Edinburgh. You have John Murray, who's a naturalist, who's a Canadian-born scientist, who'd had experienced in the Arctic with whalers. You've got Henry Mosley, who's a naturalist as well, who's later involved in the Pitt Rivers donation to the University of Oxford.

You've got John Young Buchanan, who's a Scottish chemist, also at the University of Edinburgh at the time when the expedition sets off. You've also got some non-British scientists. You've got Rudolf von Vilmos Schum, who is a chemist, he's German. He meets Thompson when the North Sea expedition pops into Edinburgh, and he meets Thompson. He's a very late addition. and then Thompson takes a secretary who is also the official artist, which is a Swiss academic called John James Wilde. You mentioned, I think it was 167 crew.

What were they doing? What different jobs did they have? You have an usual complement of officers. You obviously can get reduced to the crew. The crew had been bigger when they needed to man guns. You don't need those crew. So the crew is slightly reduced from what it had been when it had been a fighting ship. But the crew do a whole range of jobs.

jobs from stoking to sailing, the sailing crew and stoking crew, you have what were called idlers, which would be your cooks, your chefs, your carpenters, the crew who don't necessarily serve watches but do other jobs. They become really important in fixing and maintaining scientific instruments on the voyage and part of the crew. And then you have the officers who provide tasks you would expect like navigation, but they're also the surgeons and you've obviously you've got a captain. So you've got a standard Royal Navy crew minus those who would be fighting men,

and so you need a big compliment of crew. But you kept two guns? Yeah, there's various reports as to why they kept two guns. I've got a suspicion that it was because it were going to be too difficult to remove them. Also, Challenger, regardless of where it was going, was expected to take out duties that a Royal Navy vessel would do go into these places. I've hosting dignitaries, firing gun salutes. So you need to have at least some kind of gun,

not really for fighting anyone off. That wasn't anticipated, but more for ceremonial reasons. Thank you. Giles, Giles Miller, much of what was discovered is in front of you on your desk, where you were. Can you tell us what there was and what there is? That's right. Well, I'm extremely privileged to have such an amazing collection at the Natural History Museum. How big is it? That's a very difficult question, because the collection... They're distributed amongst many of my colleagues at the Natural History Museum.

I'm in charge of the ocean sediments deposits, and that include... You mentioned me having something on my desk. That's a piece of rope, which was one of the original pieces of rope used to haul up the deposits from the base of the ocean. But these collections are spread throughout the world. And we did make an attempt through a project run by the Royal Albert Museum in Memorial Museum in Exeter. To try and piece them back together virtually so that somebody can look them up online and see how many there are. And so if you go online, you can actually look at HMSchallenger.net, and you can look at some of the items that we found as we were trying to piece those together.

But really, we were only really scratching the surface. Even now? Yeah, even now, yes. I mean, my colleagues are still discovering items, even at the Natural History Museum, in Farfax drawers that have Challenger labels on them. I've got also a temperature, a thermometer. We've got several of those in the museum in a drawer. We sent one of them around the world, in fact, in our treasures exhibition.

We've also got many, many jars of these sediments. We've also got rocks that have been dredged from the bottom, particularly manganese nodules. We've got many, many types of invertebrates, which were also caught in the dredging nets as they dredge them from the ocean. So you're sending out these huge nets on these very tough ropes, sometimes miles down, and just dredging along the bottom and pulling them up

and then poking around to we find something that can land. on your desk? Well, I was just listening to Sam mentioning about the coal. Actually, I don't think there would be room for any coal because it was probably full of rope. Apparently, they took almost 100 miles of rope with them because they kept losing

rope and sometimes instruments because the ropes would break or get worn, and so they were constantly having to replace the rope. And it sounds like most of the available spaces in the ship were sort of crammed with extra bits of rope to help them in their dredging. But they did.

dredge, they did bring an enormous amount of the surface, out of which we're told to have more than 100,000 objects remaining now and still were available for enticing new study. When they sent down, it was like they sent down these enormous bags, and while they were doing, first of all, they would send down a sounding mechanism, which would basically be a lump of lead, which would sink quickly to the bottom of the ocean.

