THE SEA, THE SHIP, AND I: Stories, Things, and Objects from Oceanography during the Cold War

by

Denzil Lee Dawn Ford

B.S., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004 M.A. Montana State University, 2009

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

(History)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

June 2015

© Denzil Lee Dawn Ford, 2015 Abstract

This dissertation examines how and why men on oceanographic research vessels in the middle of the 20th century used storytelling as part of scientific practice. I weave scholarship on literature and science together with the history of oceanography and demonstrate that oceanographers constructed their social world through narration. To begin, I look closely at a diary, memorandum, cartoon, and motion picture and then illuminate how the process of creating these narratives formulated collaboration, persuasive strategy, friendship, and community. Each author used the process of narration to make sense of expedition life and determine how best to proceed as a member of the oceanographic community. I argue that storytelling was not merely a pastime: it formed an integral part of social functioning of science at sea. Inspired by scholarship concerned with things and objects, the study also uses the content of the stories to investigate the ways in which things and objects at sea did four actions: influenced the oceanographic gaze on the Pacific, altered the patronage relationship between oceanography and the U.S. Navy, facilitated the construction of a shipboard ecology built upon collaboration, and came to represent Scripps as the dominant creator of knowledge in the Pacific. While historians have explained how elite actors created the geopolitical arrangements that determined ocean science in this period, this project argues that non-elite scientists, graduate students, Navy crew, and medical doctors recorded everyday experiences on expeditions in stories because their contributions to shipboard life and work were also a crucial component of the development of oceanography at sea during the Cold War.

ii Preface

This dissertation is an original intellectual product of the author, Denzil Lee Dawn Ford.

All correspondence with living members from the Downwind expedition were conducted in compliance with the Behavioral Research Ethics Board at the University of British Columbia. Certificate Number H13-00323.

Permission for use in this dissertation of photographs, images, illustrations, and visual excerpts from archival documents that I collected from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography physical and online archives granted by Lynda Corey Claassen, Director of Special Collection and Archives, UC San Diego Library, August 5, 2014.

Permission to use the personal photograph collection of Alan Churchill Jones granted by Alan Churchill Jones on November 30, 2013. These images appear throughout the dissertation and primarily in Chapter 2.

Permission to use Erwin Schweigger’s map (Image 32) of ocean surface temperature granted by José Alarcón Oviedo, Editor de Texto, Revista de Marina de Chile, April 8, 2014.

The Epilogue was originally published as an online essay for The Atlantic under the Object Lesson Essay Series: Denzil Ford. “The Secrets of the Jumbo Squid: A Writer Imagines the Final Moments and Afterlife of a Squid that Died February 3, 1957.” The Atlantic. Technology Section. January 31, 2014.

iii Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Preface ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv List of Images ...... vi Acknowledgements ...... viii Dedication ...... x Introduction ...... 1 An Unexpected Archive ...... 1 Oceanography in History ...... 7 Bread and Butter: Method ...... 11 Stories, Things, and Objects ...... 14 The Downwind Expedition ...... 25 Dissertation Track ...... 30 Prologue to Chapter 1 Director Roger Revelle’s Sea Search Story ...... 35 Chapter 1 Sea Stories: Narrative as a Social Tool of Science ...... 43 Introduction ...... 43 Storytelling Legacy and Expedition Context ...... 51 1. A Diary Story ...... 59 2. A Memorandum Story ...... 66 3. A Cartoon Story ...... 75 4. A Motion Picture Film Story ...... 86 Conclusion ...... 94 Prologue to Chapter 2 Geologist Bob Norris’ Expedition Diary ...... 97 Chapter 2 Airplanes and Islands: Surveying and “Primitive” Bodies in the Pacific ...... 107 Introduction ...... 107 Seeing the Pacific from Clipper Mohawk ...... 111 The Moonlight Tiki Sneaking Society ...... 127 Conclusion ...... 142 Prologue to Chapter 3 Doctoral Student & Navy Sailor John Knauss’ Memorandum ...... 144 Chapter 3 Ships: The Social Life of Two Research Vessels ...... 146 Introduction ...... 146 Horizon and Baird ...... 151 Translation ...... 156 Articulation ...... 165 Agency in Malfunction ...... 175 Conclusion ...... 186 Prologue to Chapter 4 Maxwell Silverman’s Cartoon ...... 191 Chapter 4 Boundary Objects: Scripps’ Hidden Shipboard Ecology ...... 192 Introduction ...... 192 Heterogeneity ...... 204 Index Maps ...... 210 Explosives ...... 221

iv Conclusion ...... 230 Prologue to Chapter 5 Medical Doctor Robert Bingham’s Film ...... 232 Chapter 5 Photographs and Film: The Entire Pacific Basin as Scripps’ Domain ...... 240 Introduction ...... 240 The Collections ...... 251 The Underside of Innocence ...... 270 Conclusion ...... 287 Conclusion ...... 289 Epilogue: Imagining A Voice from the Deep ...... 295 Bibliography ...... 302

v List of Images

Image 1: Maxwell Silverman's Drawing of Roger Revelle ...... 83 Image 2: Pages 52 and 53 of Robert Norris' Diary...... 102 Image 3: Airplane propeller travelling to Downwind over Guatemala ...... 114 Image 4: Panagra DC-6 [named Clipper Mohawk] unloading in San Salvador ...... 114 Image 5: Volcano at Atitlan, Guatemala ...... 115 Image 6: Robert Fisher with child at Saksaywaman, Cusco, Peru...... 116 Image 7: Lake Nicaraguas ...... 116 Image 8: Coastal dunes near Chancayao, Peru ...... 117 Image 9: Transition to Andean Peaks ...... 117 Image 10: Chilean central coast...... 121 Image 11: Guano Islands, central coast, Chile ...... 122 Image 12: Peak from 22,000 foot altitude (unpressurized) ...... 122 Image 13: Islas Hormigas off Callao, Peru ...... 123 Image 14: Islas Hormigas off Callao, Peru ...... 124 Image 15: Cap Roggeveen, Easter Island from Baird ...... 128 Image 16: Walking tour through Easter Island farm ...... 130 Image 17: Robert Norris and women from Easter Island ...... 131 Image 18: Easter Island church of Father Sebastian Englert...... 131 Image 19: Easter Island Ranch house ...... 133 Image 20: Tour of Easter Island in Chilean military jeep ...... 136 Image 21: Alan Jones and Moai on Easter Island ...... 137 Image 22: 33-inch Moai carved in wood ...... 138 Image 23: Navy crew meet people from Easter Island ...... 139 Image 24: Research Vessel Horizon, 1957 ...... 153 Image 25: Reserach Vessel Baird, 1952 ...... 154 Image 26: Exchanging goods between Horizon and Baird on Downwind ...... 154 Image 27: Berthing compartment on Baird, 1952 ...... 173 Image 28: Research Vessel Horizon, 1953 ...... 177 Image 29: Maxwell Silverman's Downwind cartoon ...... 191 Image 30: Figure 15 from Preliminary Report on Downwind ...... 214 Image 31: Figure 8 from Preliminary Report on Downwind ...... 217 Image 32: Erwin Schweigger's map of ocean surface temperature ...... 219 Image 33: Sketch of depth-sounding sonar ...... 223 Image 34: Near surface TNT shot from Baird ...... 225 Image 35: Fruit vendors, Callao ...... 253 Image 36: Carreta with oxen ...... 253 Image 37: RLF [Bob Fisher], small girl, Sacsayhauman [sic]...... 254 Image 38: Nubile Chilenas ...... 254 Image 39: Chilean Navy officers, Norris Rakestraw center ...... 255 Image 40: Equator initiation ...... 255 Image 41: George Hohnhaus dunking pollywog ...... 256 Image 42: Bob Norris being dunked ...... 256 Image 43: Giant [sic actually jumbo] squid ...... 256 Image 44: Alan Jones for scale ...... 257 Image 45: Moai inventoried number 284 by Sebastian Englert...... 258

vi Image 46: Final Downwind sunset ...... 258 Image 47: Crossing the line: King Neptune ...... 261 Image 48: Crossing the line: men on deck ...... 261 Image 49: Crossing the line: cheering...... 261 Image 50: Crossing the line: pollywog ...... 262 Image 51: Launching temperature probe ...... 265 Image 52: Bob Norris, Pasamay, Peru sand dunes ...... 266 Image 53: Mataveri Airport, Easter Island Image ...... 266 Image 54: Bob Fisher at Pasamayo, Peru sand dunes...... 266

vii Acknowledgements

My first encounters with the history of science, and academic history at all for that matter, came as I entered my masters program at Montana State University and attended a little reading group organized by Carla Nappi that grappled with Hacking, Haraway, and Latour. I remember we drew a lot of stick figure illustrations in hopes of making sense of ideas that seemed to challenge everything I thought I knew. I also recall sparks being lit. The possibility of new understandings of the world combined with a deeply engaged set of peers excited me. This opened my eyes to a new way of seeing and ignited an intense flame that inspired the quest to write this dissertation.

Everything resembling coherence, argument, clarity, and intellectual contribution within this text emerged in one way or another from my time spent learning from Jessica Wang. I am lucky to have found a dissertation supervisor who not only appreciates the attempt to smash things together that do not normally go together, but who could help me execute the task. Jessica also challenged me in countless spoken and unspoken ways to navigate verbs and voice, argument and creative thought, intellectual exploration and disciplinary boundaries, writing demons and scholarly potential. She has been incredibly patient with me as I re-learned many aspects of written English by writing and editing this dissertation. Thank you, Jessica, for being there when I needed support, offering sage guidance paired with a good laugh, and for just being able to tell a really good story. Tears of pride and relief well up when I think of how far this text has come from the original full draft. Words cannot explain my gratitude for the energy you expended in teaching me how to write history and be a productive scholar.

Carla Nappi has been my teacher and mentor across institutional, international, and historiographical boundaries for eight years now. She introduced me to and helped me hash through the scholarship on things and objects. Her instruction informed the skeletal structure of this dissertation. Her approach to intellectual work and mentorship eased many of the growing pains that come with this process, helped me find direction when I was lost, and periodically reminded me why I was on this journey in the first place. Carla is the kind of academic who bleeds inspiration, love, innovation, laughter, integrity, dedication, and hope. I am grateful for every second she has spent training me and lucky there have been so many seconds. Thank you, Carla, for being an invaluable model as an intellectual, writer, and human being.

I owe a huge debt to my committee as a whole: Jessica Wang, Carla Nappi, and Alejandra Bronfman. I appreciate their deep engagement in their profession both as researchers and teachers. This project benefited greatly from individual feedback and a few brilliant and illuminating occasions where we discussed my work all together in the same room. They each offered their deep support for this project from its most meager beginnings. For much of the writing and editing process, Tina Loo was also a committee member. Her feedback has been invaluable in framing the project’s introduction and clarifying several points throughout the text. Many faculty from my home department provided assistance at various stages of my training and the project itself. Michel Ducharme, Neil Safier, Bill French were especially helpful teachers. And to our graduate support staff, Gloria Lees and Jason Wu, thank you for everything.

I received generous fellowships from the University of British Columbia. The Department of History supplemented these general fellowships and contributed much (much) more. The dissertation is about an American expedition through the south Pacific, and this support allowed me

viii to chase that journey. I went to many locations in Chile and Peru visited by the oceanographers in 1957-1958. While I don’t know exactly who they are, there are people behind the department scenes responsible for making this possible, and to them I am grateful. Outside of UBC, Middlebury College provided a fellowship for me to attend their summer Spanish language program. I also received assistance from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archive. Canada’s Science and Technology Museum supported my participation in their 2009 “Reading Artifacts Workshop.” The 2014 “Place and Practice: Doing Science in and on the Ocean Conference” funded a presentation of “Ships that Talk,” a short version of Chapter 3 of this dissertation. Special thanks to Eric Mills and Keith Benson for their detailed attention to this chapter.

Thank you to the staff and archivists at the Instituto del Mar del Perú, especially for the sitting stool and conversation provided by the armed guards while I waited for a cab to leave Callao. Many thanks to the staff at el Instituto de Estudios Históricos-Maritímos del Perú, el Instituto Geofísico del Perú, el Archivo Histórico de la Armada de Chile, and la Biblioteca Santiago Severín, Valparaíso. Special thanks to Bob Fisher and Alan Jones, the two living members of the Downwind expedition. Fisher made himself available for many telephone conversations and mail correspondences. Alan Jones generously provided a set of photographs and permission for use that appear throughout the dissertation.

A most heartfelt thanks to my fellow companions on this journey in doctoral education. First I want to thank Chris Laursen for his friendship and hospitality through the personal and professional troubles and transitions that tend to come with this process. The post-coursework diaspora has made me long for similar affections I received from Geoff Bil, Kieran Metcalfe, and Tamara Caulkins. Luckily Henry Trim and Christina Adam made it over for pizza night from time to time, evenings that seriously kept me sane. Thanks to each of you, including Antony Adler, who read early chapter drafts with honest and keen eyes. Glynnis Kirchmeier brilliantly handled some of the technical tasks that came with constructing this text. And thanks to Phil Van Huizen, Laura Madokoro, Chelsea Horton, Kelly Cairns, Samantha Muka, Megan Raby, and Jerry Jessee who always answered my questions about navigating a doctoral education with insight and care. And thank you to my Macbook Air for not breaking down or electrocuting me. You proved a trusty mate in this adventure.

During the last two years and eight months of writing and editing, I also had two babies. There is no way one word of this dissertation would have been written without an amazing child-care support system [and an accommodating adviser, thank you again, Jessica]. Thank you Kuhan Milroy, Ali Joy, Glynnis Kirchmeier, Poonam Jhingan, and Elise Van Draanen for taking such wonderful care of the little men that mean more to me than anything. Speaking of care, thank you to Danny and Christine Vickers for taking me in during two bouts of personal turmoil. I will always hold your hospitality, songs, and home-cooked-meals in my heart.

My Mom and Dad put the idea of getting a PhD in my head twenty-some-odd years ago. It took me a long time, but in many ways this dissertation is for them, my brothers, and the rest of our family who have stood by me in what sometimes feels like complete intellectual self-indulgence. But the formal dedication for this finished project is for my best friend and partner in everything, Kuhan Milroy. He has done more than anyone, possibly even me, to ensure that these ideas in my head turn into a finished product. His love, encouragement, and support have been copious and unending.

ix

Dedication

For Kuhan

x Introduction

An Unexpected Archive

In 1953, doctoral student John Knauss wrote a play that parodied the absurd nature of negotiations amongst his superiors, whom he characterized as overly dedicated academics, out-of- touch institutional leaders, and compulsively bureaucratic university Regents. Knauss’ skill is evident from the fact that the drama continues to be funny today, but the script is remarkable because

Knauss was not a graduate student of drama or literature. When he wrote it he was training to be a physical oceanographer, and the play is about the administrative aspects of getting ships out to sea to do science. More than five decades later during his oral history interview, Knauss was asked to talk about the script and discuss what compelled him to write something so artistic about oceanography.

After reminiscing about his undergraduate liberal arts background Knauss replied: “…I’m not quite sure I remember, but it was kind of fun at the time, and so I did it.”1 The explanation seems simple enough. It made sense to use his skill to poke fun at the sometimes frustrating, always arduous process of getting ships to sea for scientific expeditions.

This dissertation digs underneath such a pragmatic interpretation of the many stories and narratives created in this period of oceanography. What does the history of oceanography look like if one treats sea stories as an unexpected yet incredibly rich archive of ocean science and takes narrative as well as the materiality contained within seriously? This study connects scholarship on stories and narrative to the history of oceanography and demonstrates that the act of storytelling about life at sea actually built and placed limits upon personal and professional relationships during and after expeditions. My approach examines how and why men on scientific research vessels in the

1 Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of John Atkinson Knauss,” 1 November 2005, SIO online archive, accessed June 24, 2014, pp. 7.

1 middle of the 20th century used storytelling. It considers deeply the narratives contained within a diary, memorandum, cartoon, and motion picture and then argues that the process of creating these stories formulated collaboration, persuasive strategy, friendship, and community. Each author used the narrative process to make sense of expedition life and determine how best to proceed as a member of the oceanographic community. Not merely a pastime, storytelling formed an integral part of social functioning of science at sea. Beyond the act of narration, the analysis also investigates the content of the stories and engages with scholarship on things and objects in order to reveal that the material world was not merely a backdrop, but in some instances acted on and thus influenced the expedition community. For my purposes here, I am less interested in the details of what things were on a metaphysical level and more tuned towards what work they performed.2 Deep-sea expeditions centralized research in this era, and I demonstrate that oceanography cannot be fully understood without attention to relationships between men and things at sea. It is precisely at that point of contact where the project uncovers, first, how commercial airplanes and islands influenced the oceanographic gaze on the Pacific; second, why oceanographic research vessels and their malfunctions played a crucial role in the patronage relationship between oceanography and the U.S.

Navy; third, why seemingly mundane tools of oceanography, namely maps and TNT explosives, reveal a hidden shipboard social ecology; and fourth, where photographs and film transformed from casual snapshots of expedition experience into visual representations of power.

This dissertation contributes several new and surprising ways of seeing oceanography as a particular kind of Cold War science determined as much by the everyday reality of living and working on ships at sea as it was by geopolitics and military patronage. Along with scientific journal

2 Throughout this dissertation I use and loosely conflate the words “thing” and “object” in order to signal my attention to particular finite entities of the material world. I do not make a metaphysical comment on the difference between things and objects because doing so is not vital to the construction of the historical arguments contained within this project. For further discussion on the differences between things and objects see Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001): 1-22.

2 articles and geopolitical documents, oceanographers built their discipline through narration in plays, poems, speeches, diaries, memos, cartoons, photographs, and film. Ships at sea certainly afforded scientists technological platforms from which they encountered the ocean, but airplanes and islands also provided crucial vantage points for understanding that environment. The ships, however, were not technological godsends nor were they unproblematic markers of oceanography’s place in the

Golden Age of Science. These vessels operated in a continual state of malfunction and crucially altered how oceanographers engaged in relations with their Cold War military patron. Further, seemingly insignificant items at sea held the power to bring people together for work in new ways.

Maps and TNT explosives, for example, facilitated shipboard collaborations that were not dependent on geopolitics or high internationalism. Finally, an oceanographic identity emerged in this era not only because of public representations of the science but also through the production of private photographs and film. Deliberate historical attention to fun, and to personal and seemingly mundane events at sea, demonstrates that expedition oceanography in this era was not merely a product of elite leaders, centralized institutions, technological advancement, and a lot of money. The

Cold War got expeditions out to sea, but it was the men on ships who determined what came back and to what use the things that returned were put.

Think for a moment about the ocean world in which oceanographers travelled during the middle of the 20th century. Especially consider what it would have been like to conduct science there. Rusty metal constituted a physical boundary between seawater and scientists who used ships to navigate across this world. On these ships, glass in the shape of bottles brought water up from the deep. Steel tubes rescued sediment cores from the deafening silence under the seafloor. Nearer the surface, 400-pound TNT explosions sacrificed fish, squid, and whales in order to send sound waves down to the greatest depths. Sunrise at daybreak, songs sung after the evening meal, amoebic dysentery and many other everyday realities made their way through life and science at sea. The men

3 on these ships not only lived this day-to-day existence, they also recorded stories about experiencing it. For instance, the following vignette takes the reader out to sea to experience the sunrise from the deck of a ship:

I stand in pre-dawn darkness on a moist and rolling deck to watch the tortured waking of the day. As yet the ebon coverlet of night lies close and snug upon the gently heaving bosom of the sea. The myriad points of cosmic light that dot the velvet black shine on as though unknowing of the greater light that soon will make their feeble sparks unseen. I stand a sole observer, an audience of one, in the now-deserted pit before the cosmic stage on which is daily played the tragi-comedy of time. Slowly, almost timidly, faint gray streaks along the eastern rim appear. The stars are dimmed like houselights, and a sudden quiet, heavy with expectancy, descends upon the sea.

We wait, the sea, the ship, and I. We all have watched this scene before, but have not seen it played twice the same. The gray has fought and lost a silent struggle with a gentle rose that now suffuses all the eastern sky. Day is waking slowly now, and gently eases back the tattered coverlet of night to peer with bleary eye above the eastern rim. Phoebus’ first fiery, ray, that silver gauntlet of approaching day, thrown down in angry challenge on the sea, is hurriedly picked up by every sloping surface, shattered, and thrown back, as though to say, “Bring on your sun, we’re ready for the day.”

The hush has gone, the gray has gone, the pink has gone, the night and stars have gone. The ship, the sea, and I alone remain. We three have watched the wonders of the dawn, but of these wonders the other two are mute, and I alone am privileged to tell. Anon. – For Chrissakes Anon.

When I first read this I thought the author was playing with a strange idea. He seemed to be considering things like the day, stars, sea, and ship to be capable of action, at least to some extent. In one moment, the man stands alone at sea because he is the only person. The narrative arc, however, implies a relationship between that single man as human and the sea and the ship as material things.

Even though they cannot speak they are present, and for some reason their presence deserves a prominent role in his narrative. The act of watching affords these things animation. The man, then, is not actually alone because the sea and the ship also watch the daybreak. They are his companions, and they also experience the sunrise. The author’s lyrical writing provides the reader a narrative experience in which the sea and the ship behave as entities with some kind of agency to act and experience.

4 Many similar stories, in multiple literary and visual forms, surface from the archival record when one looks for them. Others indicate a more literal intersection between scientists and their complex material world. The following anonymous poem, for example, explains that for the oceanographer, no matter how dangerous life was at sea the real risks were to be faced back at home on land:

The Oceanographer’s Lament

I’ve stood ‘fore the mast of a lurching bark And I’ve swarmed the rigging free I’ve probed the abyss With ‘ner amiss For oceanography.

I’ve crept about on a queezy deck With half the sea aboard With enough dynamite In my grasp so tight To blow me to heaven, toward.

I’ve braved the brunt of the typhoon’s howl From the bridge of a stricken ship I’ve buried the dead With the green – one red – And never my foot would slip.

But when I’ve left the soft sea foam To the realm where mankind tread The sticks and stones They break my bones And the stern of the car ahead.

The sticks and stones and the car ahead All join in conspiracy And that’s not all For I did fall With the flasks of salinity.

The ocean’s wide and the ocean’s deep And you think of the dangers there But the dangers lurk On the doggoned dirt Near the east of my office chair.

5 So I’ll sail again where the Trade Winds blow Where I’m safe upon the sea For I’m glad I’m alive And I’ll never survive This armchairography.3

The story contained in this poem represents oceanographers from this era as the sort of knowledge- makers who are passionately drawn to the open ocean. The author self-reflectively describes a world in which physical illness, the potential of blowing oneself up, typhoons, and the possibility of death at sea appeal more to expedition oceanographers than sedentary life on the mainland, driving in traffic, and the professional office chair. Of course, not everyone agreed with this sentiment in every moment. Some men left expeditions early or never returned to the sea after an expedition ended due to negative experiences, dislike, and a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, oceanographers constructed a culture of seagoing in which the act of navigating the ocean world for science was a privilege, an adventure, and fun. Within this culture, men recorded stories about how material things and objects like the sea and ships often transcended categorization as object of inquiry and scientific instrument such that the inanimate emerged as a vital force the oceanographer worked alongside and against.

These stories, things, and objects stand orthogonal with much of the history of oceanography, which has been concerned with the integration of science with politics, policy, institutions, government, internationalism, and patronage. Those histories either directly or implicitly argue that governments and oceanographic institutions – packed full of elite leaders, politicians, and money – determined oceanographic functions and practice. Overwhelmingly, the approach characterizes the flow of power from the mainland out to sea. From this perspective, expeditions emerge as a sole product of the geopolitics of Cold War Big Science and its elite leaders.4 This

3 SIO Subject Files, Box 46, Folder 10: Poetry 1951-1970. 4 Ronald Rainger describes expedition development at Scripps prior to World War II in: “Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the Navy, and Oceanography at the Scripps Institution,” Earth Sciences History 19, no. 1 (2000). I utilized the online version reprinted by the History of the Sciences Society from Earth Sciences History (2000): 1-74, esp. pp. 4-9.

6 dissertation operates at a different level and thereby illuminates the ways in which everyday social, cultural, and material realities at sea travelled back to the mainland, influenced how oceanographers organized themselves, offered an alternative vantage point for seeing the Pacific, crucially altered the patronage relationship, and built scientific collaboration.

Stories, things, and objects help us re-envision oceanography during the Cold War as a science in which deep-sea expeditions catalyzed the development of social groups, technological alterations, and a particular way of seeing the Pacific Ocean. The history of oceanography looks very different when it starts far from the mainland. Out on the water the obnoxiously loud sound of a ship’s diesel engine mixed the smell of burnt oil with the sulfured stench of the ocean. After a long day of dropping instruments into the deep, men of science devoured freshly caught leatherback turtle and jumbo squid for an evening meal. As they ate, they stared across hundreds of miles of ocean water at the horizon. Immortalized in stories, everyday expedition experiences became a currency with which men on ships exercised power and made adjustments to the social and cultural functioning of oceanography during the Cold War.

Oceanography in History

Historians of 19th and early 20th century oceanography have addressed expedition practices in their scholarship. Eric Mills, for example, examined the ways in which individual oceanographers in the early 20th century created unprecedented amounts of data and new ideas about the ocean from work at sea.5 It is the history of 19th century oceanography, however, that has more thoroughly investigated some of the realities that took place on the ocean. Helen Rozwadowski’s work has been

And on page 29 he turns to Revelle’s support of expeditions after the war on the deep-sea. He states: “Prior to 1941, Scripp’s scientists had done no deep-sea research,” pp. 29. Revelle claims that the war was what changed the Institution’s expedition practices to include deep-sea work. Jacob Darwin Hamblin describes expedition development during and after World War II at Scripps in, Oceanographers and the Cold War (2005). 5 Eric Mills, The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet: How the Study of Ocean Currents Became a Science, Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2009).

7 pivotal to understanding how British and American practices, including narrative creation, enmeshed with mid-19th century entrepreneurial interest in laying the Atlantic cable.6 She attended to the ways in which science of the sea expanded the human imagination of what the ocean was in the first place. Thus, it was not just the entrepreneurs driving increased interest in knowledge of the ocean.

Scientific curiosities emerged at the same time that middle-class Europeans became more aware of the open ocean, gained the means to travel to that environment first-hand for pleasure, and developed a new genre of maritime novels. Rozwadowski explained how 19th century science on the sea not only emerged within this broader social context but incorporated popular voyage narratives into professional activities. Back further beyond this relatively recent history, symbols and myths sit famously within many classic pieces of literature including, for example, the Babylonian epic

Gilgamesh, the Bible, and throughout the works of Shakespeare.7 Indeed, human desires to know the sea consistently turn up throughout human history.

Storytelling on the ocean was still a vibrant practice after World War II when surplus war vessels provided by the Navy allowed expedition science in the United States to expand dramatically.

In this period, oceanographic institutions sent hundreds of large and small expeditions to sea. The

Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps) rose to become one of the leading organizations conducting research concerned with the deep ocean environment. Once military patronage funded

American ocean science, scholars trained their analyses within political, financial, administrative, military, and governmental realms, and the historical significance of storytelling vanished.

The dominant historiography on oceanography during the Cold War comprehensively explains how the production of ocean science involved the Office of Naval Research, the President’s

6 Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University (2005): 69-95. See Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1989) for an institutional account of developments in studies of sea flora and fauna across Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States in the 19th century. 7 Sebastian I. Sobecki. The Sea and Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer (2008). Steve Mentz. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. Harrisburg, PA: Continuum (2009).

8 Science Advisory Committee, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Scripps Institution of

Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Lamont Geological Observatory,8 and programs like the International Geophysical Year. This scholarship also discusses the complex and changing roles of elite leaders like Roger Revelle (Scripps), Edward H. Smith (Wood’s Hole), and

Maurice Ewing (Lamont). Any history of American oceanography after World War II, no matter what its methodological and thematic focus, cannot ignore the real money and power that flowed from Cold War geopolitics into the development of large-scale research at sea.

Oceanography would not have been capable of the growth it saw after World War II without the patronage of the U.S. Navy. Historian Ronald Rainger’s work has demonstrated the ways in which patronage emerged at Scripps in large part due to the work of Director Roger Revelle who saw expeditions as the cornerstone of ocean science.9 Rainger explained how the military-scientific relationship, however, was not dominated by military concerns. He described a mutually beneficial exchange that emerged even though the Navy certainly held the power to influence intellectual goals and research trajectories through careful selection of projects to fund. Other scholars have touched on expedition practices in order to get at a different set of social issues and sometimes non-elite historical actors. For instance, Naomi Oreskes has investigated Scripps’ relationship with its Navy patron by considering the role of women who worked for Scripps as computers but typically did not work at sea. She demonstrated how “women’s work” was defined as work on land in laboratories after World War II not because of sexism inherent within the scientific community, but because oceanographers built their discipline on military patronage that came with very stringent expectations of gender segregation on ships at sea. The Navy, not the oceanographers, found it

8 Renamed Lamont-Doherty Observatory in 1969 and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in 1993. 9 Ronald Rainger, “Constructing a Landscape for Postwar Science: Roger Revelle, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the University of California, San Diego,” Minerva 39 (2001): 327-352; “Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the US Navy, and Oceanography,” Earth Sciences History 19 (2000): 58-89; “Science at the Crossroads: The Navy, Bikini Atoll, and American Oceanography in the 1940s,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 (2000): 349-371.

9 completely unacceptable for women employed by Scripps to board oceanographic vessels for anything but short day trips.10

Many aspects of geopolitics determined growth in ocean science in this period. Jacob

Darwin Hamblin has described the Cold War state, institutional interests, internationalism, and the political environment as determinants of research programs, disciplinary priorities, and the general contours of oceanographic life in the United States. His research, however, also hinted at the presence of extra-geopolitical forces on the development of oceanography. While he focused on elite administrators and organization, he highlighted how expeditions sometimes were not just geopolitical initiatives. The Downwind expedition of 1957-1958, for example, was a trip to sea that involved pre-existing scientific concerns over the composition of the seafloor.11 Hamblin also raised questions about the exchange of scientists on ships at sea.12 He described expeditions not merely as geopolitical tools but as a means to economic wellbeing.13 Further, he discussed some of the complexities of oceanographic research vessels in this period rather than assuming them as unproblematic vehicles of oceanography.14

The Cold War context certainly created a dire need for oceanographers to establish credibility for their discipline. Before World War II, expedition science in the United States relied on random private philanthropy, a situation that resulted in very few ships going to sea. Prewar activities occurred mostly on the shore with only rare opportunities to study open waters. The war facilitated an alliance between the major oceanographic institutions, like Scripps, and the Navy and saw an influx of dozens of surplus military vessels capable of sailing to the deep ocean.

10 Naomi Oreskes, “Laissez-Tomber: Miltary Patronage and Women’s Work in Mid-20th-Century Oceanography,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 30, no. 2, Military Patronage and the Geophysical Sciences in the United States (2000): 373-392. 11 Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, Seattle: University of Washington Press (2005): 78. He also discussed Downwind on pp. 94. 12 Ibid., 70, 138. Also see these pages for further discussions of expeditions: 10-11, 24-25, and 137-138. 13 Ibid., 121. 14 For instance, see Ibid., 68-70, 25, 95-98.

10 Oceanography navigated its adolescence in an era of intense scientific competition against nuclear physics, a field that spoke directly to the world’s most pressing fear, the nuclear arms race. Within this context, oceanographers needed to position their contributions as solutions for some of the greatest risks to human society. Scripps Director Roger Revelle made his career doing just that.

Many other ocean scientists who operated in the political and administrative realm followed suit.

Within this political discourse, oceanography became necessary as a way of understanding human survival. Knowing the oceans deeply would tell scientists how to make long-range weather forecasts, mitigate human food supply by controlling dying ocean fish populations, and manage the

“unbelievable quantities” of radioactive waste by properly disposing of it in the ocean.15 Proving this vitality of oceanographic science hinged on keeping the scientific separate from the personal lived experiences at sea, or at least seemingly so.

Bread and Butter: Method

Nearly all histories that mention Scripps in this period discuss the expeditions to varying degrees. In Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s language, they were the “bread and butter” of ocean research.16

Scripps Director Roger Revelle acknowledged what a priority it was to care for the body at sea when he wrote, “the food at sea is half the battle.”17 This overlap in language of sustenance, between

Revelle as historical actor and Hamblin as a historian of Cold War oceanography, seems more than coincidental. Expeditions fed oceanography as a science, and food fed the body, which fed the expeditions. But underneath practical descriptions of such relationships, this period in oceanographic history was one defined by hunger in the sense of intense craving for adventure on,

15 Roger Revelle, “Statement by Dr. Roger R. Revelle, Technical Panel on Oceanography, U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year before the Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Independent Offices, U. S. House of Representatives,” n.d., p. 5., SIO Non-Subject Files, Box 75, Folder 23: IGY Statements House of Rep Comm. 16 Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, 76. Hamblin specifically used this phrase in reference to expeditions during the IGY, but I extend that reference and claim it was true for expeditions throughout the 1950s. 17 Prologue to Chapter 1.

11 and knowledge about, the deep sea.18 Expeditions were the material manifestations of those desires.

The bulk of the history of oceanography does not help us understand what expeditions meant to the men who traveled on them nor does it explain how those men leveraged the power to influence the social structure of oceanography, change commitments to scientific technology, and alter patronage relationships.

This dissertation is not an argument against the existing historical literature, but it attempts to offer a different perspective aimed at opening new conversations. My approach takes seriously the idea that the expeditions were the livelihood – the bread and butter – of oceanography. It does so to the extent that I consider everyday expedition activities to be included in the conditions of possibility that led to oceanography’s unprecedented growth during the Cold War. At sea was where men labored with their hands to understand all of the mysteries that so puzzled them. Out on the ocean men wrote stories, broke their bodies, and found adventure. In a few cases it was where scientists died in terrible accidents. For Scripps’ expedition leader Henry William Menard, it was where a split-second mistake resulted in three of his vertebrae becoming permanently fused, something he suffered for the rest of his life.19 Expeditions were events in their own right full of danger, adventure, and emotion. They required an almost unimaginable amount of work. That work often became a labor of love, sometimes hate, worthy of expressions in stories.

Those moments of hate are the one point at which this project challenges the existing literature. Much of the negative emotion expressed about participating in science at sea revolved

18 Historian Rosalind Williams has written about another quest to understand what lies underneath. In her Notes on the Underground, she argues that since the 19th century, literary narratives about the underground world have provided a way for people to proselytize future states of the environment. The underground world became a model of artificial environments from which nature was banished. Like much of this dissertation, her book examines how people making the journey underneath (for her underground, for me underwater) experienced the journey as enduring and powerful. The process of discovery unfolded through descent. 19 This did not happen on Downwind. See Menard, The Ocean of Truth, 42-43 for a brief yet honest description of the deaths of Henry Stetson, Bruce Heezen, and an unnamed man in 1961. This passage mentions other accidents like being washed overboard. And Menard discusses his own personal most serious accident at sea where an un-skilled assistant cut a rope sending a piece of heavy equipment smashing into his back, which compressed his vertebra by a centimeter.

12 around the research vessels. These were scientific instruments that came to oceanography as surplus military ships from World War II. Oceanographers transformed these vessels from their military functions into scientific research tools. Alongside the history of oceanography, I acknowledge the great value these ships brought to ocean science. Without them scientists would not have been able to move their discipline from shore-based research to investigations of the deep-sea and the ocean on a planetary scale. I dig deeper, however, beyond their obvious positive worth and complicate the success story of ex-military ships that operated in the scientific context. Historian Rebecca Lemov has written, “As with much of Cold War technology, not least the atomic bomb, the dreamed of machine was also a nightmare.”20 Through focused attention on their presence in stories told by men who sailed on them, I uncover how these ships were mired in surprising levels of malfunction.

Drawing heavily upon the literature regarding things and objects, I then consider malfunction as a manifestation of agency that transformed relationships between oceanographers and their primary patron, the U.S. Navy.

The sea stories from this era have literally remained tucked away in the personal records of oceanographers and hidden in obscure folders within the archives. This impetus to hide and thereby devalue certain aspects of practice offers a reason, in addition to situating the Cold War as the primary explanatory factor for science after World War II, why scholars have looked past this layer of oceanographic history: many of the key documents that provide evidence toward this dissertation are overwhelmed in the archive by the volume of bureaucratic Cold War documentation. Relatively few have bubbled to the surface, 21 and only minor attention has been placed on the history of Cold

War oceanography on expeditions at sea.

20 Rebecca Lemov, “Hypothetical Machines”: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science,” Isis 101, no. 2 (June 2010), 407. 21 Some examples of stories that did circulate include: Henry William Menard, The Ocean of Truth: A Personal History of Global Tectonics, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1986); Helen Raitt, Exploring the Deep Pacific, New York: W. W.

13 Stories, Things, and Objects

My approach is informed by two main literatures: first, stories and narrative and second, things and objects. This strategy brings our analytical lens for the history of oceanography away from elite politics and the geopolitical nature of the Cold War and toward life and work on deep-sea expeditions. Centered on these voyages to sea, it becomes clear that narrative creation was not merely a pastime but a means by which thought and social action took place. Scientists used storytelling as a basic tool for puzzling out their purposes while on expeditions. The stories were also sites of performance used to negotiate social standing. As tools of thought and performance, these literary creations facilitated relationships and created community. The content of the narratives reveal how the material world altered the oceanographic gaze on the Pacific, transformed the patronage relationship, and helped build the scientific community.

I situate this dissertation within a broad trend of scholarship of the history of science that since the 1980s has moved toward understanding scientific practice.22 More specifically, because of my concern with the hidden stories of oceanography I locate this study within a smaller subset of scholars attending to the ways in which scientists, their practices, and their material reality refute a dichotomy between “text” and “action” by offering better understandings of the performative dimensions of science, especially the performance of narrative.23 Under this approach, science as a process of knowledge-making occurs such that scientists do actions in the world and engage in discourse about it. Analyses proceed by assuming that both forms of activity, material and

Norton (1956); Elizabeth Shor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: Probing the Oceans, 1936-1976, San Diego: Tofua Press (1978); and see the Scripps online archive for a set of links to numerous oral histories. 22 Foundational examples include: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1986); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1988); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1985); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Chicago: Chicago University Press (1995); Andrew Pickering, Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: Chicago University Press (1992). 23 See James J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,” Focus: History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences, Isis 101 (2010): 555-559.

14 discursive, contribute significantly to the production of knowledge and knowledge communities.

Under this rubric, the literary, linguistic, and even artistic dimensions of scientific practice matter as much as more traditionally conceived scientific activities, such as experiments, sampling, measuring, and observation. Many scholars with this focus spend their time worrying about the ways in which literature has shaped or can shape scientific developments or how science influences the output of literature.24 Others swing wider outside of literature, formally conceived, to consider how the creation of narrative across different forms, not just literature and not just writing, intertwined with analytic practices of collecting, observing, recording, and categorizing. What emerges is attention, across a variety of local contexts, to the ways in which scientific work co-depends upon texts that come in multiple forms of expression from peer-reviewed journals to literature, personal narrative, and even art.

Donna Haraway’s work delves extensively into the relationships between literature and science. Many of her essays could be discussed in relation to my work, but it is “A Cyborg

Manifesto” from which this project draws a foundation for taking sea stories seriously as components of scientific practice: “Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious…The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities.” These statements signal her concern with the ways in which writing held significance for colonized groups (her example is women of color in Western society). It does seem awkward at first to apply Haraway’s cyborg politics, which emerged out of feminism and utilized women as the exemplary human, to a group of relatively affluent white males in the middle of the

20th century. Although I am not explicitly making direct parallels between the women Haraway

24 Bono’s “Making Knowledge,” Ibid. offers a nice introduction to this scholarship. Also see Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chicago: Chicago University Press (1991); Stuart Peterfreund, ed., Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, Boston: Northeastern University Press (1990).

15 exemplified and oceanographers who went to sea, there is sense of Harawaian thought running through this dissertation.25

For Haraway’s women of color, writing held the power to signify a particular interpretation of the world, and with that power they reframed the boundaries around their own identities.

Essentially, these women used the written word to subvert power structures that framed their lives.

Oceanographers in the middle of the 20th century similarly constructed stories (in writing but also in other forms) as a way to exercise social power on an individual level at a time when elite politics weighed heavy on this branch of science. Expedition participants used stories as tools with which they built scientific collaborations, lobbied for technological changes at sea, grew friendships, and pursued social standing within the oceanographic community. If subversion is too strong a verb, these oceanographers definitely reframed their own identities by aligning themselves with certain shipboard co-travellers, distancing themselves from others, and creating clear separations between expedition participants and other peoples encountered along the way. They also used literary strategies to construct documents that pushed oceanographic institutions to change patronage relationships. In small but compelling ways, stories were vessels that expedition participants used to carry their experiences from the open ocean back to the mainland. As such, stories emerged as tools with which expedition participants altered some of the Cold War circumstances in which they operated.