And at that time, they would need the engines of the boat to hold in place at exact spot, so they could take a good reading of the ocean. the depth of the ocean. And they would simply measure how much rope had gone down. And at the bottom, there would be a small tube which would sample a very small part of sediment. And after they'd done that, they would then send down a dredge. And what this was basically a massive bag with some weights.

And then they would drift gradually in the wind. And that would, as the boat moved, trawl some of the ocean sediments. And when they brought that to the surface, they found that that was absolutely crammed full of mud. And early in the expedition, they found that it was this amazing white, it was the consistency of concrete. The white ooze, you're talking about? This is the glibigirina ooze. Globidurina is an organism called a pheumonifrin, and this ooze has composed almost exclusively of this creature. These are tiny microscopic things, usually less than a millimeter in size. So what was valuable about that?

They had found them in other crews. Erika was mentioning some earlier crews. just earlier. And they had found these oozes in those cruises. So they were expecting to find that. But they didn't know whether they would find it across the whole of the ocean. And in fact, when they began to dredge, they were finding there were variation. Sometimes they had these white oozes and sometimes it was just mud. So what's the value of them now? Well, they contain these microscopic organisms called foraminifera, which are very sensitive to the climate. So these are floating around in the ocean. And they also took plankton sample. from the surface of the ocean at the same time,

and they were comparing them on ship. And one of the things they discovered that was that they were finding the same organisms floating in the ocean as they were finding in these oozes. So clearly the bottom sediments were composed of these sort of planktonic calcifying organisms that were floating around in the ocean at the time. Thank you. Erica Jones again.

The world was becoming much more interconnected at that time. How did that relate to the challenge of voyage? Well, one thing that was going out at this time, was the speed of travel. I mean, it was a time when global capitalism was expanding and you had steamships, trains, and the royal mail actually is a big part of the Challenger story. One of the things that Challenger did, talking about related to what Giles's work, is that it was able to collect the largest amount of data and specimens that had ever been collected from the deep ocean at that time. And how they did it.

it after they collected it from the drudger trawl, they put it on board and preserved it. But then the next trick they had to do was... Preserved it having alcohol. Yes, lots of alcohol. They used thousands of gallons of alcohol. Thick jars? Actually, the jars were the ones that were sold to sell sweetmeats. So it's sort of Victorian treats.

And so Charles Weival Thompson had acquired these before the voyage, hundreds of jars. and boxes ready to be filled with the animals that they discovered. So they filled up these jars on ship, but there wasn't enough room to store them and the hold. So what they did was at certain ports of call, they would ship these back to Edinburgh for study later on. But the other thing that was really important is that alcohol evaporates, and these specimens need to get back as quickly as possible before the alcohol evaporated. and then they would begin to rot.

So they were sent in what was really the FedEx system of the day. And take, for instance, I've studied the story of one mollusk named Carditas Asteroides. And you can track its voyage from the Challenger. It leaves at Sydney, Sydney, Australia. And it's put in a case. And it's great. It's fantastic. They had some really good records on Challenger.

And they tried to write down these long lists of everything that they're, they were descending. Then what? I'd put anything on, Sydney. Then what? Then it went from a steamship to San Francisco. And this was a steamship line that had just been put into operation that year. So I can trace it on that ship to San Francisco. And then from there, it was taken on to the American Transcontinental Railroad, which it only opened in 1869. So these are like really new fast ways of transportation that made it much faster to send specimens from remote parts of the world. We're heading for the East Coast now, so we're on the East Coast with this specimen. Then what? Well, it's taken off the train at New York City and then put on a postal steamer to London.

And then from there, after it's checked by the Admiralty, it goes to Edinburgh University where William Turner puts it in a storage room. And that's where he tops up the alcohol, checks that everything's okay and masses the Challenger collection waiting for them to study these animals when they return. It's an extraordinary journey, isn't it? I mean, just as a very, very lay person, you think, why didn't they spill it?