Bruno Latour claims that narrative forms significant to science can vary from “a paper slip, a document, a report, an account, a map.”26 In this dissertation I address the ways in which a speech, diary, letter, cartoon, set of photographs, and a silent color motion picture allowed those who went

25 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge Press (1991): 175. 26 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007): 223-226, note 19. A literary studies approach to form and applied to history of science methodologies can be found in Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and vice versa),” Isis 101 (2010): 578-589. Also Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” touches on the poem (p. 156) and the photo (pp. 169-170) as forms that have been important to cultural practices.

16 to sea an opportunity to commemorate and make sense of their experiences, extract the meaning behind those experiences from the story itself, and then translate experience into powerful messages that changed the scientific context and culture back on the mainland. 27 Throughout the chapters I address the following questions regarding these stories and their varied relationships to the history of oceanography: For what purpose or for whom was the story meant? What does it tell us? How did oceanographic work shape the narrative? How did the story mediate between oceanographic practice and cultural reality back on the mainland; shape practice at sea and on the mainland; relate to other stories; and integrate work and labor into the narrative? And how were these stories told?

Historians Hunter Heyck and David Kaiser discuss how “variation is now the theme” when approaching science during the Cold War. 28 Scholars depict the struggles of that era not merely as defined by military, technological, and ideological tensions but as a global transformation with a wide array of local forms. As a whole, this project ties together historical actors’ views of their lives with deeper consideration of unintended historical consequences. I contribute to the geopolitical history of oceanography a new look at how ideas, people, and things travelled from the sea to the mainland instead of continuing to look in the opposite direction. I engage with the intellectual history of oceanography as I detail how practices at sea involved bodies, materiality, and a mosaic cast of people with varied interests and agendas.

Within the last ten years, two ways of approaching scholarly analysis of the production of scientific knowledge have merged into a relationship that can help tune the history of oceanography during the Cold War toward the particular stories that did matter and that do offer deeper insight into how oceanographers created a culture of expeditions at sea. The history of science and the

27 As I will repeatedly explain, the speech and the letter were not written on Downwind. The speech was by the Director of Scripps addressing a larger expedition tradition at his institution, and the letter was by a Downwind ship Captain writing about an earlier expedition. I argue that both of these still tell us a lot that we did not already know about expedition practices across the 1950s, the same period in which Downwind took place. 28 Hunter Heyck and David Kaiser, “Focus: New Perspectives on Science and the Cold War, Introduction,” Isis 101 (2010): 363.

17 separate field called literature and science have expanded into one another, an intellectual collaboration historian James J. Bono refers to as the creation of “interdependent fields.”29 The convergence of these two approaches has resulted in examination of how science affects literary culture and the ways in which literary practices contribute to the production of scientific knowledge.

Scholars ask: how has literature shaped scientific developments; what were the performative dimensions of literature within the context of science; how have material practices been associated with literary practices; and in what ways have the circulation of texts and objects created networks of exchange in science? Essentially, the concern is with the ways in which the making of science has been a product of the creation, performance, and circulation of a combination of literary texts and scientific texts, objects, and ideas. Vibrant themes include the use of metaphor in science, literary and scientific texts as performative agents, literary form as a tool of scientific practice, the function of science fiction within scientific practice, the ways in which stories shape scientific practice, scientific work as integrated into travel narratives, and scientific text as narrative, to name just a few.30

For the purposes of this dissertation, I situate the sea stories in the interdependent space, as

Bono describes, between the history of science and literature and science. It is in such a space that these expedition stories can be taken seriously as literary constructions that meant something within the science of oceanography. Bono’s interpretation of the relationships between these two fields has received some level of criticism. Two years after Bono’s Isis article came out, English Professor John

29 James. J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,” in Focus: History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences, Isis 101 (2010): 555. The seminal journals corresponding to these fields are: history of science, Isis and literature and science, The Journal of Literature and Science. For an even more critical response on the debate as to whether the history of science and literature and science can and should overlap see: Janine Rogers, “Review of James J. Bono’s (ed) ‘Focus: History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences,’ Journal of Literature and Science 4, no. 1 (2011): 80-83. 30 Compilations of these themes can be found in two Isis Focus sections. “Focus: History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences,: Isis 101, no. 3 (September 2010): 555-598; and :Focus: Mathematical Stories,” Isis 97, no. 4 (2006): 678-726.

18 Holmes also addressed their relationship.31 While acknowledging overlap, Holmes points to a serious problem in overdrawing the connections between them, namely the differences in evidence. Literary texts often leave a level of uncertainty the history of science would find unacceptable. Nevertheless, he concludes that as long as scholars attentive to literature are frank about the nature of the evidence from which they work, there is much to gain despite these limitations. Essentially, keeping literature and science separate will allow scholars, who work from divergent sources, to make their case more convincingly. Literature and science methods reveal things about scientific ideas, their significance, etc. that the history of science alone cannot determine with “the same subtlety.”32 I appreciate

Holmes’ concern over divergent sources, but claim that the nature of the stories from oceanography in this period requires that I braid the history of oceanography together with literature on stories and narrative. These stories emerged as part of the process of conducting science at sea, not separate from it.

Choosing stories as a central component of this history of oceanographic expeditions marks the project as cultural history of oceanography that works alongside more traditional political, geopolitical, military, and administrative approaches to this field of science. The narratives point to historical circumstances adjacent to cold war tensions and politics. For deep-sea expeditions at

Scripps in the 1950s, a large gap existed between the ways in which elite administrators and scientists spoke about scientific journeys to sea and how those expeditions were actually experienced. While geopolitical tensions, institutional politics, and military patronage provided money, ships, scientific instruments, and military service to working oceanographers at Scripps, the power of influence was not unidirectional. Oceanographers’ personal, interpersonal, emotional, embodied, and material lived experiences created knowledge, opinions, preferences, and relationships that travelled back to the

31 John Holmes, “Roundtable: Literature and Science vs. History of Science,” Journal of Literature and Science 5, no. 2 (2012): 67-71. 32 Ibid., pp. 69.

19 mainland. Sometimes the stories were a location where men on ships puzzled out their purposes in relation to others in the world of oceanography. After the writing process, these men then constructed their social world based on what they had determined while creating their narratives. At other times, stories acted as a kind of performance for a person who occupied a liminal social position in this scientific world. When a man achieved a higher status in the oceanographic community, those strategies were no longer needed, and they disappeared from the narrative record.

In essence, these stories facilitated relationships, created community, and performed identity.

Taking the content of narratives seriously requires accounting for the incredible attention authors placed on the material world. Within these stories oceanic things and objects came alive.

Scholarship on things and objects has taken many forms, and several of its practitioners have claimed explicitly that a unified goal is antithetical to this kind of work. A defining link might best be described as a distaste for the (mis)characterization of our world when positioned primarily from the standpoint of human beings. The world has things in it, and if we ignore those things and their multifarious effects on us we cannot possibly interrogate the human condition.

Many scholars call their attention to “things” a kind of corrective to a Cartesian anthropocentrism in which René Descartes constructed our conception of human beings as the only entities capable of utilizing language, thus setting in stone, so to speak, a division between the human being and the natural world. To remedy this division, which many see as false (Latour adds political), scholars have taken notice of the ways in which humans actually revolve around, act on behalf of, and are moved by things. Roland Barthes wrote about the ways that mythologies of modern bourgeois life wove around certain things and even went so far as to claim that these things spoke a kind of language of their own. Martin Heidegger also famously wrote about certain things as

20 self-sufficient entities that cannot be fully captured by the human mind regardless of our perceptions of scientific theories about them.33

Many more recent works have found inspiration in the work of these classic thinkers. If one insists on identifying coherent schools of thought we could discuss New Materialism, Speculative

Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, and even stretch that to communities of Actor Network

Theorists. Each of these groups developed its own categories and conceptions of things and objects to work with. But that raises the question: Why do particular categories in fact apply to specific things and objects and not others? Such a methodological problem twists into a serious practical difficulty because the more attention paid to how scholars have attended to different objects in different contexts, the more kinds of objects pile up as possibilities for how things behaved and acted in historical cases. But importantly, the more unrelated kinds of objects emerge as possibilities from which to work.34

There have been interactive, natural, and indifferent kinds; boundary objects; commodities; things that circulate; objects of scientific inquiry; things that talk; quotidian objects; objects multiple; vibrant matter; units; and immutable mobiles, and these represent a small handful of object

33 Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, University Press of America, 1985. 34 Ian Hacking described interactive, natural, and indifferent kinds: The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Bruno Latour defined immutable mobiles, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Boundary objects: Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19, no. 3 (Aug. 1989), 387-420. Commodities as scientific object: Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Things that circulate: Paul N. Edwards, Lisa Gitelman, Gabrielle Heckt, Adrian Johns, Brian Larkin, and Neil Safier, “AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information,” American Historical Review (December 2011): 1393-1435. Objects of scientific inquiry: Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Things that talk: Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, 2004. Quotidian objects, Ibid., especially Lorraine Daston, “Introduction,” pp. 9-24. Objects multiple: Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Vibrant matter: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Units: Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomoenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. These scholars work to answer specific disciplinary questions that exist within social and historical contexts and methodologically range from investigating alliances and relations made of networks of people and things, inspired by Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, to determining the role of things as “units” – individual things that exist and act regardless of humans and that hold just as much importance as humans in the world.

21 categories from the history of science literature alone. How does one justify a single framework as the best fit for any particular object or case study? Looking to the individual objects from existing scholarship only increases the complexity. All of this leads to a serious problem.35 It is one of the greatest criticisms directed toward this scholarship attentive to things: What, if anything, are we really contributing by affording the non-human world the power to act? Things are said to act in so many divergent ways that at times it seems like every single thing in the world might fall under any one of the already determined thing and object categories, and those that do not call for the invention of a new category.

For the purpose of analyzing the material content contained within oceanographic stories, this dissertation claims that affording non-humans the power to act provides a new framework for viewing hidden components of complex relationships amongst individual people and human groups.

Because objects that exhibit action lie at the center of these relationships, this approach illuminates thus far unexamined yet formative interactions between humans and the objects themselves, but also between humans and other previously ignored humans. As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai put it,

“from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.”36 Objects leave certain kinds of traces based on the particular local circumstances in which they function, and we can learn more about them if we follow those traces. Many of the specific things and objects that emerge from this scholarship could be examined under two if not more given categories. Lorraine

Daston posed The Glass Flowers as an example of a “thing that talks,” yet application of Star and

Griesemer’s boundary object theory might prove equally viable in understanding how these objects

35 There are several works that attempt to offer some clarity on this vast scholarship. For instance, Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (edited volume), New York: Cambridge University Press: 1986; and Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001): 1-22. 36 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 5.

22 have been socially situated. At the center of both is the question of how things interact with human beings and how those interactions alter, intensify, or degrade exchanges between the human beings themselves. We could say that in some situations boundary objects speak and that things that talk facilitate collaboration. That does not mean, however, that all categories apply to all things and objects always. Rather, the intricate specificity that tends to be at work when scholars mobilize things and objects toward understanding social processes sometimes hints at how objects can pose multiple functions in their interactions with human beings. But what is the nature of these

“functions?” What do we mean by thing and object agency?

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter describes “thing-power” as the ability of inanimate things to produce effects.37 Bennett’s central tenet insists that certain things in the world do not depend on humans for their power to act.38 Rather than focusing on how things are socially constructed, she explains that some things possess an “agentive capacity” all their own. Essentially, Bennett wants to redistribute the power in our world such that human beings do not necessarily occupy the center stage in all situations, histories, and interactions. Rather, if we “think slowly” about physical matter in the world, it becomes clear that in some instances things are not merely inanimate. For Bennett, thinking slowly and specifically about the possibility that physical matter acts will lead to new understanding of rich yet easily overlooked details of relationships between humans and things, but also, and perhaps more significantly, between humans and other humans. The key is that we use objects as analytical tools with which to understand relationships because they get us out of traditional ways of thinking about the same kinds of historical interactions.

Why do this? Bennett tells us that considering the capacity of the material world as vibrant and capable of impeding, blocking, facilitating, and assisting the wills and desires of human beings

37 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 6. 38 Bennett is but one example of a scholar who builds upon a longer philosophical project to understand the material world that has now, in large part through the work of Bruno Latour, intersected with the history of science.

23 will fundamentally change how we analyze events such as consumption, public health, stem cell research, and energy policy. Attention to vibrant matter allows us to be more alert to our own capacities and limitations and with that alertness, we are able to engage more effectively as scholars and as living humans with the material world that we depend upon.39 While her concerns are not merely historical, her approach certainly can be applied historically.

Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter hints at some of the defining components of material agency with the concept of “things that talk” as posited by Daston et al. 40 According to Daston, there are special “things” in the world that “give rise to an astonishing amount of talk.” These things

“talk” in the sense that their physical properties, component parts, movements – essentially their tectonics – create an inspiration for prolific discourse in human cultures.41 Daston provides The

Glass Flowers as her example. These objects are a collection of 847 botanical models made of glass for Harvard’s Botanical Museum that were constructed from 1887 to 1936. Daston thinks about these fire blown silica structures as meticulously built artifacts. These glass structures appear lifelike and evoke wonder and emotion. Their construction, fragility, and presence cause humans to exhibit strange behaviors not seen in relation to other models of the natural world. Spectators and museum personnel alike talk “endlessly” about how well the Flowers’ represent real specimen, how they were constructed, and how they must be cared for. Understanding the frenzy around these artifacts requires consideration of not just what people think and do, but attention to the ways in which the constitution and imagery of the Flowers move people’s thoughts and emotions.42 Saying that these

39 There are also scholars who seek to understand things irreverent of human beings. See footnote 4 for Object Oriented Ontology. Specifically see the work of Ian Bogost and his use of the word “unit” in place of “thing” or “object.” 40 Lorraine Daston, Things that Talk, New York: Zone Books, 2004: 11. 41 In her Introduction to Things that Talk, Daston does not use the word “tectonics,” but she describes the sense of construction from which I work. The book asks: What things are and how they are made (pp. 20). The chapters discuss the rigidity and functionality (pp. 19), bony materiality (pp. 18), and general properties (pp. 17) that make the things what they are and determine how they manifest in the lives of people and communities. 42 Daston’s Introduction, “Speechless,” introduces these issues, and her essay on the glass flowers at Harvard exemplifies each of these effects, “Chapter 6, The Glass Flowers,” 223-254.

24 things “talk” is a way of drawing focused attention to how they influence human conversations, feelings, and actions.43 The central subject matter of this type of analysis is not the things in and of themselves, but the relationships they participate in with and evoke between humans. The verb

“talk” stands as a metaphor to help us think in new ways about what certain “things” in the world mean to people and importantly, what about those things elicits those meanings.44 It affords

“things” the power to do work, or be vibrant in Bennett’s sense, but equally recognizes how that work reaps new ways of talking, thinking, feeling, and acting about and toward things.

The Downwind Expedition

The chapters in this dissertation use brief moments in time to look closely at relationships between people that formed or broke apart because of stories, things, and objects. In order to apply theories to specific circumstances and offer some relationship between those moments, I chose to structure the dissertation as a whole first and foremost around one oceanographic expedition. I decided upon the Downwind expedition conducted by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography under the International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958. This brief journey captures much of what is at stake in discussing the practices involved in taking American oceanographic expeditions to sea during the 1950s: the engagement of an extremely diverse set of historical actors, the movement of

43 Daston writes, “Once circumscribed and concretized, the new thing becomes a magnet for intense interest, a paradox incarnate. It is richly evocative; it is eloquent.” Things that Talk, 24. 44 Lorraine Daston perhaps would argue that the phrase actually is not a metaphor and that such a description comes from skeptics who deem this mode of thinking a kind of “childish fantasy about tongues in trees and books in brooks,” Things that Talk, 12. However, she points to two facts that cause me to leave this comment as a footnote, signifying my own use of “things that talk” as a kind of metaphor: 1) things to not actually literally get up and start talking, and what we are after are the ways in which things elicit meaning in communities of people and how those meanings play out, and 2) it IS actually a metaphor in the sense that this kind of attention to things stems in part from the fact that even in the face of such doubt, scholars cannot ignore the multifarious historical instances in which “things have been said to talk.” In fact, Joseph Leo Koerner’s chapter “Bosch’s Equipment” in Daston’s volume states, “…while I don’t believe that the things I write about literally speak to me, there is something satisfying about pretending they do,” pp. 45. I believe Daston calls out those sorts of instances, where people give things language, as signposts signifying starting points for this sort of methodological application in search of a kind of co-construction of humans and their material world. As this chapter will demonstrate, there were many instances in which Horizon and Baird were anthropomorphized and given the possibility of human language. In part, it is from those instances that I begin to draw on the scholarship of things and objects, and more specifically on Daston et al.’s attention to things that talk.

25 those actors through ocean environments, the enmeshment of things and objects with people who worked to produce knowledge, and the intersection of science with the tradition of storytelling.

Downwind provides a framework within which we can conceive of expedition experiences involving the material world, when recorded in stories, as powerful tools men on ships used to alter how oceanography functioned socially and culturally during the Cold War.

In conducting the research for this project, I began from a set of narratives related to the

Downwind expedition and then extended outward to many other sources. The hidden stories themselves come in multiple forms: a speech, diary, letter, Chilean scientific journal article, pen and ink cartoon drawing, and photographs and a silent color motion picture. Beyond the stories, I analyzed primary published literature, personal and institutional letters, oral histories and biographies conducted by other historians that sit filed in the Scripps archive, autobiographies, newspaper and magazine articles, Scripps oceanographers’ publications, photographs, ship’s logs, shipboard telegraphs, accident reports, IGY reports and addresses, charts, graphs, maps, internal reports, budget requests, memoranda, postcards, brochures, news releases, audio transcripts, a song written about Downwind, Navy and private contracts, National Science Foundation applications, and other materials. I also engaged in several conversations with one of the men who travelled on Downwind, expedition leader and research geologist, Dr. Robert L. Fisher. All of these documents verify the vital nature of expeditions in this period, but they also indicate that the history of oceanography included an incredible array of events and circumstances that took place on ships at sea.

With this archival base, I step outside of the standard cold war framework into a cultural approach to the history of oceanography. As already stated, historians of oceanography who focus on earlier periods incorporate the cultural, especially maritime traditions and narrative production,

26 into their accounts of knowledge making at sea.45 But once investigations into the Earth’s oceans enmeshed with military interests, during and especially after World War II, historians began to train their analyses at the level of geopolitics and the power of elite scientific actors tied directly to

Washington. In general, non-elite historical actors that touched the world of oceanography do not appear. While historians also focused on how military patronage affected the science and thereby called attention to a small set of non-scientific actors, namely Navy personnel, explanatory arguments remained attuned to military support for science and ultimately led us right back to the

Cold War as the prime mover of post-World War II science. This dissertation investigates the process of narrative creation and the content of stories in order to reveal that engineers, graduate students, and Navy crew also had a hand in shaping the social world of oceanography.

Men at sea lived and worked in an environment that constantly changed in many capacities.

The ships themselves moved continually through the ocean. Downwind was a journey of two ships that sailed throughout the Pacific Ocean for 130 days. In the afternoon on October 21, 1957 the expedition left port at Point Loma, San Diego. The expedition sailed on two ships, Horizon and

Spencer F. Baird (Baird), across the Pacific to a port of call in Papeete, Tahiti, and arrived on

November 15. On these ships, the material nature of life at sea came alive. The ships themselves, oceanographic instruments, and various written or illustrated documents became vital material artifacts on the journey. The ships stayed in port until the 19th when they turned south and reached

Rapa, the southernmost inhabited Polynesian island, on the 24th. Bad weather inhibited some of the planned work, but the ships reached the southernmost point on the expedition track (in blue water at 48°30’S. – about 2,500 miles west of Castro, Chile) on December 7th where the ships met light snow. The ships then moved north toward Valparaíso, Chile, the halfway point of the expedition.

45 Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography: An Early History, 1870-1960, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1989); Helen Razwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University (2005). Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001).

27 The people present on the expeditions also changed over the course of the journey. While oceanographers and staff came and went in every port of call, major personnel changeovers occurred at Valparaíso. Oceanographers travelled in late December down to Chile to meet the ships.

The expedition members who continued through Valparaíso spent the Christmas holiday ashore, most of them in Santiago. On the 28th the ships began their journey up the South American coast over the Peru-Chile Trench. This leg of the expedition also carried five South American oceanographers on exchange as part of the IGY program. When the ships reached Callao, Peru on

January 15 the South Americans left and one oceanographer from India joined the scientists on

Baird. In Callao, Scripps scientists met their colleague working on location in Peru, Warren Wooster, who arranged several social gatherings with Peruvian IGY personnel. Equipment also became damaged or lost at sea, and new equipment was continually acquired. On Downwind, major equipment repairs took place in Callao and the ships left port at noon on the 18th. The last leg of the expedition extended up the coast of the Americas and back home to California. But before heading north, the ships headed due west, making stops at the islet Sala y Gomez and on Easter Island. On

Easter Island, oceanographers met with the Chilean military, and some of them spent time with the famous missionary, Father Sebastian Englert. On February 3rd the ships made their final sojourn toward San Diego, where scientific work mixed with celebrations of the expedition’s impending completion. Oceanographers held a shipboard party, sang, and recorded a song commemorating their adventures. Both ships reached Point Loma on the 28th where they were greeted with family, friends, Scripps administrators, and a ceremonious concert performed by one of the local high school marching bands. The entire journey was one of shifting personnel, research concerns, scientific equipment, and physical locations in the Pacific.

Downwind serves as a window into what I consider to be a hidden territory of expedition practices during the 1950s. Oceanographers focused on explaining their discipline in public and

28 political arenas as a field of science that created and relied upon vast amounts of data. As part of the

IGY, so much data was produced that the International Council for Science created World Data

Centers aimed at compiling an almost unmanageable quantity of numbers and figures under the assumption that anyone who wanted access to the information contained within merely needed to request it. In this era, data became important at a new scale within scientific discourse. Scientists were virtually required to participate in the worldwide data-driven scientific activities that emerged after World War II in order to legitimate their work.46 Practices at sea that generated much of the knowledge vital to the science involved much more than rote data and sample collection, however.

Oceanographers practiced a rich array of observation and collection processes that were deeply dependent on personal experiences of their scientific bodies and minds with the material world.

Attention to these processes reveals, first, that expedition work in this period involved bodily encounter between the oceanographer and the ocean as an object of inquiry, mediated often by scientific instruments. Second, expedition work also extended beyond the shipboard activities.

Oceanographers met their object of study just as profoundly with a bird’s-eye-view achieved from cramped seats on commercial airlines, for example. And third, oceanographers not only studied the ocean from ships that moved around its surface, they extended their scientific and analytical work to islands where they were literally able to walk around inside another layer of their object of inquiry.

Cold War, geopolitical, military patronage, and oceanographic administration frameworks cannot account for the depth to which physical realities at sea impacted those who worked there and inspired these men to use those experiences to instill intellectual and administrative change at their mainland institution. Sea stories from Downwind open such a window, and further investigations of

46 There are many authors to be sited here. For an example that overlaps with this history of oceanography specifically see: Elena Aronova, Karen S. Baker, and Naomi Oreskes, “Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, 1957-Present,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 183-224.

29 many other related sources allow me to flesh out how work on ships at sea came to satisfy the requirements of oceanography.

Dissertation Track

The dissertation applies five different analytical approaches to stories, things, and objects across five chapters. Each of the five chapters begins with a prologue that showcases one of five stories from or closely related to the Downwind expedition, which allows the men who experienced and constituted the ocean world I seek to understand to set the stage, in their own words, for my analysis. Their narrative strategies, language, and concerns get the reader out to sea on the expedition. The analytical approach of this dissertation examines highly specific moments of interactions between humans and things, yet the prologues aim to contextualize those moments by providing a way to imagine what that world must have been like to see, feel, touch, smell, and taste.

Where possible, I include the stories in their full original form, although excessive length required some truncation, which I indicate with ellipses. The prologue to Chapter Five was inspired by a silent film, which could not be literally inserted into this textual document. Therefore, I transcribed the film into prose that provides a factual description of the visual imagery experienced when watching the film. Inspired by each prologue, analytical chapters investigate the significance of stories, things, and objects in oceanography. Chapter One examines the process of creating the stories, and Chapters Two through Five draw things and objects out of the stories around which my analysis centers.

Following this introduction, the first chapter establishes the literary underpinning of science at sea in this era by examining what the process of narrative creation meant to the authors of five different forms of stories from or closely related to the Downwind expedition. I build from these approaches to ask, most basically, how the production of stories worked to structure and shape social interaction between expedition participants. I provide examples that belong within the history

30 of science as it intersects with literature and science. At that intersection within oceanography, a series of textual forms contained powerful narratives that shaped scientific practice and culture. I argue that the process of creating those stories helped the authors understand their scientific experiences at sea, and through the process of narration these stories became tools of cultural understanding that the authors used while navigating the everyday social and material world of ocean science in the Cold War era.

Chapter two explains that commercial airplanes and islands provided oceanographers new locations and vantage points from which to interrogate their object of inquiry. Historians and historical actors alike have tended to disregard oceanographic work in these places as activities tangential to actual science. I argue, however, that because oceanographers used their time in these places to conduct sensory surveys, the information taken from airplanes and islands should be integrated into our understanding of the production of oceanographic knowledge in this period.

More traditional scientific activities, including indirect quantified measurements and quantified specimen samples, were not the only way that oceanographers came to produce knowledge. The moments when the scientist personally came into contact with the object of inquiry were also formative. Oceanographers used airplanes and islands as a means of surveying coastal and island areas, which provided them a fresh perspective on geological similarities and differences and a way of accounting for “primitive” bodies in a synoptic conception of the Pacific Island region.

Chapter three discusses how the malfunctions of research vessels crucially affected the oceanographic process by determining social arrangements. I argue that the impact was so great that the ships facilitated a breakdown in the military-scientific relationship. Cold war oceanographic practice at sea conducted by Scripps emerged on vessels that did not work properly and continually required maintenance and troubleshooting attention. Their design, regardless of multiple translations from military to scientific vessels, continued to articulate an original construction scheme that

31 oceanographers were forced to work around. This chapter argues that these malfunctions altered how Scripps saw military patronage and drove a wedge between science and the military. Regarding the ships, patronage was not merely a beneficial addition to ocean science in this era. Once extensive malfunctions of ex-military vessels surfaced, oceanographers came to desire a separation between the lifeblood of their institution, their ships, and the US Navy.

Chapter 4 examines shipboard interactions between oceanographers and two groups of fellow expedition travellers: foreign scientists and Navy personnel. I present index maps and explosives as “boundary objects” that operated in different capacities to facilitate the collection of deep-sea ocean data. The particular mobilization of the boundary object framework here interrogates the heterogeneous nature of expedition work in the 1950s and explains oceanography as a fundamentally collaborative activity that functioned not just in the midst of, but precisely because of the diversity in agency among individual people, diverse groups, and a handful of material things.

The boundary objects in this case acted at the division between Scripps oceanographers and Erwin

Schweigger, a scientist from Peru, and at the intersection of Scripps oceanographers with Navy personnel. At those two social boundaries, maps and explosives (boundary objects) facilitated collaboration between diverse worlds. My analysis of the bridge that emerged on ships between these diverse groups illuminates how Schweigger and Navy personnel were not merely assistants to

Scripps oceanographers; they contributed significantly to the production of knowledge on

Downwind. I present Downwind as a case in which textual and technological boundary objects worked simultaneously in the collaborative production of knowledge between scientists and two groups that are otherwise almost completely silent in the historical record.

Chapter five analyzes photographs and a film from Downwind as objects that present the world of expedition oceanography at sea from the oceanographer’s perspective, yet reveal unspoken realities also at work during the journey. Scientific adventure and fun often came coupled with a

32 culture of tourism built from a long tradition of travel and colonialism in the Pacific region. This chapter applies methodologies of image analysis to the history of oceanography towards explaining what was at stake as oceanographers visually documented their expedition experiences. I examine photographs and a film that captured expedition life and work and uncover how images in science at sea served multiple functions. I argue that the photographs and film from the expedition have two sides: they are casual recordings of men who merely wished to document their journey at sea, yet underneath they contain references to the process by which the entire Pacific Basin came to be the domain of Scripps.

In the conclusion, I widen my lens to explore some of the larger messages that can be extracted from the specific moments addressed in the chapters. Expeditions were not journeys that occurred outside of Cold War realities, a point that this dissertation could be accused of making.

Rather, they were events that gathered many different species: narrative stories; airplanes and islands; ships; maps and explosives; and photos and film. In their collective function, these events brought together literature and the quest to understand nature, oceanographers and ships, science and self.

They also enmeshed the world of geopolitical, military, and elite administrative concerns with shipboard life because when expedition participants returned from their journeys, they brought their experiences, thoughts, opinions, things, and objects back with them. Looking at these journeys to sea in this way helps us gain a broader, more inclusive understanding of how the men on ships leveraged the power to influence choices about technology, competition, international collaboration, and geopolitics in oceanography during the Cold War.

The final chapter is an epilogue originally published as an online Object Lesson essay at The

Atlantic with the hope of encouraging a popular audience to think in new ways about how our lives intertwine with the non-human world. The essay imagines that a squid, caught and killed on the

Downwind expedition, narrates the story of its own death and afterlife. The Object Lesson Essay

33 Series is published under The Atlantic’s online Technology Channel. As an animal categorized within a technology section of a magazine, the squid becomes a tool for thinking about those intersections from below the surface of the sea. Inspired by a hope that a change in perspective offers the ability to see new ideas and connections, the epilogue attempts to give a nonhuman thing in this world, a dead squid, the last analytical word.

The setting for this dissertation, the point at which I focus my analysis, is precisely at the intersection between the men who went to sea on expeditions in the 1950s and the diverse material world within which they lived and worked. With “the sea” representative of the Pacific Ocean and its component parts, “the ship” indicative of the material world of artifacts, and “I” standing in for the diverse cast of human expedition travelers, my central concern in this project is to understand how “the sea, the ship, and I,” the title phrase, entangled with one another and became part of the conditions of possibility for American oceanography to grow at an unprecedented rate during the

Cold War. Expedition experience narrated in stories was a kind of power that men on ships used to influence the nature of that growth and support the intellectual activities of science.

34 Prologue to Chapter 1 Director Roger Revelle’s Sea Search Story

The architecture of this dissertation pairs analytical chapters with prologues that showcase stories from oceanography. The first prologue here presents a speech written by Scripps’ Director

Roger Revelle that demonstrates how an elite leader publicly set the stage for stories within the social world of science at sea.47 Chapter 1 introduces four stories, all from the Downwind expedition, and analyzes what narration meant to each of the authors. The actual stories appear later as direct quotes48 in the prologues to chapters 2-5, which give voice to an ocean geologist, graduate student, engineer, and medical doctor – actors who have been written out of this history. Chapters

2-5 dig into the content of the stories and use them as windows for viewing everyday realities at sea.

In sum, this structure underlines the power of narration (Chapter 1) and narrative content (Chapters

2-5) to support the intellectual activity of ocean science. If circumstances, events, or portions of the stories from Chapter 1 recur downwind in this dissertation, it is in aid of further elaborating the moments that defined what Revelle’s Sea Search story referred to as: a world full of mystery and secrets.

47 Revelle acted as Director of Scripps from 1950-1964. The following works offer an introduction into his career as a charismatic leader at Scripps. Harold A. Thomas, Jr., “Roger Revelle: President-Elect,” Science 179, no. 4075, Feb. 23, 1973: 818-820; William A. Nierenberg, “Roger Randall Dougan Revelle (7 March 1909-15 July 1991),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136, no. 4, Dec, 1992: 596-600. Judith and Neil Morgan, Roger: A Biography of Roger Revelle, San Diego: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1996; and Robert Dorfman and Peter P. Rogers, Science with a Face: In Honor of Roger Randall Revelle, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Other examples of Revelle’s work include: Revelle’s Address to the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors, November 17, 1955, SIO Non-SIO Series, Box 76, Folder 2: IGY National Committee, 1953, 1955. Or see Revelle’s “The Oceans and the Earth,” December 27, 1955 before Session X6 – A.A.A.S., Symposium on the International Geophysical Year, SIO Roger Revelle Papers, Box 4, Folder 37: The oceans and the earth talk. These are just two examples from the IGY, but there are many others throughout Revelle’s papers that extend more generally outside of that special program. For example, see Robert L. Fisher and Roger Revelle, “The Giant Furrows of the Pacific: The long narrow and deep trenches around the margins of the Pacific Ocean may hold the key to the evolution of continents and the origin of mountain ranges,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, draft held in SIO Russell Watson Raitt Papers 1922-1996, Box 6, Folder 2: R. L. Fisher 1957. 48 For the film, my transcription of the visual images.

35 Director Roger Revelle’s Sea Search Story

MAN IS A CURIOUS CUSS.49 Throughout history men have been prying into the secrets of the earth. They have looked behind rocks…dug holes into the earth to see what they could uncover…moved mountains to find out what they are made of [all ellipses throughout this quotation are original and indicate a direction to pause in spoken word not an omission of text]. But the greatest mystery of all, man is just beginning to uncover. The story of the things that lie beneath the surface of the sea is that mystery. And this is the story of the men and women engaged in learning the secrets of the sea. It involves scientists and sea-captains, mathematicians and engineers, artists and dock hands, biologists and fishermen, oilers, chemists and cooks. These are the people who work on the land, on the sea, and under the sea. What they find is important to every person on the face of the earth for, from the sea, comes the basic sustenance of the major portion of the earth…from the daily rising vapor the sun steams [sic] from the surface of the oceans come the rains that grow our crops and give us water. Today, the human population of the earth grows apace, and men are beginning to look to the sea for the sustenance of the human race. This is the story of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, an [sic] extension of the University of California whose task is two fold – to learn the secrets of the oceans and to teach them to others [This strike through appears as blue pen over the original typescript. All remaining strike throughs represent capital X’s typed over the original text as a form of deletion]. Take a map of the Pacific coastline from the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon to Cape San Lucas, the southernmost tip of Baja California. Run a series of lines a thousand miles out to sea on your map, spacing them forty miles apart. Then draw another series, running north and south, crossing the east-west lines and extending out to sea to the end of the first pattern. Mark each crossing of the lines with a pinpoint, give it a number and you have a series of “stations” covering the Pacific waters. These are the domain of the Scripps Institution fleet of converted mine-sweepers, tuna clippers and luxury yachts…and they are the waters in which the tremendous fishing industry of the

49 “Sea Search.” Addressed to “Hank Shippey, 5402 N. Banewell Ave., Azusa, California. SIO Roger Revelle Papers 1910-2009, Box 4, Folder 38: Hank Shippey. The text contained in this prologue is an exact quote of the entire document with clarifications added in square brackets. As stated in the first bracketed clarification, the ellipses are original and indicate a moment of pause while speaking.

36 west coast are interested. Both the commercial and the sports fisherman have an interest in these waters, the water that supports one of the west’s major industries, fishing. Staff these small ships with competent men and send them to find out what is happening at each station you have marked on your map. And then send them again, and again. Fill shore buildings with mathematicians and chemists and artists and technical writers to sort and sift the mountain of data the ships out at sea collect. Put all of this together and you get a picture of what is happening in this important section of the Pacific Ocean. This is the mighty task of the Scripps Institute. Through these findings Scripps scientists and oceanographers find where the fish spawn, how they live and where they go. They find where the waters run in their mighty currents and can tell where they will be six months from now. Information important to our defense as well as important to the fishing industry [sic]. It isn’t easy. The men and women who do this work are capable, trained oceanographers and scientists in other fields…and they have been sailors who love the sea and are curious about their love. They must spend weeks and months each year tossing about on the surface of the waters they study…and then more weeks and months in the land laboratories putting the data together to make a comprehensive picture of the activity of the sea. Let’s take a trip with the M S Horizon, the largest of the Scripps fleet. Just a routine trip, one of the many the ship will take throughout the year. On board the ship we find equipment strange to the landlubber’s eyes. Nansen bottles, thermometers, plankton nets, jugs of formaldehyde, inclinometers; equipment to take samples [two or three unreadable words typed with x’s over them] and temperatures of the deep waters, for taking samples of the life content of the waters, and equipment for having fun on the days of rest that must be taken during the three week cruise. And on board the ship we find the people to operate the ship and all the equipment. Captain, mates, deck and engine crew, radioman, marine technicians, chemist, marine biologist and a weatherman. And not the least, the cook! The Scripps fleet prides itself on the cooks who go to sea with them for the food at sea is half the battle of making the trip. The cruise is going into the southern waters. Leaving her berth in San Diego Harbor the Horizon clears Point Loma headed for the Coronado Islands, a scant twenty miles out. From here,

37 clear of bay shipping and week-end fisherman, she sets her course for Cedros Island, an overnight run south. The first station of this cruise is just south of Cedros. The scientific complement aboard is readying their equipment for the first station. In the lab, the marine biologist inspects his plankton nets and hanging lights, numbers his bottles and jars, readies his formaldehyde to pickle his catch. The four marine technicians aboard divide into two watches, each couple working alternate stations. In their lab they mount thermometers in Nansen Bottles, bottles which automatically take water and temperature at different depths. Three thermometers to a bottle, two are pressurized for comparison check purposes. The Nansen Bottle is a reversible, metal bottle which is clamped to a lowering cable upside down. A weight sliding down the cable trips the top clamp, the bottle swings over, closing doors in each and which traps water at the depth tripped. As the bottle turns, the mercury column breaks in the thermometers attached so they will maintain the reading at the depth tripped. Then all hands settle down for the run south, relaxing until the moment the work starts. the [sic] coffee pot in the galley is steaming and the cook has steaks almost ready for the table. Bunks are made up and skin diving and fishing gear stowed away until the time comes to use them. Stories of past cruises, weather the little ships have gone th [sic] through, discoveries and explorations they have undergone during the cruises, and contemplation of what is in store for them during this trip hold them through dinner and until time to bunk down for the first night out. The technicians are glad to get a good night’s sleep tonight for, once they hit the first station in the morning, they will be “on the line”, [sic] hitting stations every forty miles, whether it is 3:00 a.m., or noon. Through the night the little ship makes her long run south. With dawn the ship becomes alive. The San Benitos islands are ahead…a deckhand yells into the sleeping quarters for all hands who want to watch a pack of killer whales go by to “roll out.” In the morning light a pair of small islands loom from the misty seas. About five miles apart, these are the San Benitos, the home of giant sea lions and sea otters, and sea elephants. These monsters loll indolently in the warm waters and peek shyly from rocky grags [sic] surrounding the small beaches. During the dawn the ship has picked up an escort of albatross, the “gooney-birds” familiar to sailors the world over and now accused of wrecking aircraft on Midway Island. They glide on the wind astern of the ship, occasionally lighting in the water for a rest, landing with their ski-like

38 feet pushing the water ahead of them, and then awkwardly paddling themselves into the winds to follow again. Under the bow of the ship a school of dolphins play a crisscross race with us, crossing our path inches ahead of the cutting metal bow, slicing through the clear water with incredible speed and grace. Off duty hands and technicians line the bow with their cameras trying to get pictures of Neptune’s ballet. P Past San Benitos, the mighty northern tip of Cedros Island looms to the south. This stone face holds the scattered wreckage of more than one ship. It rises from the water to a height of thousands of feet, with one lone stand of trees on the very top. The Horizon runs down the coastal, sheltered side of Cedros, taking protection from the sea, past the once booming whaling station of Cedros. Blue whales from Arctic regions pass here yearly traveling to San Ignacio Lagoon, the site of the whale’s nuptial rites. Passing the southern end of Cedros the captain takes his bearings from landmarks on the island and on the barely visible mainland to the east. From this point it is only an hour to the first station. He sends word to the technicians to get ready. “ON STATION” ! [sic] The ship stops and a flurry of activity takes place. The technicians hoist a weighted cable over the side. The weight is painted white on top and they must estimate the distance below the surface this is visible, marking it on a chart. They work from a metal cage hanging on the side of the ship. The cable descends from a boom directly over their heads. The winch operator works where he can watch the activity in the cage. After a few feet of cable have been paid out the cable is stopped. The first Nansen bottle is attached. This is the bottom bottle on the “cast” and will go to a depth of ____ feet [these blanks are original and were never filled in]. “Let her go”, signals the technician, and the winchman pays out another ____ feet below the surface. More bottles are stacked clamped to the cable at predetermined points, twelve in all, spaced so, with all submerged, they take data at known levels. Once down the cast must remain a few minutes while the attached thermometers attain their correct readings. Then a small brass weight, a “messenger” is placed around the cable and dropped. This trips the first bottle, trapping water and breaking the mercury columns in the first bottle. The first bottle releases another messenger [sic] which trips the second bottle, and so on down to the bottom bottle.