Why didn't they break? Wasn't there a crash? Didn't all these obvious things happen? None of them did. They got the stuff back to Edinburgh. Well, see, that's one of the great things about challengers is that other voyages they had tried to make these collections before.

The United States exploring expedition they collected a lot of materials, but some of them rotted. And giving you an example, the things that can go wrong, they sent their collection back to Washington, D.C. And unfortunately, that's where a curious administrator opened up the boxes, took them all out, misplaced the labels, and there you don't know where they came from. So a lot of things had to happen right for Challenger to get its information in order. Sam, Sam Robinson, so we've mentioned that the British colonies all over the world at that time,

who joined in. Can you give us some examples? Where the colonies get really involved is in welcoming the Challenger when it comes into port. So the very first sense of how important Challenger will be is when it arrives at its first port in Lisbon, which is obviously not a British colony, but it's our closest ally and longest term. And the Portuguese king is invited onto the vessel

and tours it for an entire hour. They spend two months in Japan in the port of Yokohama. They are honoured with an audience, with the emperor. These are things that are quite unusual and not really been things that scientists in particular have been able to have recognition before. They are welcomed by big parties in places like Cape Town. And so they're a big event when they arrive. What bearing this have on the success of the expedition? They're obviously given a lot of help. I want to always put it into the opinion of the ordinary sailor. The most exciting thing about coming into port is fresh meat. So

one of the things they do is they're restocked with fresh food and they're They fix and do anyone in repairs. The idea is that the ship will keep moving. I think the biggest thing that is the help is the ability to communicate, to pick up on what Eric has just been saying about specimens. One of the things that they're also able to take advantage of with the Imperial Communication Networks is to send early reports of scientific findings to London, which are then published with illustrations in scientific journals like nature,

which is not something that's ever been done before. It's not like this expedition sets off, nobody's talking about it. It's not been, they go around the world. It's reported in the newspapers. It's reported via telegraph in London newspapers, as well as in local regional places. And their scientific results are reported before they even return back to port, back to London.

Giles, Charles Miller, another discovery was the cosmic dust of micrometeorites under the ocean. What did that reveal? This was one of the surprise discoveries of the expedition. They spent a lot of time when the ship was calm enough, looking down microscope, There's some rather beautiful illustrations of those scenes. Micrometeorites are falling all the time.

So if you were to go up onto your roof, perhaps, I don't recommend you doing that now, but to take some sediment or some dust from a drain pipe, you might find a few of them. And they were falling in the ocean, or they are falling in the ocean at the moment. What these can tell us, as they fall through the atmosphere,

they react with the carbon dioxide and the oxygen in the atmosphere. So by studying them, we can tell what the ancient atmospheres were like. The particular ones for the Challenger are really useful to us at the moment because we can go back through millions of years of time and take ancient rocks and do the same thing. We can dissolve them up and find these microscopic cosmic particles. They give us an idea of the age of the universe.

Not necessarily the age, but the composition of the atmosphere in earlier times of the universe. But the issue with those is that, of course, they've been sat at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago. So what the Challenger shows us is it gives us a window on what might be happening to those while they're sat at the bottom of the ocean. I think one of the things that the Challenger scientists thought was amazing about these ferials is that they contained iron. And because there was this question of how in the middle of the Pacific do you get iron? because iron is an element that is absolutely essential to all life, you know, animals and plants. And so that was one of their questions.

How did iron get into the middle of the ocean? And one of the answers was debris falling from space. That was not an answer that anyone expected. You're at sea, and sometimes it's rough weather and so on. It's a very limited space. However, while you're planet out, South. Did they have working methods to work with it? I think that's a really good question.

because it reminds us that a voyage at sea, they had to deal with changing weather conditions, environment, different types of ocean, weather and conditions. And I think one of the things that's also really important to remember is that they learned from people they met along the way. One thing I found in my research is when they went to the Philippines. The Challenger scientists were really interested, and they wanted to acquire this specific type of animal Well, it's a glass sponge. And it's called the Venus flower basket, UPotella.

And it only was found at that time in one place in the whole world. And that was off the island of Cebu. So they got to Cebu, and they asked the local fishermen, where can we find this glass sponge? So the fisherman showed the Challenger scientists where they should dredge. And they did so. But as we've talked about, that they had this very heavy iron dred. And it crushed and mangled these delicate creatures.

And then what the answer was, the local fishermen, they had a very special type of dredge that they had developed. It was made out of bamboo. It was very lightweight. It had about 50 sort of fish hooks on it. And when the challenger scientists used the fisherman's dredge, it gently pulled these glass sponges from the mud. Sam, presumably people in a long way,

where we'd say, what's this? Well, they knew it was a ship, but what are these people doing? What are they doing it? Was it reciprocal? Did the people on the ship find themselves amazed by what was happening on these remote islands? Amazed is an interesting concept. I think what they did do, what we can say they did, is when you're at sea for a long time and the vessel's going very slowly and you're taking a station, so you're taking some samples every three or four days, it's quite monotonous. So getting to any kind of land was quite exciting. And also, gathering specimens or doing geographical work, such as just walking the land and taking recollections of what you were seeing was quite easy compared to doing anything at sea. And so every opportunity was taken when they went on land to stretch their legs. And some of the things they did was to take photographs of local people,

local scenes, local animals. They also, it was said that Royal Navy officers were very keen to shoot as much as they could shoot. So they would happily take their guns and collect as many samples as possible. The best superstitious one was the sailors didn't like anyone to kill an albatross. So they would, but if an albatross would come near, it was very difficult for gentlemen who have a sporting persuasion to not want to shoot albatross. But they'd take any animal that basically they could hunt and they could take a specimen in the sample of it.

And it wasn't just necessarily the scientists. There were scientists on this voyage, but the Royal Navy had spent over many years, had encouraged its officers, especially at surgeons, to take up scientific pursuits, and scientific interests. And so many of the officers themselves had an interest in collecting animals or seeing or viewing or hustling new animals. And it was the sport almost of the Victorian age

to collect all sorts of natural history. So it was quite common in the Victorian area to do this. And officers in particular took every opportunity to when they could. Giles, why did they want to measure the temperature? The first reason was that it was an unknown quantity. But the main reason would be that if you're laying cables at the bottom of the ocean,

you'd like to know what the conditions are down at those depths. There's a little bit of expansion and your cable could break or contraction or however. So that was one of the main reasons for sampling and working out the temperature. But also the things that they were dredging up from the deep, they were very interested to know how they lived, how were they able to live down in those conditions. What was the temperature like in those conditions? and also all the way through the water column.

And they were also studying currents through the ocean, so it was interesting to study some of the temperature variations in some of those areas where the currents were well formed. The main surprising conclusions would be that at the bottom, there was an environment that was okay for things to live. Many of the conclusions before they left were that they wouldn't find anything. There'd be nothing there, or it would be too cold and too dark to be able to find anything at all.

Sam? Yeah, this is the Azoic theory which had been put around by a naturalist called Edward Forbes who'd said that there couldn't possibly be life below 300 metres. And so, or 300 fathoms, they weren't expecting to find much down there

and then recent scientific voyages just before the Challenger had started to disprove this theory. So you wanted to, at this time, and one of the things that Thompson particularly wanted to do was not just collect specimens of life, but also measured. the physical properties of the ocean to understand how life might live in these quite extreme environments and one of the things that they did was to send down a

live rabbit to 500 thalphams to see what would happen to the body it was quite crushed so they were very interested in what kind of life could live down there and what can the conditions were like and temperature was one way of understanding how the conditions were were different to what they were they were very aware that there was a lot of pressure down there from sending bottles down that came back crushed but they They didn't necessarily have any reliable way of measuring exactly what that pressure was. Erica, along the way, we told that people jumped ship and new people came on. How did that operate?