39 After time has been allowed for all bottles to trip, the cast is brought back to the surface. One by one the bottles emerge from the depths, are taken from the cable and placed on a rack in the lab. The last bottle is put in place and the weight is swung aboard, but they aren’t through yet. Now comes the plankton tow. The plankton net is a widemouthed [sic], coneshaped [sic] net, five feet in diameter, funneling about twelve feet to a removable cup about the size of a quart jar. It is designed to take the minute particles of free-floating oceanic life classified as plankton. This includes fish-eggs and larvae, shrimp, squid, jellyfish, and the hundred and one other things which make up this basic food-stuff of the ocean. Through many experiences, oceanographers have evolved a method of using a plankton net, allowing them to attain exact data as to how much water passed through the net at certain levels. The net is dropped ____ feet. The ship is headed slowly upwind. The net is dropped ____ feet in exactly ____ minutes. On the cable hangs an inclinometer. The net is allowed to remain at maximum depth for ____ minutes and is then slowly drawn in. The trick is to keep the cable at a constant 45%. Here the technician or biologist in charge of the net tow takes over the ship. With one eye on the inclinometer, one eye on a stop watch, he relays orders to the bridge increasing or decreasing the speed of the ship according to the angle of the cable. Each thirty seconds the cable angle is marked on a chart – 40%, 43%, 48%, 53% - and he orders the ship speeded – 50% 47%, 45% - he grins with satisfaction, but - 40%, 35%, 30% - and he is blue in the face yelling for them to stop the ship. Later, his degree markings on the chart will enable mathematicians to compute the exact length of time the net remained at different depths, giving certain knowledge of the plankton catch at different depths. As the net comes from the water the technicians wrestle it aboard. They unscrew the quart sized cup from the huge funnel and take it into the lab immediately. The contents of the/cup [typed edit added in double spacing clarifies: ^finely woven] are washed from the finely woven cup into labeled jars and pickled with formaldehyde. These are stored for return to the shore labs for analyzation.and [sic] counting of the contents. On the biologists chart are also recorded the number of albatross and other birds, sharks, noticeable or observed fish, and the state of the weather. The moment the technicians plankton net emerged from the water, the ship resumed its course, headed for the next station. Their stop on station has only been for about twenty minutes

40 and they are under way again, but far from done with the work of the station. This will continue for the next few days, until the ship reaches a favorable spot for a one-day rest. Out the line, stopping every forty miles to work a station, then coming back in again on the next line south, working along the way. Underway, the technicians finish the work of the station. They take line and samples of water from the Nansen bottles for the shipboard chemist to analyze for saline and phosphate content. They take other samples [sic] which are bottled and capped to be brought back to shore to a determination of their oxygen content. Then, with magnifying glass and flashlight, they read the three thermometers on each Nansen bottle. These reading are read by both the technicians on duty, doublechecking [sic] readings and giving a check on the variability of the thermometers in the time between readings. So now we have the data to tell us about one particular place in the ocean. We can tell that at 1:00 p.m., April 4, 1955, the oce ocean at this spot contained a certain planktonic content, a definite mineral content, a certain amount of oxygen. We know its temperature at varying levels, its clarity was a certain degree, the weather was known and noted birds and marine life are known. This gives us a known set of factors for one spot at one time. We have other ships working, taking the same type of data, every month of the year, covering our part of the Pacific Ocean. We collect the known data from each station worked on every cruise of all the ships. With enough of them, taken over a period of time, it shows a definite pattern of activity in the ocean, following a set of factors from one place in the ocean to another, tracing the waters, known by their characteristics of content and temperature as one would recognize a familiar face, as they form the mighty oceanic currents the flow through the seas of the world. But there is fun too on the cruise. Ending a line in the warm tropical waters below the tip of Baja California, somebody spotted tremendous sea turtles…and the chase was on. Spears were the weapons used, and Scripps people are all skin divers at heart. Chasing down the turtles, the captain handled his ship like a sports fishing boat. STRIKE! Got one. Follow him down the length of the ship from the bow where you speared him…back to the stern where you can handle him. They fight hard, these turtles, even with a spear thrust clear through them. In an house we have speared four big ones, and its turtle soup and turtle steaks for dinner tonight.

41 And the “days off” when the ship put into Magdalena Bay for a rest. For the lazy ones, just drop a line over the side and haul them in, but for fun, put a skiff over the side and row over to the little, warm clear, coves just inside the entrance to the bay. Here, the shallow water is filled with fish and lobsters. It is a skin divers paradise. Even the rare “blue” lobster is found among the shallow rocks. The fish so thick that, in ten feet of crystal clear water, its hard to see the bottom. Back on board, cutting the choice fillets from your catch, saving the lobsters tails and throwing the rest back, placing your catch in the ship’s freezer to take home wi with you at cruise end.

42 Chapter 1 Sea Stories: Narrative as a Social Tool of Science Introduction

The people who went on Scripps’ expeditions in the 1950s make it clear that science at sea involved a lot of fun. In his Sea Search story Roger Revelle described a close relationship between scientific and everyday activities on expeditions in this era. He wrote, “But there is fun too on the cruise. Ending a line in the warm tropical waters below the tip of Baja California, somebody spotted tremendous sea turtles…and the chase was on.” The phrase “ending a line” was a colloquialism for completion of scientific work, and Revelle’s rhetorical strategy illustrated how men on expeditions embraced adventures that flowed, almost naturally, out of what would more traditionally be understood as scientific tasks like sampling, observation, and measuring.

This chapter examines how a geologist, a graduate student, an engineer, and an expedition medical doctor, all under Revelle’s leadership, narrated their experiences on expeditions in this era using stories as objects to think with.50 I preview the stories in order to establish that the process of narrative creation – the action of coming up with the stories rather than the stories in and of themselves – allowed men on ships to puzzle out their social purposes, perform their identities, facilitate relationships, and create a coherent shipboard community out of an intermixed group of scientists, engineers, Navy crew, and various other assistants. In the stories analyzed throughout this chapter, each author narrated a series of events as a kind of interpretive aid in understanding how a

50 Similarly, Sharon Traweek has explored the ways in which social meaning was transmitted among high-energy physicists (in the 1970s) in daily routines, especially stories told within a tightknit exclusively male community. She argued that physicists were made as young recruits were told stories about heroes, success, and failure, and through these stories learned information vital to developing as a viable professional. See Chapter 3 “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics,” in Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992: 74-105. For other examples of things people have thought and do think with see: Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.

43 wide array of daily realities intertwined with science.51 These stories tend to be highly individual and personal, and, as I will show, they emerged for a variety of reasons. The thread linking them together is narrative’s power of influence: the ideas and relationships the creators came to apprehend through the process of narration subsequently changed, altered, and modified social arrangements within the oceanographic community.

On the Downwind expedition, Geologist Bob Norris recorded his experiences in a diary.

The process of creating that text was the basis for Norris’ puzzling out how he situated himself in relation to the men he worked with on the expedition. He wrote the diary in private, but doing so became vital to Norris determining how he related to non-scientists and in realizing that some of the surveys he casually conducted could be translated into intentional scientific work, a viable scientific collaboration, and subsequent journal article. Likewise, graduate student John Knauss recorded his personal perceptions of what it was like to live and work at sea. He wrote a memorandum to Scripps administrators explaining his experiences aboard oceanographic research vessels.52 In this memo,

Knauss utilized a particular rhetorical strategy that softened the blow of his complaints about the difficulties he experienced on ships with strong statements regarding the overwhelming value of the vessels to the science of oceanography. In this case, Knauss used a memorandum to perform skilled narration because his status as a graduate student who desired technological change meant that he did not necessarily have the social standing to have his extensive complaints and requests taken seriously. Later in his career, he ceased using this strategy because he no longer needed to prove himself. Engineer Maxwell Silverman also sought credibility, but through illustration. The cartoon

51 For a similar example, in the context of information technologists at the National Center for Ecological Analysis (1997-2001), in which storytelling is deeply implicated in “every aspect of organizational life,” (pp.10) see Florence Millerand, David Ribes, Karen S. Baker, and Geoffry C. Bowker, “Making an Issue out of a Standard: Storytelling Practices in a Scientific Community,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 38, no. 1 (2012): 7-43. 52 This was in reference to an earlier expedition, not Downwind specifically, but I use it as part of this dissertation as a document that singlehandedly represents the breadth of complaints typically voiced to Scripps administrators regarding the research vessels in this era.

44 that commemorated his expedition work on Downwind represented more than a fun pastime.

Silverman created it for his scientific expedition leader, and in so doing, sought to build a bond between himself as a scientific assistant and his superior at sea. The drawing functioned as a tool

Silverman used to facilitate an important professional relationship and create strong ties within the shipboard community. Also seeking validation in the oceanographic community, medical doctor

Robert Bingham filmed a silent motion picture during the first leg of Downwind. In this film,

Bingham portrayed himself as one of the oceanographers who spent time on Scripps’ land-based campus and who conducted scientific work on ships at sea. Although Bingham was invited to the expedition to care for the medical needs of the scientists and crew, the process of creating the film allowed him to construct a particular identity for himself in which he stood as a vital contributor to ocean research. He later attempted to submit the film to Scripps in hope of further strengthening his relationship with professional oceanographers. When that did not work, he gave the film new life as he presented it to public audiences in southern California.

Each of these stories demonstrate that personal and leisurely activities like writing a diary and memorandum, drawing a cartoon, and filming a motion picture were also a part of the development of scientific relationships at sea. As ethnographer Julian Orr has demonstrated, storytelling can be a legitimate component of working social arrangements, not merely an addition to it.53 I argue that the process of creating these stories helped the authors understand their experiences at sea, and through the process of narration, the stories themselves became tools the authors used to navigate the everyday social and material world of ocean science, and this is critical – at sea.

Out on the ocean, oceanography operated differently than it did back on the mainland.

Shipboard science incorporated adventure and fun into sampling, measuring, and observing. The ship, however, was a difficult environment. Onboard, 30-50 men lived in tight quarters, and in the

53 Julian Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1996).

45 very same space they completed their work. Typically more people travelled on these ships than the ship could comfortably accommodate and everyone felt cramped.54 The men came up with creative ways to solve spatial problems. They slept in beds in the sick bay rather than proper bunks. Many other circumstances proved trying. Seawater puddled on the deck from which the men worked. The walking surface was slippery, and one was always wet. Open-ocean waves often caused the ships to roll heavily, which made seasickness a daily occurrence for many of the men. The list of undesirables is long and I develop it more fully throughout the remainder of this dissertation. The important point here is that in this distinct shipboard environment, physical discomfort, adventure, engine noise and grease, seasickness and bacterial infection, sleep deprivation, oceanic beauty, friendly relationships, and contentious conflicts spontaneously flowed into moments where these men conducted scientific work. The extent of this overlap was not always benign: at times it impeded the production of science. Sleep-deprived, cramped, seasick scientists and assistants struggled to handle hundreds of pounds of oceanographic instruments that needed to be lowered and raised deep into the ocean. Shipboard communities overcame these difficulties by relying on one another. Social bonds at sea, formed in part by sharing adventurous and fun aspects of expedition life, facilitated the execution of daily research goals. The ways in which the men on ships interacted with one another personally cannot be separated from how they completed oceanographic research professionally. It was under the aegis of close interpersonal relationships that the work of deep-sea oceanography, from exploding TNT for seismic profiles to collecting water samples, succeeded. To understand the career of oceanography in this era we must investigate how these social connections were generated through the process of narration.

54 Frustrations over cramped quarters emerge time and time again from many different individuals across Scripps’ archival record.

46 My interpretation of oceanographic stories begins with the view that language does not merely reflect but constitutes the world.55 The stories did not come about on the fringes of oceanographic practice, and the intent and meanings behind them were not merely personal and therefore peripheral to science at best, weightless at worst. Rather, men on expeditions constructed their particular manner of conducting science through storytelling that built the very community that executed and supported the intellectual activities of oceanography. This study builds upon the foundation of Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture can be examined as an “assemblage of texts.”56

Attention to the many forms and strategies that people and groups use to narrate their lives and experiences allows for broader conclusions to be drawn about formative relationships, crucial tensions, and personal yet influential interactions. I study oceanographic stories by sorting out their style and structure, seeking crucial yet thus far ignored background information about their creation, and using both to determine, as Geertz calls it, “their social ground and import.”57 Geertz goes on to describe how this process requires the scholar to manage “a multiplicity of conceptual structures” that are “knotted into one another” and that are “strange, irregular, and implicit.” By undertaking a similar level of engagement with the narratives from oceanography, I argue that these stories hold clues to social commitments, structures, and beliefs at the core of scientific field practice during expedition life and work. Oceanographers and their assistants at sea created stories for different purposes. Sometimes narrative emerged in good fun for entertainment, for example, when they commemorated the end of an expedition. At other times stories came about when they needed to communicate work-related wants and needs to administrators. In both cases they used these narratives to make sense of that world, and only by undertaking close readings, including attention

55 Specifically, I am working from literary scholarship that defines language as “generative” not “mimetic.” See, for example, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 59-86. 56 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books (1973). 57 Ibid., 9.

47 to style, structure, and form, can we become aware on a deeper level how narration in the context of mid-century expedition science was not merely a personal pastime.

The significance of my approach lies in its attention to the process of creating stories about life and work at sea. One of the most common ways in which scholars determine the role and impact of a particular narrative is by investigating its circulation through different communities or groups and seeking to understand how the dominant elements of the narrative embedded themselves into lived communities.58 But these oceanographic sea stories did not travel very far.

With very limited exceptions, the words and images contained within them have remained private or enjoyed only a very limited distribution until their treatment in this dissertation. Some may not have seen the outside of a shoebox or archive folder since the 1950s. Nevertheless, at stake in this chapter are the ways in which the development and employment of narrative and narrative strategies indicate the author’s intent behind and experience in creating the story. Even though these narratives did not go on to reach a wide public at the time, become explicitly utilized in cold war scientific discourse, or emerge in science and society debates, the authors wrote, drew, and filmed them as tools to understand and build the community in which they developed friendships and sought professional mobility. I focus here on what the stories meant to the authors.

My attention to the act of storytelling binds my analysis to the problem of form. Scholarly debates on this polemic, even within the history of science alone, span wide, but generally address the following kinds of questions: How do scholars define literary and textual form in different historical contexts? How do different definitions of form relate to one another? What role do style, structure, and materiality (paper type, format, page size, headings, and layout) play? And what role

58 Pivotal to this scholarship is the work of Bruno Latour and his concept of Actor Network Theory that addresses the ways in which textual forms circulate through scientific societies, Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005). Also see Henry S. Turner’s idea that we should be paying attention to “networks of forms,” in “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa),” Isis 101, no. 3 (2010): 578-589, especially pp. 586-589.

48 have non-textual forms held?59 Each story in this dissertation comes in a different form: personal diary, memorandum, drawing, and film.60 By examining these stories, my first contribution is to explain how narrative worked as a tool oceanographers used to formulate their social world at sea.61

These scientists did not just narrate their work in scientific journal articles and military contracts.62

Personal and private stories that came in a variety of forms also held an important role for these historical actors.

This chapter also relates to questions of form in a methodological sense. Borrowing from literary scholars and historians of science attentive to the intersection of narrative and science, this chapter is built on the assumption that narrative structure is never simply an inert tool used in the creation of knowledge, but it contains knowledge itself.63 In analyzing how these stories were told, I closely read a wide variety of narrative strategies, such as verbal and narrative patterning, language, event range, format, repetition, hand-drawn images, and 16mm film scenes. With these readings I come to an understanding of how a particular author created his narrative, what was at stake in that story, and to what use the author put it within the oceanographic community. As the chapter develops I argue that these stories were used as social tools created for personal reasons but utilized with professional intent. The authors wrote, drew, or filmed these stories, but I argue that that process of creation and the final product also made a mark on each author’s behavior, relationships, and social stance. The stories themselves pushed back on their authors. They knit together matter and meaning. In literary scholar Laura Dassow Walls’ words, “…works of literature do not merely grace the halls of museums but weave the talking things of science into new and surprising

59 See Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on “Form,”” Isis 101 (2001): 578-589, pp. 580-581. 60 Many literary scholars do not limit the relationship between literature and social context to “literary texts” because they see no sound epistemological reason to make such a distinction. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of Text,” Speculum 65 (1990): 64. 61 Ibid., pp. 581 and 584. 62 Two forms of written discourse typically referenced in current literature within the history of oceanography. 63 See Ibid., 584.

49 alliances.”64 Said perhaps more simply, sea stories became narrative entities through which expedition participants built scientific collaborations, lobbied for technological changes at sea, grew friendships, and pursued social standing within the oceanographic community.

As a set, I situate these sea stories as part of a “network of forms,” including written text, hand-drawn image, and 16mm film, that facilitated communication, thought, and collective association among oceanographers by allowing the authors to think through and concretize ideas and social connections.65 In the context of mid-century expeditions, the written word, hand-drawing, and 16mm film were vital components of oceanographic culture. My attention however, by necessity of following the narratives themselves that did not circulate widely, gears toward extracting the meaning and ideas contained within the forms and seeking to determine how those meanings and ideas emerged and where they extended beyond written word, drawn cartoon, and light-exposed film reel. To begin this level of analysis, I ask why oceanographers in the 1950s recorded narratives about their work at sea in the first place.

At the start, the chapter provides the background necessary for understanding these narratives as tools. I explain how storytelling at sea was rooted in 19th century scientific expeditions.

A much older way of doing science on the sea inspired men to narrate their experiences at sea after

World War II. Then I describe the development of expedition science at Scripps in the 20th century.

The heart of the chapter is the remaining sub-sections, which examine the four stories. These examples illustrate how expedition experiences inspired storytelling where men puzzled out their interpersonal lives and in so doing built the social world that became the foundation for oceanographic research on ships at sea.

64 Laura Dassow Walls, “Of Atoms, Oaks, and Cannibals; or, More Things That Talk,” Isis 101 (2010): 598. 65 Henry S. Turner uses this phrase when discussing how he believes Latour’s notion of form is “especially innovative” because he pays special attention to how forms do not merely represent and do not merely hold meaning, but how they “function: form does things, it doesn’t simply mean things.” Ibid., 586-587, italics original.

50 Storytelling Legacy and Expedition Context

During the 1850s, primarily within the United States and Britain, a shift occurred from conceptualizing the ocean as something unknown and greatly uninteresting to an intriguing space that spawned real life monsters (large, dangerous, and sometimes weird-looking sea creatures) and simultaneously fostered human health (seashores offered rejuvenation).66 Before the 1850s, the open oceans were imagined primarily as a space of transport and mostly not thought of at all. Fisherman caught fish there. But this space in large part merely provided a liquid substrate used to get from one place to another. Not much was known about that which lay beneath the surface, and no one much cared. Historians agree that a strong momentum developed in the middle of the 19th century that led to the birth of modern ocean science.67 This momentum grew out of a new curiosity about ocean environments for human use and was tied in large part to prospering American and British maritime cultures and economies as well as an even bigger Western scientific trend to characterize, understand, and control large spaces, such as the atmosphere, the Arctic, and high-altitude mountain ranges.68 The new curiosity provided a foundation upon which people of all sorts began to wonder about the open sea and its great depths.

The growing mid-19th century interest in the world’s oceans arrived hand in hand with various forms of writing that historian Helen Rozwadowski groups together as “voyage narratives.”69

In modern Western cultures, especially since the 1850s, people of all sorts pondered, described, and understood the ocean in large part through writing, reading, and telling stories. These narratives took

66 Ibid., 110-158 Steinberg describes the ocean as a void in the 19th century. 67 Many histories that cover fields of science that overlap with the history of oceanography in the middle of the 19th century characterize the 1850s as a time when people breathed a new kind of life into ocean science. Notable works that focus on this shift are: Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, Cambridge: Belknap, 2005; Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography, An Early History, 1870-1960, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989; Michael Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 68 Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783-1870, London: Longman, 1983. 69 Rozwadowski explicitly defines “voyage narrative” in 19th century maritime literature as: “the chronological story of a voyage, sometimes constructed like a journal with separate daily entries,” pp.18. However her analysis goes on to include all of these forms I listed here that may or may not strictly fit that description.

51 many literary forms, including logbooks, journals, travel accounts, expedition narratives, published laments on expeditions, shipboard musings of sea experiences, maritime novels written by professional and sometimes famous writers, scientific voyage narratives, whaling stories, songs, poems, drawings, paintings, and since the early 20th century, photographs and film. This wide variety of literary and narrative forms used to understand the ocean overlapped with a fusion that occurred in the 19th century between maritime culture and ocean science. People who worked on the open ocean saw and read what others working there drew, painted, and wrote. Scientists read accounts written by whalers, mariners, and novelists who in turn read what scientists wrote about the sea.