And why? Why did they want to jump ship? I think we've alluded to that one of the important things about HMS Challenger is that it had steam power. So every time that they were using the sounder or the dredge, they were operating under steam power. And the way this worked was they had six. furnaces in the hold, and those had to be filled with coal by hand continuously while they were sounding or dredging. Take, for instance, when they were dredging, that was something that could take all day. They would raise steam around 6 a.m. They'd finally bring up this dredge of all the things

from the bottom of the ocean and the mud about 5 p.m. in the evening. So during that whole time, there were men in the hold shoveling coal. And we know, from contemporary accounts, the temperatures could reach between 40 and some say 70 degrees. So it was extremely hot, noisy. It was a dangerous place to work. And so throughout the voyage, we know that about 60 men did desert. And recent documents have shown me that it was mostly stokers that were deserting along the way. But on the other hand, they were also picking people up as people left.

And I think it's interesting to note that not only did they have the six scientists on board who are rightfully famous, they also had assistants who were helping them. And one of these assistants, his name is William Penibar. And we know about him because we actually have two photographs of him, one on deck and one in the Bermudas. And he was a black man for Bermuda that joined the voyage there. And he was working in the analyzing room all the way until Hong Kong. Hong Kong where he died. So we don't know much more about him, but so people were leaving, but also joining Challenger throughout the voyage.

The voyage took four years, which I think is worth reminding our listeners of in case. I thought he had a long time to be stuck on a ship going around the world, whatever condition. Anyway, that's rather diminishing it. It was a heroic event. Were they still in touch with the world? What they were doing was very much connected to the expansion of what would become the red line, which was the British telegraph cables going around the world. And this was a really important thing.

So I think there was that aspect to it. But again, through as a scientific voyage, exploring the deep ocean, not only was it exciting, but it was breaking new ground. And as Sam mentioned, they were sending reports back to the Royal Society during the voyage, and that information was being communicated to people that way. Also in newspapers, I think everyday people were interested in what, Challenger was doing. And Charles Weival Thompson, he was also a great advocate of giving the science to the people, this popularization of science. And so they were speaking on two different levels,

one to the scientists, but also trying to tell people about what they were doing to educate the British public and also trying to justify all the money that they were spending on this voyage. Was there any rumblings back in London or Edinburgh that all this money was going down the dry and as it were? Not rumblings that I know of. There was certainly concern with how much this was going to, this was costing. The justification for the supporting the Telegraph surveying is it's something the Royal Navy had taken on through the 1860s as the US Civil War had taken the US out of that. And the Royal Navy had done a lot of surveying work for telegraph companies. Where there is the most concern is probably after the expedition with publishing the reports.

The reports are published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office and they cost an absolute fortune. and much later John Murray claims that the amount of science produced by the voyage is more than paid for itself, but still as late as the early 20th century people are complaining about how much money this voyage has cost and continues to cost. It takes until the 1890s for the final volumes of the report, which amount in the end to 50 volumes to be published. Charles, can we talk about these strange nodules that they found around objects like shark's teeth or plankton shells? Yeah, so they found them pretty much everywhere that they went. I mean, they got a bit bored with them after a while because they found so many.

So we do have them in our collections. They're about the size of a potato sort of size. I mean, they could be larger than sometimes smaller. When you cut them open with a rock saw, you find these concentric rings inside. And they're composed of a series of manganese and iron hydroxides with some other minor elements such as cobalt. and nickel and copper. So does that make them very valuable? They are, yes, very much so.

If you imagine how much that might be worth, if you mined the entire nodules from the entire ocean, that would be quite a considerable amount of resource. With such a huge gathering of information, Erica, how was this preserved back in Edinburgh? How do they find the space and the people to look after it? They had a lot of energy in the beginning, and Charles Weival-Thompson, he had a plan.