Further, each of these groups began borrowing from the others as they continued to write their own narratives. Thus, over the 19th century, the practice of documenting sea stories in multiple forms became infused with creating knowledge about the world’s oceans.

Moving into the 20th century, the world of the ocean continued to change, as did peoples’ interactions with and interpretations of it. Innovations in scientific instrumentation provided a means of studying the plants and animals that lived under the sea surface as well as reaching, probing, and determining the qualities of the seafloor. Two world wars transformed ideas about the world’s oceans even further from a place of maritime transport to usable and knowable space – more specifically as a battleground for strategic and secret submarine reconnaissance.

Revelle’s Sea Search story describes how the scientists in the 1950s observed killer whales, islands, sea lions, sea otters, and sea elephants, and birds as they primed themselves for their work.

They took photographs of dolphins alongside the ships. On station70 they made quantifiable observations and measurements at one point in the ocean. Eventually oceanographers began to incorporate all of this information into constructing a “familiar face,” or rather synoptic picture, of

70 Remember that Revelle describes what “on station” means in his Sea Search story – a set of latitude and longitude coordinates that pinpoints particular spots of measurement under the ocean.

52 the Pacific. To create that sense of familiarity and synopsis, oceanographic practices enmeshed with personal sensory experience. Numbers and maps combined with illness, infatuation, dreaming, adventure, hunger, and celebration. Storytelling practices, for many of the men who went to sea on

Scripps ships, not just Revelle, entwined with oceanographic research.

The stories from Scripps, and those from Downwind that I address in the remainder of this chapter, emerged within a broader narrative tradition of popularizing the ocean. Some of the most famous scientific and literary icons who reached American popular culture wrote prolifically after

World War II. Beginning in 1951, Rachel Carson published three books about the sea. The Sea

Around Us won her the U.S. National Book Award, and the other two became best sellers.71 Also published that year was John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, based on his 1940 trip around the Gulf of California with his scientist friend Ed Ricketts. Ernest Hemingway offered The Old Man and the Sea, the last work published in his lifetime. This book, written by a seasoned and famous author, earned the Pulitzer Prize in for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Jacques Cousteau used his ship Calypso for exploring the Mediterranean, and in 1953 published The

Silent World, which documented activities on that ship. Along with producer Louis Malle, Cousteau turned the book into an award winning film released in 1956. Two years earlier, Jules Verne’s 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was released as a film starring Kirk Douglas. Also at this time,

National Geographic began publishing periodic articles about the ocean world and the people who lived at the seaside.72

The ocean held a prominent place in the American cultural imagination as reflected by the quantity and popularity of this literature. Scholarship tuned in to these sorts of storytelling practices

71 The other two were The Edge of the Sea (1955) and Under the Sea Wind (1941), which was originally released in 1941 but sold poorly. After the success of The Sea Around Us, this 1941 book was reissued by Oxford University Press and became a bestseller throughout the 1950s. 72 For example, National Geographic January 1950 “From Indian Canoes to Submarines at Key West,” and “Shores and Sails in the South Seas.”

53 has shown how individuals construct past events through narrative. In various other historical and cultural contexts, narratives have been used to claim identity, construct memory, and organize expectations for future discourse and behavior. Narratives also tend to engage cultural power structures and offer space to alter or reclaim certain forms of identity and essentially help people construct their own lives.73 As a component of scientific discourse, nonscientific narratives often legitimate technical aspects of science itself.74 Further, narratives can offer a space for the scientist to guarantee himself as a producer of reliable work by producing stories easily digestible by a public audience.75 The diary, memorandum, cartoon, and motion picture stories from Downwind illuminate cases in which narrative became a tool of collaboration, persuasion, friendship, and community that helped each author make sense of expedition life and determine how best to proceed as a member of the oceanographic community.

The literary context overlapped with a particular context of mid-century expeditions at

Scripps. Any one individual expedition took place as one component of a much bigger research tradition.76 Sometimes these traditions formed out of the collective activities of research institutions.

For instance in the 1950s, Sea Search, to use Revelle’s language from Prologue to Chapter 1, emerged as a particular way of doing oceanography at Scripps built by weaving together scientific interests with the legacy of maritime and Naval culture.77

73 Coralynn V. Davis, “Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, and Defecating Men: The Power of Storytelling in Maithil Women’s Tales,” The Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 485 (Summer, 2009): 267-296; p. 288. 74 David K. Hecht, “Constructing a Scientist: Expert Authority and Public Images of Rachel Carson,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 277-302. 75 Mary Terrall, “Mathematics in Narratives of Geodetic Expeditions,” Isis 97, no. 4 (December 2006): 683-699. 76 Oreskes takes the 1928 S-21 gravity-measuring cruise led by Dutch geodesist F. A. Vening Meinesz, jointly conducted under the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the U.S. Navy, as the stabilizing event in a new research she calls: marine geophysics. She argues that three agents transformed this one cruise into a decade-long research tradition: 1) a consistent set of theoretical questions, 2) the gravimeter designed by Meinesz, and 3) the locale under study, which was the physical province of the Pacific basin. Naomi Oreskes, “Weighing the Earth from a Submarine: The Gravity Measuring Cruise of the U.S.S. S-21,” The Earth, The Heavens, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, History of Geophysics, Volume 5, Washington, D.C., American Geophysical Union, 1994: 53-68. 77 See previous note #14, Naomi Oreskes, “Laissez-tomber”: Military Patronage and Women’s Work in Mid-20th- Century Oceanography,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 30, no. 2, Military Patronage and the

54 World War II changed oceanography across the entire country and especially at Scripps by birthing the Institution’s decade-long expedition tradition that Revelle referred to as Sea Search.78

Several prominent oceanographers associated with the Institution worked in wartime for the Navy to develop methods for understanding how weapons, submarines, and sound moved in deep ocean water.79 These exchanges led to a partnership when oceanographers moved from the Navy after the war into their role as scientists at Scripps. A new philanthropist emerged: the Navy began funding research at Scripps. Thus, the war transformed how Scripps paid for its work as a scientific institution and altered the practices involved in conducting research. Oceanographers now participated in defense research born tied to military agendas, found positions in Washington on the cold war stage, and took their science out on the open ocean in ex-military vessels provided by the

Navy. The key point is that after World War II, Scripps began conducting much more of its research from ships at sea.80

Geophysical Sciences in the United States (2000): 373-392. For an overview of the development of marine science and scientific interest in the ocean over the 19th and 20th centuries see Michael S. Reidy and Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Spaces In Between: Science, Ocean, Empire,” Isis 105 (2014): 338-351. 78 For a look at American expeditionary science before the war, between 1902 and WWII, see Ronald E. Doel, “Expeditions and the CIW: Comments and Contentions,” The Earth, The Heavens, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, History of Geophysics, Volume 5, Washington, D.C., American Geophysical Union, 1994: 79-87. 79 Ronald Rainger explains that before 1941 Scripps did not have the ability to do deep-sea research, “Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the Navy, and Oceanography at the Scripps Institution,” Earth Sciences History: Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society 19, no. 1 (2000): 58-89, pp. 29. 80 In the 1950s, Scripps found financial allies in many forms. Only one third of the Institution’s operational budget came from traditional and permanent University endowments. The remainder was supplied by a combination of project-based contracts with the state of California’s Marine Biology Commission, private industry, the U. S. Navy and Naval Electronics Laboratory, the U. S. Army, the U. S. Air Force, the National Science Foundation, the Atomic Energy Commission, and miscellaneous contracts with the U. S. Federal Government. Scripps also operated in collaboration with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. Later in the decade the Institution took advantage of other kinds of international programs, such as the International Geophysical Year. With all of these allies and financial contributions, Scripps operated, in the words of Director Revelle, as a “Western Center of Research” focused on scientific understanding of the entire Pacific Basin. In this period, oceanographic institutions, especially Scripps, centralized defense research and benefited from oceanographers that had been appointed to serve in Washington, Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography, 321-322. Roger Revelle was a primary influence in these activities. He worked to gain national support for oceanography through organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and programs like the IGY, Judith and Neil Morgan, Roger, page 51. The IGY proved particularly useful in further putting ocean science onto the world stage, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, 99.

55 While oceanographers went to sea to gather measurements, samples, and observations, the endeavor was equally conceptualized as solving the great mysteries of the deep sea. Additionally, lived experience at sea took significant tolls on the mind and body, and oceanographers coped with that by taking part in many kinds of communal adventures along the way, including the excitement of catching giant sea turtles and outwitting the rare blue lobster as Revelle’s story tells. Men were sick from ocean waves and amoebic dysentery, sleep-deprived, and continually covered in salt water.

They visited foreign ports and experienced far away lands and people first hand. Being out there on those ships on the open ocean was a deeply personal experience.

During this period, expedition planners built their expedition practices on the successes and failures of previous expeditions.81 Revelle’s Sea Search story alludes to this sort of influence past expeditions had on current ones: “Stories of past cruises, weather the little ships have gone through, discoveries and explorations they have undergone during the cruises, and contemplation of what is in store for them during this trip hold them through dinner and until time to bunk down for the first night out.” Each expedition, including Downwind, worked to map further the intricate details of the major phenomena in the Pacific, which were mostly already known to exist. Scripps had also already established a strong sense of important research questions around three major areas: sea floor geophysics, oceanic currents and circulation, and species distribution.82

81 By 1957, the year Downwind took place, Scripps had already established a tradition of expedition travel aimed at providing a synoptic picture of the Pacific sea floor that required exchanges with scientists based in the locations Scripps travelled to. Scripps was involved, for example, with intimate international relations and consultations with the Peruvian government regarding fisheries, including overlapping interactions with the International American Tropical Tuna Commission, as early as 1950. Peru hired temporary contractors, such as Scripps’ prominent oceanographer, Warren Wooster, to provide their research institutions with advice about methodology, technique, and garnering funding. Sometimes Peruvians left their home country on a semi-permanent basis for work at Scripps: for instance, up and coming Peruvian marine scientist, Enrique Ávila, secured an assistantship at Scripps in 1955. See: Section Title: “The Triumph of Big Oceanographic Science, p.p. 466-475, of Chapter 7, “Engineering the Fishmeal Boom,” in Gregory Cushman, diss., “The Lords of Guano: Science and the Management of Peru’s Marine Environment, 1800-1973, University of Texas at Austin, 2003. Also see Cushman’s book Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 82 In addition, oceanographers referenced previous expeditions when contacting ports to request permission for scientific work in foreign waters or permission to dock, resupply, and meet with diplomats and dignitaries. They used

56 The research vessels that took the oceanographers to sea were crucial to ocean research in this period. On one of these two ships, seven of the eight major expeditions and dozens of much smaller trips ventured to sea each year. On half of these major expeditions the ships worked together. Only the Naga expedition in 1959 did not include one of them.83 Horizon and Baird were the 1950s version of Ritter’s 1892 portable tent: they were the portable laboratories without which ocean studies as defined at that time could not have taken place. In an application to the National

Science Foundation for the construction of ships designed specifically for oceanographic purposes,

William Nierenberg wrote that over the course of the 1950s, the work of the Scripps research vessel fleet had come to reflect “the total program of the institution.”84

On expeditions at sea, scientists and staff worked on a particular ship for a specific section of the expedition. Downwind had four legs: San Diego to Tahiti; Tahiti to Valparaíso; Valparaíso to

Callao; and Callao back home to San Diego (with a stop at Easter Island).85 Horizon and Baird carried scientists and Navy personnel. Geologist Menard acted as expedition leader on the first half of the expedition from San Diego to Valparaíso. Geologist Bob Fisher did the same on the second half, from Valparaíso to San Diego. Menard led the first half, and Fisher, the second half. Each was in charge of almost anything that came up regarding the science, including managing the laboratory watch schedule, resolving disputes onboard, overseeing use of instrumentation, assisting with

mostly the same oceanographic instruments that required heavy maintenance and attention for proper use. There was not a lot of technological advance over the 1950s in oceanographic sampling and measuring. Data from one expedition often shaped the goals of subsequent expeditions in research focus and in location throughout the world’s oceans, especially in regards to the Pacific where Scripps most often travelled. Oceanographers continually negotiated with their greatest patron, the Navy, for logistical supplies, more money, and in work and life aboard the vessels at sea. 83 Chapter 3, “The Ship,” explains this phasing out of Horizon and Baird at the end of the decade and their decommission in the 1960s. 84 William Nierenberg, Dean and Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD-1924, 26 September, 1966, “Proposal to National Science Foundation – Design and Construction of a Vessel to replace R/V Horizon,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 55, Folder 7: Ships, 56-59, page 3. 85 Preliminary Report on Downwind, “Narrative,” pp. 3-16.

57 oceanographic sampling, communicating with people back at Scripps regarding expedition progress, and many other tasks.

Horizon and Baird also carried a formal scientific party, about ten men on each ship, who conducted their research. These scientists were primarily geologists, but also chemists and biologists who conducted the work for their specialty. The work meant for professional publication in scientific journal articles took priority. But each one also participated in the hydrographic, photographic, and temperature work related to the deep-sea currents. The reason these men were out there, their major goals, changed dramatically depending on who described the goals and to whom they described them.86 Oceanographers, then, did not demonstrate one single unified goal or even set of goals around their expeditions. Each came to an expedition with a professional agenda that typically related only to the goals of the individuals on the ship working directly on the same project or set of questions. Intellectual foci varied widely, and the expeditions consisted of a mosaic of people working on a diverse set of problems. Social bonds also formed during the completion of research tasks amongst non-scientists, engineers, Navy crew, oceanographers, medical doctors, foreign scientists, and any others who worked on ocean science at sea.

86 Menard and Raitt’s June 1956 “Application for Research Project for the U. S. International Geophysical Year,” requested money for “seismic refraction and reflection observations,” but also stated that: “The expedition will be a cooperative undertaking involving several oceanographic and geophysical investigations, the detailed plans have not yet been worked out, and their execution will undoubtedly be modified in the course of the exploration:” Russell Raitt Papers 1922-1996, Box 1, Folder: Correspondence. On 12 October 1957, Roger Revelle distributed a memo to the University of California and the Scripps campuses announcing that on 21 October the ships Horizon and Baird “will sail on a four and one-half month expedition…as part of our International Geophysical Year Program. The primary purpose Downwind expedition is a study of the deep circulation of [the southeaster Pacific]: SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 23, Folder 9, Expedition Downwind October 1957-Feb 1958. In July 1958, Geologist Menard wrote to Revelle to correct some of the things he had been saying to the press about the scientific contributions of Downwind. Revelle had been putting in official IGY reports that Downwind discovered “a great mountain range in the Pacific,” but Menard corrected that “only minor or local changes in the contours of the whole southeastern Pacific” had been determined by the expedition. As Menard saw it, Downwind’s contribution was to “make detailed surveys of geological importance in critical areas,”: SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind. The IGY Preliminary Report, submitted in August, 1958, about five months after Downwind completed, describes three “principal aims” in this order: 1) determine characteristics of deep waters and circulation, 2) determine areal distribution of carbon dioxide in atmosphere near sea surface, and 3) make geological and geophysical studies of the structure of the Pacific basin: Preliminary Report on Downwind, pg. 1. A 1964 “IGY Terminal Report” (which matches the original IGY application describing “Project 11.9 – Seismic Sea Exploration of the Southeast Pacific) focuses solely on “seismic refraction studies of areas of geological interest,” Russell Raitt Papers, Box 6, Folder 7: IGY Terminal Report 1964.

58 Within this context a legacy of storytelling continued during expedition practices at sea. The men who went on these expeditions, whether employed by Scripps or otherwise, created and mobilized personal stories in multiple narrative forms conveying that it was a time of adventure aimed at solving the great mysteries of the deep ocean through hard but fun, dangerous but exciting personal lived experience onboard research vessels. Revelle was just one of many of these story tellers, and he prolifically transferred this tradition of heuristic narration from expedition work to his administrative and leadership responsibilities. But there were many others that mobilized story telling as part of their participation in Sea Search at Scripps, and through their stories these narrators shaped the scientific culture that conducted and supported oceanographic research.

1. A Diary Story

As he travelled with the Downwind expedition, visiting ocean geologist Bob Norris of the

University of California, Santa Barbara hand-wrote a personal diary. His account began on

December 24, 1957 and continued through February 27, 1958. As a chronological recording of events, the first 16 pages described Norris’ journey by airline to South America, where he met

Scripps ships in Valparaíso, Chile during a port of call.87 On December 28, Norris boarded the research vessel Baird, which took him and his companions on the remainder of the expedition alongside the other ship, Horizon. Onboard, Norris acquainted himself with his bunkmate, Erwin

Schweigger, a Peruvian oceanographer on international exchange.88 Throughout the next 25 pages and corresponding 18 days, these two men conversed periodically about Peru, oceanography, and family. Norris also recorded in the diary dredging, coring, and seismic work as conducted onboard the ships. He became part of the regular rotation in the laboratory watch schedule. He admitted that at times tensions arose between the ship Captain and scientists, usually over the use of the limited

87 A section of the diary I take up in Chapter 2. 88 Schweigger was German by birth but made his career as an oceanographer in Peru.

59 space on the ship, and also between the oceanographers themselves as they negotiated which forms of sampling and measuring should receive the most attention. The men troubleshot equipment problems, enjoyed swimming parties overboard, and continued to measure and sample the Pacific

Ocean. On January 15,89 the ships arrived in Callao, Peru where the men went ashore for a reception organized by Peruvian scientists. Many also enjoyed the amenities of Lima and embarked on land- tours of the surrounding countryside. There, Schweigger departed the expedition, leaving Norris a new bunkmate, Jatinder Nanda from India. On January 18,90 the ships left port in Callao and headed back out to sea. This next leg of the journey resulted in one of the few publications from Downwind as Norris collaborated with expedition leader and geologist Bob Fisher.

On January 31st (page 89), the research vessel Baird made near-shore surveys of the islet of

Sala y Gomez, which lies just about 400km northeast of Easter Island. While the ship conducted this survey, a crew of five men went ashore led by Norris and Fisher. These two men worked closely together in 1950 when Fisher joined Norris as a graduate student at Scripps under Francis P.

Shepherd.91 Norris had left Scripps in 1952 for a faculty position at UC Santa Barbara, and

Downwind was an opportunity for them to rekindle their relationship. The two became re- acquainted over the course of the previous days at sea, and this adventure on Sala y Gomez sparked a stronger bond between the scientists than they had previously. Their intention in going ashore was not to publish their findings. In fact, before they set foot on the islet, Norris joked that “Tomorrow is Sala y Gomez day when…[we] will go ashore and act like geologists.”92 He was likely, at least in part, referring to the fact that the land-based surveys were not the typical domain of deep-sea oceanographers. Yet, the seven hours Baird spent surveying the islet and the hour or so these five

89 Page 42. 90 Page 55. 91 17 January 2007 Robert L. Fisher Oral History, 22. Both men participated in the joint program operating at the time under which students conducted their research out of Scripps’ La Jolla campus but actually earned their degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. 92 Bob Norris Diary, 68.

60 men spent onshore clearly was not a priority for the expedition.93 His joke also stemmed from the fact that their stop was originally not a serious layer of the expedition’s work. The men spent time there out of a general curiosity to explore a small piece of land not many people had ever visited.94

Since there was no place for the ship to dock on the rocky slab of land, the shore survey members had to swim. They jumped in the ocean after Bob Fisher and soaked all of their clothing and equipment. To actually get onshore, they had to climb hand and foot over slippery rocks. It was a daunting task, and Norris worried that he would not execute it. Once ashore the men observed flora, fauna, and paid most attention to rocks, volcanic flows, and boulder fields. There was no time to do more than observe the presence of many tide pools. After about an hour, the men jumped back in the water and swam to their ship. When they came aboard, they realized they had just swum through a school of tuna being pursued by a hundred or so sharks.

These events certainly marked a memorable adventure in Norris’ time on Downwind.

However, as he wrote them down in his diary he recorded how communal freestyle swimming, scaling algae and urchin-covered rocks, weathering a rainsquall, and surviving the swim back to

Baird, through a field of sharks, became part of the process of collecting viable scientific evidence about this little-known and isolated islet. These are not the sorts of activities typically included when scientists and historians alike think about the process of conducting science at sea. Norris, however, wrote: “…purple sea urchins grew on the rocks and it was doubtless lucky that I didn’t crawl over any getting up the slippery rocks. ” His narrative suggests that successfully navigating that task (and others like it) was the mechanism by which they came to understand that “The island is nearly all volcanic. The older flow is scoriaceous and varies from red to black in color.” The adventure of

93 Norris diary says this shore survey lasted “about an hour,” pp. 73, while the Preliminary Report on Downwind says it lasted “two hours,” pp. 13. 94 The IGY Preliminary Report on Downwind, written near the expedition’s end, reports the Sala y Gomez survey, pp. 12-13, but lists only current studies, seismic profiles, and carbon dioxide monitoring as the official goals of the expedition. Page 24-25 and Figures 9 & 12 of the IGY Report briefly describes the scientific findings of the survey.