So in May 1876, he set up what was called the Challenger Office, and that was a place where they would distribute the specimens for study to experts, and as Sam mentioned, as a place to organize the publication of the Challenger scientific reports. And one thing they did as part of this distribution of specimens was to involve experts not only in Britain, but also the United States and throughout Europe. And that was something that was actually very controversial at the time, again, going back to this idea of this very expensive British voyage. And so there was some debate in the press, but then the scientific heavyweight such as Darwin came to support Charles Weival Thompson's view that it should be an international study. These should be the group of experts who know these specimens the best. And so that took a lot of organizations sending these out to the right people. took just the first year. Sam, Sam, Sam, Ramson, can you tell us what changed because of the four years' voyage of the Challenger? So it's often said that the Challenger is the foundation of

modern oceanography, and that's a complicated kind of statement to make. One of the things that the Challenger was doing was actually answering a lot of questions that have been posed since the 1850s. One of the things that it changed was these publications. So there's 50 volumes of reports, which are incredibly vast, detailed, become. the foundation of many scientific institutions dedicated to oceanography that are founded after the 1870s, Edinburgh itself becomes a major site for ocean sciences and international collaboration into the early 20th century. One of the things that it definitely did was, although this comes to an end, one of the things it did was put the Royal Navy onto a continuous mission

to continue to chart and sound the deep sea. You've got to understand one of the things two things that I think a Challenger did that have seemed really mundane but really important is mariners before the Challenger don't really need to do depth sounding beyond 100 thavoms because they're not, they're originally a depth sounding in case the ship runs into rocks

or runs into shores. So it becomes a continuous thing after Challenger to start to take deep sea soundings, which had been done before but it becomes more common and people start to develop techniques that improve dropping a lead on the line. The other thing that Giles was saying is they find a lot of these specimens everywhere. That's an important finding to discover that the natural biosphere of the ocean is the same all over the ocean, one ocean. That starts to become an idea that's seeded in

ocean sciences and for the next 50 years oceanographers work very hard to understand whether we have one ocean or we have separate oceans and that's a debate that's not really closed until after the Second World War when oceanographers really decide that they're dealing with one ocean and you can find things in all of the oceans and it's very similar sort of environment. We've rather neglected one of their purposes, which was to speed the development of the International Telegraph. Well, what we can see is that the expansion of the Telegraph network between 1870s and 1890 was phenomenal.

And Challenger was one part of this. But we have charts in our collection at the National Maritime Museum where you can see that Challenger's information has been added to charts that would live. later be used for ships for cable lane. So Challenger's information is definitely part of this project of such an expansion of the Telegraph Cable Network by the end of 1890s. And that's particularly beyond the Atlantic. So a lot of this work has been laying cables in the Atlantic.

One of the things that the Challenger does in a very deliberate way is zigzag its way across the Pacific to think about how we might lay telegraph cables in those areas. So it's about expanding that ocean telegraphs to, more than just the Atlantic and challenges the beginning of that sort of work and that sort of hydrography work. Charles, what would you say from the legacies of the challenge and the work you do?

Well, as a curator, the collections I think are still remain to be fascinating. And they are a benchmark for what the oceans were like 150 years ago. An example I would give is that at the Natural History Museum, when you're walking in the galleries, you wouldn't know that underneath there are laboratories. where we have CT scanners, for example,

and there are scientists scanning natural history objects all the time. So one of the things that we've been doing is to scan some of these tiny four and peripheral shells. And we've been able to scan some of the Challenger shells and compare them with a similar voyage over 140 years later, the Tara expedition. And they were able to, we were able to look at the thickness of the shells

and compare the oceans from that time and from the Challenger time. And one of the conclusions that we've come to is that it's been quite difficult for the pheumnifera to secrete their shells. The shells are much significantly thinner in the present ocean than they were in the Challenger time. That's likely to be, I mean our conclusion was that that was to do with ocean acidification. And that because of the acidification of the oceans, it's harder for those to calcify. Obviously, we need a lot more data and the Challenger collections are perfectly placed for providing that information. and not just from the one example that we've done so far,

but from the whole of the ocean that was surveyed by the Challenger. So it's still, this length of time on, it's still a valuable resource? Absolutely. I mean, some of the methods that we used were rather crude when we've mentioned the dredging and the trawling. And sometimes those, other than historical value, those collections can be not quite so useful. But on the other hand, you would never be allowed to dredge or trawl

some of those areas of the world now, it simply wouldn't be allowed. So the collections that we have, well, by dredging, you're destroying the ocean bottom, basically. So it's actually not permitted. You have to have permission from the international authorities to be able to do that, and they're unlikely to give you that permission to dredge. Any final thoughts, you, Sam, and you, Erica? Thinking about one of the amazing things they did was this collection of data and materials from around the world. And one of their early questions was the distribution.

of life. And I think one of the most interesting reports was actually published after the Challenger report in 1896 by John Murray. And what he did was he looked at all of the specimens that have been collected by Challenger, where they were placed in the world, and especially comparing those found at northern and southern latitudes. And what he came up with, which I think is one of his most astounding discoveries was through the movement of these animals, where they were found, tracing lines of evolution. He came up one of the,

I think he was one of the very first people to postulate the idea that the oceans in the past were shallower and warmer than they are today, which of course we know is true. And so there you have it. His work really showed that the ocean was not this ancient, unchanging environment,

but it was dynamic like the land and was a place of evolution and change. I think ocean historians are going to debate forever how important the challenger was for the history of ocean science and the foundation of oceanography. I think what's really interesting and fascinating is that 150 years later,

these specimens are still providing new scientific insights and these historic data sets are becoming increasingly important in research around. climate change and the impact of humanity on the planet and they will continue to do so for this foreseeable future. Well, that's shaking your spear in the air ending. Thank you all very much.

Thanks to Erica Jones, Giles Miller and Sam Rumminton and our studio engineer Steve Greenwood. Next week, it's Dragons, Sea Creed, Rheingold and Attila the Hon and the medieval German epic the Niebel Lungen lead. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say that you'd like to have said? There's a subject that's often left out of histories of maritime voyages.

And that's women. Women were definitely part of the Challenger expedition. And if you think of the Challenger report as being its legacy that passed down its research to scientists over 150 years, Women were a big part of making that production of those volumes happen. For one example, Elizabeth Gouland, she was a celebrated artist at the time, also a feminist. Her work can be found in the National Portrait Gallery. She created some really fantastic illustrations that you may have seen associated with challengers, such as the sailors on deck wrestling with a shark or demonstrating how to use the deep sea led.

in line. And so those images, which we see on the internet today, those were made by Elizabeth Gouland. And just another point about women who literally made the Challenger report, looking at where the reports were published, 30,000 pages of text. Those were printed at Neal & Company in Edinburgh. I was able to look at their company records and photographs, and a lot of their staff were women and some children. So women were the typesetters of the Challenger report and literally running the steam presses, which made the reports that were reading today.

Distributing those specimens and collections was really controversial in the 1870s. A lot of scientists who had not necessarily been directly involved in the Challenger but were British scientists, felt that they should get their hands on them first and they shouldn't be sent off to all the experts around the world. But Thompson was adamant, and I think Erica can correct me in this if I get any of this wrong,

but Thompson was adamant that the very best scientists in the world needed to be looking at these specimens because we needed the very best science and we couldn't just make this British so at the end the specimens are sent far and wide with the intention of them coming back into the British Museum at the end, not all of them make it back there are lots of duplicates

but there was a bit of a controversy particularly with British scientists that these specimens were being sent abroad before they were able to look at them yeah it's very interesting you mentioned that being spread wide and the sediment we have that problem with the sediment collections because it's very

easy to subsample them. So you'll find that there are lots of people who say they've got some sediment from the Challenger because you could just put a spoon into the bottle and put it into another bottle and then distribute it around. Some of the collections we have, you open a cupboard and there are literally tens of these massive great jars full of sediment in them. So it has been very easy to distribute. And so there are lots of people who can quite rightly say they have challenger materials in their collections, in their museums, or in their private collections all over the world. Definitely. That's a big part of the Challenger legacy, not only the Challenger Report, but the materials that went around the world. And not only did

the scientists perhaps keep back some of the specimens, which Thompson gave to them, but it was also this, it was a program in the 1890s where the Natural History Museum sent out what they called duplicates to universities and other museums around the world. And they did this to further the science of ocean science in the end of the 19th century. And so some of these specimens ended up at small universities and not just Oxford or Cambridge. And it allowed students to read the challenge reports, look at the illustrations, and then see specimens

that they could then compare for a further analysis. And this was a way of sharing information and furthering research, which is one of the real goals of John Murray. That's why he gave detailed instructions on the techniques, they used and also wanted to have such great illustration. So it all went together, the sort of instructions, the materials. It was really set out for students and future researchers to take this information further. That's what makes this the birth of modern oceanography.