61 getting to and from Sala y Gomez and walking around it once there provided the oceanographers with access to first-hand observations of the islet’s conditions and specimens, but for Norris, the experience sparked his desire to record something of it in his diary. The process of transcribing this lived experience into written form was the first change for this geological oceanographer to compile the scientific information that solidified how his one-hour onshore was not merely an instance of

“acting” like a geologist. He, in fact, decided that during this time he was being a shore-surveying geologist of an environment very closely linked to oceanic processes, and he did so together with expedition leader and colleague Bob Fisher. As a team they collected enough evidence to turn their adventure into a short journal article. Their publication echoed Norris’ diary. The text stated: “Sala y

Gomez…is a low volcanic islet…[with] vesicular red to dark-gray andesitic olivine basalt.”95 The diary was not just an account of adventure nor was it merely an informal and preliminary log for data and observations. It worked for Norris as a place to grapple with his lived experiences. As he narrated events he came to the understanding of the Sala y Gomez adventure as the field research stage of a professional collaboration between him and Fisher. By telling this story, arguably only to himself in his private diary, Norris came to realize that he and Fisher had successfully conducted a shore-based survey and systematically collected rock samples on par with the scope and quality required for professional publication. Indeed, they justified their article to the audience of the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America in their first paragraph by explaining that no one had made a shore survey since the islet’s discovery in 1793.96 Making the survey and writing about it turned the adventure from an hour-long, potentially insignificant walk on the islet to a formative foot survey of a Pacific Ocean volcanic structure worthy of a peer-reviewed publication. This transformation was

95 Robert L. Fisher and Robert M. Norris, “Bathymetry and Geology of Sala y Gomez, Southeast Pacific,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71 (April 1960): 497-502, pp. 497 and 501. 96 Ibid., 497.

62 not a result of the walk in and of itself, but highly determined by a shift in Norris’ perception of his relationship with Bob Fisher.

In the days leading up to arrival at the islet, he mentioned his other travel companions, sometimes using friendly nicknames: “Wump and I will go ashore [on Sala y Gomez] while divers investigate the bottom and the ship will survey the bathymetry around the island.”97 When describing their arrival in the small boat they used to get closer to the islet’s shore, he listed survey participants by first and last name and mentioned what each was responsible for. But once the men jumped in the water and began making their swim to the shore, Norris turned all of his narrative attention to the observations and activities of himself and Bob Fisher. It is possible that this adjustment merely indicated that Norris saw the shore party as a crew who worked as a unit. He did write “we” when describing certain activities, such as getting to and from the islet and when generally referencing the act of doing a survey. Also possible is that he saw no value in recording the activities of the survey assistants and thus turned his narrative attention to himself and Fisher.

Perhaps he and Fisher alone conducted what Norris deemed to be relevant scientific activities.

Tellingly, the final publication with Fisher also did not mention the names of any participant in this shore survey aside from Norris and Fisher themselves, just like the observational portions of the diary. The first paragraph of the article admits that “Three geologists and two seamen landed to collect rocks…” but nowhere, not even the acknowledgements, do readers learn the identities of that third geologist and two seamen.98 This practice of omitting the exact names of oceanographic assistants and subordinates was common throughout the 1950s, even outside of oceanography, although doing science depended intricately on their work.

97 Bob Norris Diary, 67. “Wump” would have referred to either Fisher or Richard von Herzen, the other geologist that went ashore. 98 Fisher and Norris (1960), pp. 497.

63 I argue that in this particular situation the pair of omissions, first in the diary and repeated in the journal article, actually reveals Norris’ writing process as a means of experiencing social transitions, communal breaks, and alliances as he felt them happening during expedition work and adventure. Getting from the ship to Sala y Gomez was a group effort. Once he realized this event as significant to science, it became a collaboration between him and Fisher, who bonded over what they found and the questions their survey aroused and assisted by three others who participated only tangentially. The two primary oceanographers pondered whether they had any means of determining the islet’s greatest elevation, puzzled together over the lack of volcanic vents on a volcanic islet, and concluded that the peak must have a submarine origin.99 The act of acknowledging the growing importance of this emergent connection between him and Fisher in his diary signals that Norris used the text to begin giving material form to a collaboration that later resulted in an intellectual contribution to oceanography in publication.

Norris rooted his text in his experience. The narrative weaves together social realities and scientific data: the social realities behind the collaboration; the underlying social message that Fisher and Norris were the ones on Sala y Gomez conducting science, not the third oceanographer and two seamen; the social realities of a strengthening of the professional scientific collaboration made public through peer-reviewed publication; and the compilation of enough descriptive data to warrant professional distribution of their knowledge of Sala y Gomez. In this case, Norris did not think through the value of this experience before writing the diary. Rather, he came to realize the intellectual significance of his day spent surveying the islet by means of writing about it. As literary scholars have demonstrated, texts can sometimes act as “thinking machines” – entities constantly involved in transformations with and because of the surrounding environment – which develop

99 Ibid., 497-501.

64 through ongoing engagement with the world.100 I argue that Norris’ private account of this shore- based survey of Sala y Gomez was this kind of thinking machine. He used the diary as a tool to work out discursive codes he experienced between people themselves, people and data, and people and the environment of Sala y Gomez. Subsequently, he and Fisher unwrapped those codes and data from personal experience by transforming them into the form of a professional publication.

In this case, the intellectual contribution to oceanography – a journal article that systematically and scientifically described Sala y Gomez for the first time in the 20th century – resulted from a close working relationship between Norris and Fisher. I am not, however, pointing to the mere fact of collaboration alone. The publication was the result of an accidental scientific survey that the participants interpreted as an adventure as they lived it. The survey and the publication were a happenstance product of a quickly developed yet relatively close tie that came to link these men as they travelled from Valparaíso, Chile to Sala y Gomez. The relationship developed only in the 34 days prior to landing on the islet. Their involvement on Downwind emerged in a historical instant, but as the decision to go ashore with one another took fruition, the men experienced the adventure of swimming to the islet, discovering what was there, and returning to the ship through a swarm of sharks. On this expedition, the intimate nature of living and working onboard led Norris and Fisher to one another as companions. The adventure of visiting Sala y

Gomez inspired Norris’ diary entries where he puzzled out his purposes in relation to Fisher and scientific knowledge. The Sala y Gomez journal article was the product of a social bond that built the conditions of possibility for and thereby preceded the production of knowledge. The social connection between these two men opened the possibility for the science to occur in the first place and turned an unplanned survey into a data set relevant to the greater oceanographic community.

100 See Laura Dassow Walls’ discussion of the ways that literature can work in science, including her attention to the work of Maxim Waldstein in Laura Dassow Walls, “Of Atoms, Oaks, and Cannibals; or, More Things That Talk,” Isis 101 (2010): pp. 591.

65 2. A Memorandum Story

John A. Knauss’ memorandum story also constructed a social foundation for oceanographic research at sea, but instead of building a platform for collaboration, this narrative provided the author an opportunity for upward mobility in the oceanographic hierarchy. On January 12, 1956,

Knauss, a fifth-year doctoral student at Scripps sent a memo to the Institution’s Marine Operations

Committee.101 In it, he responded to his experience on Eastropic expedition from October to

December 1955, which utilized both ships Horizon and Baird.102 At first glance, the textual form is that of an official memorandum typical of the period. Right justified, the institution name and date are offset at the top of the page by the phrase, “MEMORANDUM,” which is left justified.

Underneath that phrase are the recipient names, and below those, the main text begins. Knauss breaks the body of the memo up into thematic paragraphs used to highlight his opinion on several issues pertinent to life on oceanographic ships at sea. But within this memo Knauss embeds a series of vignettes that convey a story about work at sea. He recounts specific events that took place on the expedition in order to bring out issues he deems important regarding shipboard life, work, and community. He uses the following headings to frame the narration: “Berthing,” “Equipment,”

“Scientific Equipment,” “Maintenance of Scientific Electronic Equipment,” “Ship Maintenance,” and “Ship Personnel.” Each section details individual instances of malfunction and breakdown involving the ships themselves and the scientific instruments used on the ships. As a whole, these vignettes combine to form a story of Knauss’ experiences on the Eastropic expedition that involved

101 Knauss took 8 years to complete his PhD because he also worked periodically for the Office of Naval Research in the geophysics branch under Gordon Lill. For more details of his life see Margaret Leinen, “John Knauss: 50 Years of Service to Oceanography,” Oceanography 14, no. 2 (2001). 102 Eastropic also used the ship Hugh M. Smith, owned by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and operated by Scripps from 1943-1959. For details on the Eastropic cruise see online document titled, “Oceanographic research cruises in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, (no date), https://swfsc.noaa.gov/uploadedFiles/Divisions/PRD/Programs/Ecology/ETPacCruises.pdf, accessed, June 19, 2014. For details on ownership and operation of Scripps vessels see SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Records, 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 21 Horizon 1957-1963, “UCSD-1924, 26 September, 1966, Proposal to National Science Foundation,” RE: construction of new oceanographic ships, page 13, Table 1. “Historical List of SIO Ships.”

66 ships and their instruments that did not work satisfactorily. However, the memo is not just one of complaint. The unlabeled opening and closing paragraphs declare the beneficial nature of Horizon and stand in contrast to the messages of malfunction contained under the above headings. The depth of the contrast is curious. In opening, he writes: “Horizon is presently the most efficient open ocean research ship in this country; and I suspect from what little I have heard, read, and seen that she is the most efficient in the world.” However, he continues in the body of the memo to say: “Life was one long series of open condensers and smoking transformers…The mid-water trawl is a potential killer…[and] the GEK [is a] bastard rig on the Baird.” In writing this way, Knauss pushed to persuade those in charge of ship maintenance to make changes by acknowledging the privilege associated with Scripps’ possession of these ships while simultaneously calling out a long series of crucial malfunctions. It is the development of this contradiction, serious and extensive complaints sandwiched between great appreciation and acknowledgement, that Knauss used as a tool to influence, without offending, administrators to alter ship design, mechanics, and function.

Knauss came to Scripps in 1951103 with a B. S. in meteorology from MIT and an M. S. in

Physics from the University of Michigan.104 He took eight years to complete the PhD at Scripps, so in 1956 when he wrote this memo, he had been a student and also employed as a “Junior Research

Oceanographer” for five years.105 But his academic attention had not always been focused on science. As a master’s student at the University of Michigan, Knauss fed his interest in the liberal arts by taking English and playwriting courses and participating in writing programs.106 In 1953, he

103 Arrival date determined from: Document: “SIO Students Table – Science & Engineering Library, students-1.xlsx,” downloaded from Scripps Online Archive document search, search term: “students-1.xlsx,” June 24, 2014. 104 Degrees prior to Scripps including dates determined from Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of John Atkinson Knauss,” 1 November 2005, SIO online archive, accessed June 24, 2014. 105 11 October 1956 University of California SIO Officers of the Institution, pp. 3, SIO online archive, accessed June 24, 2014. 106 His oral history states that he received “honorable mention” for his participation in a national playwriting program. It does not say which one, and I have not tracked it down specifically. However, it may have been the Armed Services recreation program as indicated by the accession register at the University of Michigan online archives, which associated

67 wrote a play fictionalizing the nature of planning a deep-sea expedition (this is the play discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation).107 The play indicates some of the problems and tensions of the early 1950s in going to sea, and includes a humorous depiction of Director Revelle’s sometimes

(self-admitted and well-documented by others who knew him) absentminded lack of attention to bureaucratic details – in the play he forgets to ask the university Regents for permission to go on the expedition until the ships are already at sea. The plot also documents the darker context of

McCarthyism under which some oceanographers faced pressure to sign a loyalty oath, explores the tensions that arose between oceanographers and their wives who were left at home for weeks or months on end, and imagines encounters with mermaids.108 Act I, Scene 4 offers a humorous commentary on some of the very real tensions that existed between practicing oceanographers and the Regents who held power over many of the resources needed:

Scene 4 (REGENTS MEETING They are a group of nice ineffectual men and women seated around a table with President Sproul [President of the University of California])

1st REGENT Pre. Sproul we are here to discuss things of importance…Wilbur, what are you doing? (Wilbur had been looking under the table. In fact he was almost completely under the table.) WILBUR I thought I saw one. 2nd REGENT Really, where. (He gets under table too.) 1st REGENT Don’t be silly. We got rid of all those people in 1950. There are no more left. They have all signed loyalty oaths. WILBUR I know, but I never saw one…Do they look like Machiavelli? 3rd REGENT Who’s Machiavelli? Is he on our faculty? 1st REGENT (Turning to Sproul) Is he, Pres. Sproul? (Pres. Sproul just gives a Sproul laugh.)

Knuass’ name with a list of students whose plays, scenarios, and radio scripts were submitted in coursework for the university. Rowe, Kenneth Thorpe, 1900-, “Student Play Collection, 1928-1970,” http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/data/68796471, accessed June 24, 2014. 107 Script reproduced in Peter Sargent, The Sea Acorn: Scripps Institution of Oceanography: The People and the Place, 1936-1942, pp. 250, “Note for ‘Endless Holiday’ 1953 (May 1979): http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/gc29s27.pdf, accessed June 24, 2014. 108 This play is discussed in many sources from the Scripps archive including: Margaret Leinen, “John Knauss: 50 Years of Service to Oceanography,” National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia, Oceanography 14, no. 2 (Feb 2001): 5-10; Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of John Atkinson Knauss,” 1 November 2005, SIO online archive, accessed June 24, 2014; Peter Sargent, The Sea Acorn: Scripps Institution of Oceanography: The People and the Place, 1936-1942, pp. 250, “Note for ‘Endless Holiday’ 1953 (May 1977), pp. 250 highlights the theme of the loyalty oath.

68 2ns REGENT What is the first order of business today? 1st REGENT …we now have a request in for approval of the purchase and installation of electric lights and fixtures… 5th REGENT Do we vote on the whole request, or on each section separately?... 2nd REGENT Let’s vote on how we should vote… …[They vote on how they should vote and then vote to turn down the purchase of electric light fixtures] 1st REGENT Well, Gentlemen, shall we now take up the matter of the installation of the electric lights?... 5th REGENT Pardon me, but I wonder if there is much point in voting for the installation if we have already turned down the purchase of the lights… 1st REGENT (After considering matter) That is true, but we bound ourselves by our first vote to take votes on both parts of the request. We’ll just have to go through with it gentlemen. 6TH REGENT But what shall we do, if after considering the merits, we vote for approval of the installation, but have disallowed the purchase? 1ST REGENT We’ll consider that when we come to it… [The Regents continue conversing about the issue of the electric lights until someone suggests that those requesting them don’t really need them anyway and they should just ask the Office of Naval Research to supply them.] 1ST REGENT …Let’s see, what’s the next order of business?...Oh yes, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 3RD REGENT Do we own that too? 1ST REGENT Of course. They request… 3RD REGENT I’m tired. Let’s go home. 4TH REGENT Me too. 5TH REGENT We can’t make our best decisions when we’re tired. 6TH REGENT That’s what it is, all meeting long – decisions, decisions… [The Regents sing a song together with lines, such as: “We manage each college, Unhampered by knowledge By playing on Faculty fears.” The song ends with: “We spend all your taxes, And brother, the fact is – We’re in red tape up to our knees.”] End Scene

Knauss’ literary strategy used humor as a form of commentary on the real tensions between oceanographers who went to sea and the administrators and Regents who stayed back on land. The

Regents appear impractically dedicated to bureaucratic process and all too willing to suggest oceanographers get what they need from the Office of Naval Research instead of the University of

California. The play circulated primarily among the oceanographers themselves and was performed only twice: once in the 1950s in Director Roger Revelle’s living room for his 50th birthday party and

69 a second time in 2003 as part of Scripps’ Centennial celebration.109 Still, two things about this play can help us contextualize Knauss’ memo about the ships: first, the play highlights the particular set of tensions that existed between the oceanographic community and university administrators around replacing and repairing equipment, and second, the play demonstrates Knauss’ skill in constructing purpose-built narratives.

Standing alone, Knauss’ memo might simply appear as a document created to suggest improvements to Scripps’ ships, perhaps as anyone invested in the operation of any technology or instrument might do. However, this document is not a single instance of suggestion, a point that matters in understanding what purpose it served for its author. Knauss wrote it within a discourse ongoing throughout the 1950s centered on the functionality, maintenance, and repairs of Horizon and Baird that included a diverse set of individuals, committees, and organizations involved in

Scripps’ oceanographic practices. These people were: oceanographers themselves; various engineers, who were typically professors from other University of California campuses who traveled as visiting professors on Scripps expeditions; ship captains; Director Roger Revelle and various Assistant

Directors; the Vice President of Business Affairs; the Marine Operations Committee; various Marine

Superintendents as the individual changed throughout the decade; the Navy Electronics Laboratory; the Marine Physical Laboratory; various Regents and the President of the University of California,

Gordon Sproul (who Knauss included as characters in his play); Director of the Institute of Marine

Resources, Charles Wheelock; the Division of Radiation Safety of the University of California; the

U.S. Coast Guard; the Office of Naval Research; and the Maritime Commission.110 Within this

109 Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of John Atkinson Knauss,” 1 November 2005, SIO online archive, accessed June 24, 2014, pp. 8. 110 Extensive correspondence documenting the involvement of these people and organizations can be found in the SIO Subject Files, 1890-1981: Box 55, Folder 7: Ships ’56-’59; Box 56, Folder 2: Design of a vessel to replace Horizon (which includes Scripps attention to the National Science Foundation as a potential funding source for building the ship New Horizon); Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon 1952-1956; Box 62, Folder 21: Horizon 1957-63; Box 66, Folder 17: Baird 1951-52, ’54-’59.

70 context of intense attention on and concern over the function of Horizon and Baird, graduate student

John Knauss took it upon himself to submit a memorandum each year throughout his tenure at the

Institution to Scripps’ Marine Operations Committee.111 Over this decade, his concerns shifted to and from different aspects of the ships from year to year but a state of concern over functionality remained throughout.

Telling a story was a common thing to do when writing to administrators. Stories came packaged as a series of vignettes in seemingly formal documents, such as professional letters and memorandums. Knauss, however operated from a particular position within the Scripps community, and using narrative meant something significant to him. He was a graduate student who had been at

Scripps since 1951, but a student with relatively junior status nonetheless. His participation in the dialogue regarding ship operations meant inserting his thoughts and opinions into a very powerful group of institutional advisers, administrators, and organizations. While he likely was not aware of every detail and every conversation involving all of the people and organizations I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the debates around how well these ships did and did not work was common knowledge at Scripps, especially among those who actually went to sea on them. Virtually everyone, for example, who cared to think about it knew that when Baird was prohibited from sailing on the open ocean and restricted to lakes, bays, and sounds in January of 1957, the regulation came down from U.S. Coast Guard.112 It was obvious that although these ships existed as part of Scripps’ fleet, they were also embedded in much larger social and institutional arrangements. So in order to be taken seriously, Knauss needed to use narrative to simultaneously acknowledge their benefits alongside his complaints.

111 John A. Knauss’ “1 July 1960 MEMORANDUM To: Pete Trapani” clarifies that writing such memorandum was a yearly practice for Knauss. SIO Subject Files, Box 62, Folder 21: Horizon 1957-63. 112 SIO Subject Files, Box 66, Folder 17: Baird 1951-52, ’54-’59, “Certificate Amending Certificate of Inspection By Changing Character of Vessel, Route, Equipment, Etc., United States Coast Guard, Marine Inspection Office, Port of Los Angeles, 19 March 1956. 31 January, 1957 restriction of Spencer F. Baird to “Lakes, Bays, and Sounds.”