It's that. It's teaching materials and learning materials and research collections. It got to many more people that way than the number of people who engaged with the ship itself. And was it the first on that scale of ocean ocean adventures, as it were? Absolutely. That is the amazing thing about Challenger. They had the largest collection of deep sea materials acquired at that time. And it wouldn't be replicated until much later. And it was because of the cost. And voyages that happened after Challenger thinking about the USS Blake, they were concentrated on smaller areas, such as the Atlantic. And so there were voyages that happened after Challenger that were very important. But those tended to. concentrate in specific smaller areas. Do you think it's anything like it is likely to happen again, Charles? I mentioned the Tara earlier.

I mean, they're continuing to collect materials from plankton from the oceans, but not necessarily dredging the bottoms as the Challenger did. So there are sort of lower levels expeditions, but I think it's very unlikely that the scale and the breadth of the collections that they made and the breadth of the scientific expertise on board would ever happen again. The fact that dredging is not really approved of, does that hold the spread of knowledge back? I don't think so,

because the modern day method of studying the ocean bottoms would be to send down a submersible, for example, where you could go and you could potentially collect small amounts or you could collect individual animals from the bottom of the ocean using one of the sort of arms that they use in submersibles. So I don't think it really prevents that happening in the future. And also video cameras they're using today. And that's another link with Challenger,

that they had an official photographer on board. And of course, back then, 19th century photography wasn't a great fit for oceanography, but video cameras are such an important part of modern-day oceanography. You can send a video camera down and be looking around, and not have to dredge? I think ocean science has become more mission-orientated.

It's a lot more focused on particular questions. There are a whole variety of reasons, particularly you mentioned funding. Earlier on, I think funding is one reason why you have to be more results-driven. You can't be just curiosity-driven perhaps now. But, I mean, there's a lot more ocean science happening now around the world than Challenger did. And I think one example is we also don't use ships so much anymore. We can use satellites to some extent, but we can also use remote science. sensing. So I'll mention the Argo project, which is a use of floating boys that sink, take

temperature measurements, depth measurements, pressure measurements, come back up after a number of days and then uplink their data to a satellite, then sink again and repeat the process. That project in its first phase generated as much data as all of ocean science had created beforehand, and that was just in a few years at the turn of the 21st century. So the way that we do ocean science is now very different. It's not that we couldn't do another challenger. It's that we wouldn't necessarily do it in that exact same way. We'd use different set of tools. Just one thing springs to mind actually mentioning all those different methods of looking at the ocean bottoms. The integrated ocean drilling project has been drilling the ocean since about the 1950s,

and they've got a very good coverage of the entire ocean bottoms. So instead of trawling and dredging, they've been drilling and able to collect the very top surface of the ocean at that time. And also the sediments going down into the depths of the oceans. And those are really useful, for example, looking at the Forum and Ifra can tell us about changes in the climate and across all those different areas of the oceans, across millions of years. So, for example, the last glacial periods, they can be really instrumental in showing us climate variations towards those and how the planets and the oceans have recovered from those. periods. So the challenge goes in. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Now, we might get a cup of tea

if we're lucky. Hi, Simon. Who'd like tea or coffee? Anybody? In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Are you confused about why your mortgage rate is going up? Unsure of what causes inflation or befuddled over what GDP stands for? I've got the perfect podcast for you. I'm Tim Harford. And in my new Radio 4 podcast, understand the economy. I'm taking you active basics. I'm going to explain all the complex financial terms you're hearing in the news as clearly as I can. Inflation, interest rates, growth, bonds, banks, I'll explain it all. Search for Understand the Economy. Available now on BBC Sounds.