71 He used stories113 to bring members of the Marine Operations Committee to sea where they could, in a way, see for themselves what life was like out there on Horizon. But the depth of his contradiction between first, all of the things that he described that needed improvement and the extent to which those things affected life and science at sea, and second, his acknowledgement of the unprecedented benefit the ship brought to ocean science, worked as a tool of persuasion. Only with such a stark contradiction would the negative aspects be palatable to the people who had the power to make real changes. Without the complaints being packaged with appreciation, the memo would fall flat and appear to be nothing more than a list of complaints:

…the scientific party…deserve[s] better accommodations than seamen, oilers, and mess cooks…there just aren’t that many cabins to go around…we slept two scientists in the sick bay…The most expensive failure was the radar…it was a continual disappointment…The constant frequency sources used by our ships must be considerably under designed. Life was one long series of open condensers and smoking transformers…I had thought the EDO had worked rather well…[but ours on Horizon] didn’t come close to approaching…[the] sharp traces [on Baird]…The mid-water trawl is a potential killer…[because]…the bridle is too long…More often than not…someone risks his hands in clearing the net…The heater does not appear to be completely effective [on the ASOP]…I was impressed with the effort [of the Navy]…in trying to keep the ship looking well…However, try as they would, it was impossible for the Horizon to make a smart appearance in port…because of the absolute impossibility to keep that white hull looking good three days after clearing San Diego. I would like to suggest that thought be given to painting the hulls of our Scripps ships a darker color, maybe black.114

Knauss instead opened with a list of positive affirmations:

…The first point I would like to make and one which I hope the Committee will bear in mind throughout this memo is that from the first hand inspection of much of the oceanographic fleet of this country, it is my opinion that the Horizon is presently the most efficient open ocean research ship in this country; and I suspect from what little I have heard, read, and seen that she is the most efficient in the world… and he closed with the same:

113 Here I am using the word “stories” in a broad sense. The memo is an account of past events, and in that sense I consider its content to be a story. 114 John Knauss “12 January 1956 MEMORANDUM to Marine Operations Committee,” SIO Subject Files, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon 1952-1956.

72 Again, I would like to reiterate what I said in the beginning. I was very happy with the Horizon…I think it is at present the best oceanographic ship afloat in this country. It may well be the best in the world. Compared to her over-all effectiveness, my comments are very minor.

His strategy changes how one experiences the memo. Surrounding these negative statements with highly positive statements transforms an extensive list of complaints from a graduate student into

“suggestions for improvement.”115 Knauss was a skilled narrator operating within a discourse full of powerful entities. In order for his comments to be taken seriously, he needed to exercise his ability to bring negative experiences at sea alive for administrators and package those complaints with positive generalizations about the same experiences, a combination that indicates how Knauss meant this memorandum as a tool of persuasion.

In writing his yearly memo to the Marine Operations Committee, Knauss came to understand the transitions that occurred in this discourse around ships. By the 1960s, he continued to sandwich a body of complaints with beginning and ending paragraphs that described what wonderful machines the ships were for oceanographic practice. However, in part because he moved up the hierarchy at Scripps through the years, earning his doctorate in 1959, and also due to a decade of practice at the same institution, the body of the memos changed. Knauss ceased using narrated stories to describe what was wrong with the ships. Instead, he limited his prose to writing pointed statements of what needed to be fixed, which lacked all reference as to why or what specific experiences led him to think so:

…There are not enough cleats in the fantail area…The davit…is in the way [of work on the fantail]…The A frame would be more useful if we could somehow get the point of suspension two or three feet farther aft. As it is now, equipment lowered into the water scrapes against the stern of the ship…The anemometer should be moved…[we should have] more than intermittent use of the SPS-5 [radar]…the noise level [from the EDO head] is abnormally high at times…We were bothered by a high noise level on our hydrophones at times when the ship was stopped…[the shaft should be grounded]…

115 John Knauss “1 July 1960 MEMORANDUM to Pete Trapani,” SIO Subject Files, Box 62, Folder 21: Ships Horizon 1957-1963.

73

His earlier memo reflects his own status as a junior student researcher at Scripps, and his later memo signals that some shifts had occurred throughout the 1950s. I address these shifts in more detail in

Chapter 3, but I point to them here as a way of drawing out the importance of narrative and contradiction to Knauss in his earlier memo. At that historical moment, narrative was a vital tool for his suggestions to be taken seriously.

Knauss self-consciously and intentionally incorporated stories with negative content and juxtaposed those with contradictory positive statements. He packaged complaints and dissatisfactions with positive superlatives – Horizon was “the most efficient open ocean research ship

–” in order to inspire administrators to allocate resources for further alterations to active research vessels. The very possibility that Knauss could continue going to sea on these ships depended on building and maintaining a positive relationship with his superiors. His scientific future and forthcoming intellectual contributions depended upon his ability to voice his concerns over ship malfunctions in a way that administrators could accept, internalize, and come to believe the changes he suggested would be worth while. Knuass wrote to administrators as if his future position in the oceanographic community as a valued colleague depended upon his social positioning. But he did so only so long as his slot in the hierarchy and the discourse around the ships required him to do so.

Once he had attained sufficient status as someone capable of judging the conditions and needed improvements of the ships, narration fell out of his writing.

The difficulties and discomforts of travelling on ex-military tugboats, which had been converted into scientific research vessels, inspired Knauss to narrate his experiences in the form of a memorandum to university administrators, which signaled to them his deep engagement in work at sea and his knowledge of the value these ships provided oceanography. This memo, however, was more than a simple innocent note. With it the author sought to situate himself not as a complaining

74 graduate student, but a productive, thoughtful member of the oceanographic community seriously interested in furthering the research goals of Scripps. Intentional social positioning was an important skill for the men that travelled to sea in this era. Working conditions required that scientists and their many assistants work in an environment where the professional and personal blended into one another while operating in an environment that posed frequent and very real dangers to lives and wellbeing. At sea, expedition participants coped with the almost forced intimacy and typically uncomfortable, sometimes life-threatening circumstances by developing a strong social structure that included certain individuals and excluded others. The following cartoon story exemplifies, like

Knauss’ memo, that a relatively junior expedition assistant built a close-knit working friendship with an up and coming geologist and expedition leader, which helped launch his career as one of the go- to engineers at Scripps in this era. Lastly, I explore the fourth story as a case of exclusion.

3. A Cartoon Story

The community of oceanographers at Scripps mid-century included scientists and a much larger group of individuals, such as their wives and children, technical assistants, and visiting scientists. Many individuals from this era have used the term “family” to describe the community that formed out of the La Jolla based campus. As a whole, this group of people socialized as human beings with lives that integrated science as work but also extended beyond that work. They attended parties together hosted in each other’s homes. Children spent the night at each other’s houses.

Wives passed the days and weeks together when their husbands were at sea. The social milieu at

Scripps created the very possibility for scientific endeavor weighted heavily in family and community. Oceanographers functioned on a day-to-day basis through their interpersonal relationships that were chock full of tensions, discrepancies, uncertainties, as well as affinities and close-knit bonds akin to friendship and family. The community and science grew to new heights after the war. However, the foundation for the particular ways that military funding, ships, and new

75 instrumentation integrated into and circulated throughout the group came not only from governmental politics and war, but from the ebb and flow of personal relationships that preceded the war, continued after it, and in several ways remained unchanged by it.

In February of 1958, Scripps engineer Maxwell Silverman drew a cartoon commemorating the Downwind expedition as it came to an end (full drawing shown in Prologue to Chapter 4).116 A scroll in the bottom right-hand corner reads: “Probing the depths with fingers of steel whilst pushing aside the iron curtain of the sea is fun!” Looking a little closer, the images around the page edges depict ships and men working at sea, oceanographic instruments, a man carrying an Easter

Island Moai statue on his back, an odd-looking rendition of The Thinker with a weird blob behind him, a topless woman dancing in a grass skirt, a squid with something odd in its mouth, and a ship seemingly sitting atop a mountain. However weird they seem, these images are not random. They highlight particularly memorable moments that actually occurred in work and life on Downwind, and they indicate that the cartoon was drawn after most of the expedition was complete.

The cartoon rests within the SIO Subject Files, an archival accession that documents the general history of Scripps as well as a more thorough history of 20th century oceanography outside of the Institution from 1930-1970.117 But the first set of keys that unlock the meaning behind the drawing reside in two other locations: the SIO Audio Files and the Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers.118

The Audio Files contain a recording and the Fisher Papers hold a transcript of the song,

“Downwind Calypso,” recorded at sea onboard Baird as the ships made their way at the tail end of

116 As shown in Prologue to Chapter 4. Located in the Scripps Archive. SIO Subject Files 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 5: Expeditions 1957. Bob Fisher told me Silverman drew the image as the ships made their way home from Easter Island back to San Diego. Personal communication, April 22, 2014. The Preliminary Report on Downwind states that the ships reached Easter Island for the first time on February 2, 1958. Thus, Silverman would have drawn the cartoon sometime between Feb. 2 and Feb. 28 when they reached Point Loma in San Diego. 117 See Accession Record Description for Accession No.: 81-16, “Processing Record Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives,” p. 1 under “Scope and Content.” Available online at the Scripps Archive under “Guides for Archival Collections.” Accessed April 16, 2014. 118 There are also references to these incidents across many other documents in the Scripps archive – especially the other stories from Downwind.

76 their journey back home to San Diego in February of 1958. While Silverman drew the cartoon and one of the medical doctors wrote the “Downwind Calypso,”119 both tell many of the same situations.

Viewing these two Downwind stories next to one another sheds more light on Silverman’s representation. As I work through a comparison, I clarify information within the song by using square brackets. Keep in mind the Downwind Calypso is not a poem, although it was written out as a series of verses as I present it here. Ideally one would listen to the original recording of it as part of this dissertation. In place of that, just note that the creator meant the Downwind Calypso to be sung in a calypso rhythm to highlight the rhymes at the end of each phrase.120 It begins:

On the twenty first October nineteen fifty seven The Horizon proceeded slowly out of haven. When the Spencer F. Baird followed later in the day, The Downwind Expedition was under way.121

Both the drawing and the poem attempted to tell a somewhat chronological story of Downwind.

They were acts of memory and commemoration. Starting from the top left, Silverman drew Horizon and Baird conducting a seismic profiles in which Horizon detonates a large explosion of TNT under the ocean’s surface, and Baird detects and records the resultant seismic waves that bounce off the sea floor. Moving clockwise, a winch cable wire is spliced:

Early on in the trip we saw that it was true That Maxwell Silverman had nothing to do

119 I do not know for sure, but I imagine he wrote this in collaboration with the other men on the ship in commemoration of the adventures they had just endured together. Also, much of the first half of the song contents describe the first half of the expedition, which the medical doctor and author, John Andrews, was not present for. He came to Downwind beginning in Valparaíso, the halfway point of the expedition. 120 The Calypso style emerged from Trinidad and Tobago in the early and mid-20th century. It is characterized by 4/4 time, acoustic guitar, Latin percussion, and a three-beat rhythm alternating two long beats with a short beat. A simple example of this formula can be found at BBC Radio Bitesize: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/music/world_music/music_carribean4.shtml. 121 Downwind Calypso, Verse 1. The song lyrics were written and primarily sung for the recorded version by the medical doctor onboard, John Andrews who also strummed guitar to the audio version. The Accession record of the Robert Lloyd Fisher papers indicate that Fisher was responsible for recording the song. And upon listening to the audio version, it becomes apparent that many of the other men onboard entertained themselves by singing alongside Andrews. A full transcript of the song’s lyrics can be found in the Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers Collection Accession Description, 2000-04 by searching the Scripps online archive for “Downwind Calypso.” The audio version is not available online at this time, but can be found in the Scripps Archive audio files.

77 So the engineers tried to do all they were able To put Kinks and birdcages and arse-holes in the cable122

The lyrics joke that Silverman had nothing to do and indicate a sense of camaraderie onboard that allowed for a certain amount of teasing – Silverman, in fact, would more accurately be described as over, not underworked.

A temperature probe hangs in the top right corner of the page. This was one of the most common instruments used at sea. Next to that image, Silverman himself – complete with an identifying pipe that was always in his mouth123 - works in bad weather and rough seas to deploy a

Kullenberg Corer:

Now down in the south it was not very warm And we ran into a most incredible storm So life was becoming just an absolute hell Till we got a friendly message from Roger Revelle.124

Work at sea involved continual negotiation with the environmental conditions produced by inclement weather. Many times work stopped because of storms or a rough sea, and much of the crew and scientific party went to bed ill with extreme seasickness. Men received word from home with comfort.

The next image is Horizon’s Captain Marvin Hopkins125 single-handedly laboring with a monstrous Easter Island Moai statue strapped to his back:

The Horizon thought it would be rather cute To bring back a statue for the Institute At Easter Island they found one there But when George [Hohnhaus, the largest man on the expedition] couldn’t lift it they gave up the idea.126

122 Ibid., Verse 6. 123 Also identifiable by facial structure. 124 Downwind Calypso, Verse 9. 125 His face and mustache identify him. 126 Downwind Calypso, Verse 18.

78 This verse refers to the incident in which men on Horizon planned to remove a full-sized 8-ton Moai from the island and take it back to Scripps. The event points to the intersection of many components of the expedition, such as Navy and science, personal and professional, human and material: a Navy Captain pushing to bring a statue back to California in the name of adventure,

Scripps expedition leader (Fisher) and Director (Revelle) seeking official permission from Chile to remove a statue as a symbol of scientific internationalism, and the sheer material impossibility of bringing to fruition the human desire to float one of these statues behind Horizon over thousands of miles across the Pacific. It is also just a great story of attempted yet failed adventure, which is probably why it turns up across many of the narratives regarding Downwind.

In the bottom-right corner, the scroll situates Downwind within cold war discourse.

Continuing clockwise, an underfed seaman [junior Navy crewmember] sits on the ship’s head with serious digestive problems caused by amoebic dysentery; the amoeba floats away behind him:

After Callao, Peru, the crew began to spend A lot of time sitting on their after end That ‘twas amoebic dysentery there were grounds, So at night they put refrigerator out of bounds.127

Then in treating dysentery and other ills The Doctor discovered he was out of pills And so he decided he would make no bones About borrowing from Porky or from Allan Jones [Geologist Bob Parker & Engineer Alan Jones].128

In the bottom left corner, an island girl dances topless [however, the look on her face indicates there may have been a more humorous intention such that the girl expresses fear of the amoeba that seems to move toward her on the page]:

Tahiti is an island paradise, The ladies all surrounded Bunky Rice [one of the Navy crewmembers], And when he’s been home for half a year or more,

127 Ibid., 15. 128 Ibid., Verse 16.

79 He will have many more children than he had before.129

Then Christmas time was spent in Santiago, And Pepin won some money in the Casino. For Christmas in midsummer can be very fine, When you’ve pretty senoritas and Chilean wine.130

Now Junior went ashore on Easter Isle of course And he thought it would be nice to ride a horse, But the ladies there were really overjoyed When they found that he could be much better employed.131

A squid eats a hydrophone:

Now Pepin, Jones and Doctor Russell Raitt They used to run Seismic stations very late; But, thank God, they had to stop working after dark When their hydrophones were eaten by a squid or a shark.132

The ships commonly encountered Humboldt squid, Doscidicus gigas, and various species of sharks off the coast of South America, especially between Valparaíso, Chile and Callao, Peru. This verse of

Downwind Calypso refers to the January 12 incident in which Horizon struck an unidentified object off the coast of Callao, Peru. SCUBA divers reported that the collision resulted in the removal of the transducer from the lower end of the hydrophone. That end of the shaft also showed scarring as if some unidentifiable animal had bitten it. 133

In the next verse, Baird runs aground on Rapa Isle while Islanders look on from their canoe:

While the Baird was steaming near to Rapa Isle, The Horizon was to eastward all the while, Till a message came hurridly [sic] [original handwritten correction: frantically] over the air That they were stranded on a coral reef that wasn’t there.

129 Ibid., Verse 4. 130 Ibid. Verse 10. 131 Ibid., Verse 19. 132 Ibid., Verse 11. 133 Preliminary Report on Downwind, 46.

80 On November 24, the ships visited Rapa Isle, which they considered “the southernmost inhabited

Polynesian island.” Horizon struggled to navigate the “tortuous channel” and thus ran aground. The incident was not a major one, and by afternoon oceanographers had set foot on the volcanic island where they visited with “islanders” and saw an old Polynesian fortress. 134

In a more general sense, the Chorus tells:

Oh we were far away, day after day, From California where we long to stay, And if you want the news, then you cannot refuse To let us tell of the Downwind Oceanographical Cruise.135

Many of the poems and songs from this era emphasize the different ways in which being at sea meant being far away from home. Some emphasize difficulty and others claim that the way of life at sea was preferable to that on land.136 The final chorus addresses that tension with the humorous suggestion that future cruises should not be permitted:

We are home again despite the stress and the strain. In California where we will remain: And now you’ve heard the news, you really should refuse To permit another South Sea island Holiday cruise.137

Some of the poems and songs like this one also indicate that there was something deviant about these expeditions. The final message is that all of the incidents mark the expedition as a kind of misadventure. Men on ships avoided work, played pranks on one another, weathered the tumultuous environment of the open-ocean (including periodically running the ships aground), plundered

Indigenous artifacts, caught amoebic dysentery, interacted with foreign women, lost and damaged equipment, and longed for home.

134 Ibid., 6. 135 Downwind Calypso, Chorus. 136 Both themes are evident in the collection of songs and poems in the SIO Subject Files, Box 46, Folder 10: Poems 1951-1970. 137 Ibid., Final Chorus.

81 The images from Silverman’s cartoon and the verses from the Downwind Calypso by and large relate a series of overlapping and humorous vignettes that occurred on the expedition intermixed with accounts of scientific activities. But in between all the fun, games, and shipboard shenanigans the drawing literally illustrates, as does the calypso, the nature of work at sea conducted by marine technicians and engineers: throwing TNT overboard for seismic profiles, constant and continual splicing of kinked or lost wire on the winch, operating deep-sea oceanographic instruments, lowering and raising heavy equipment over the side and off the back of the ships, repairing and replacing oceanographic instruments to which the sea or sea creatures caused damage or loss, and freeing the ships when they periodically ran aground. The images and calypso allude to technicians using scientific instruments, “fingers of steel,” to circumvent the sea surface, “iron curtain of the sea,” as a physical boundary between the world of humans and the mysterious world of the deep sea.

The cartoon belongs with the other stories from Downwind as a form of narration of experience. Each image he drew relays a story about the things, people, and events at sea that caught his attention. Silverman accounted for them and in doing so recorded some of the deep tensions experienced as men worked together toward the purpose of collecting oceanographic data. But he did so in order to build his own social standing within this community of scientists.

Silverman found a hobby in cartooning. He made many images over the course of his career that depicted different aspects of Scripps’ community and culture. He demonstrated a talent that perhaps could have been put toward professional work, especially when focused on facial profiles.

For example, he drew the following as part of Director Roger Revelle’s farewell to Scripps and transition to Harvard:

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Image 1: Maxwell Silverman's Drawing of Roger Revelle. Photo Credit: Denzil Ford, 2012. Document Location: SIO Archive. Roger Revelle Papers. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

Silverman, however, avoided flaunting his artistic abilities.138 In fact, he most often tried to hide his drawings or at least reveal them to a limited audience. Rarely did he attribute his name to his drawings overtly. Others who knew him claim that he preferred to be known for his work with oceanographic instruments139 even though the culture at Scripps was one that appreciated these images as “meticulous” depictions of the community’s activities.140 Arthur Raff’s audiotapes describe

Silverman as a “very good cartoonist.”141 Raff goes on to say that Silverman was “sensitive” and

“ashamed” of his drawings. That explains why Silverman did not sign his work. Instead, Silverman appears in the cartoon as one of the only two identifiable people. As such, he actually did sign the cartoon with an image rather than a name. Raff goes so far as to say that he thought of Silverman as a better cartoonist than he was a “scientist or a ship designer,” a sentiment that perhaps explains

Silverman’s sense of embarrassment about his art. Raff describes the drawings as “very meticulous,”

138 Image 1: SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. Roger Revelle Papers 1910-2009, Box 4, Folder: 14: Robert L. Fisher to Roger Revelle, 1962. 139 Arthur Raff discusses this in his audio recordings of his time at Scripps, Arthur Raff Tapes, SIO Online Archive, Transcription, page 39. Bob Fisher also confirmed Silverman’s hesitation to assign himself as an artist in my personal conversation with him on April 22, 2014. 140 Arthur Raff Tapes, pp. 39. 141 SIO online archive “Raff Audio Tape Transcript,” 39.

83 so much so that “They would show all the joints” in knuckles and hands and incredible detail in fingernails. Faces were “bold rugged detail.”

Silverman drew the cartoon that commemorates the Downwind expedition in 1958 in an act of friendship for expedition leader Bob Fisher, with whom he had been developing a close working and personal relationship since the early 1950s. The two men travelled extensively at sea over the course of the decade, and the stories he chose to transform into cartoon images commemorated events he and Fisher experienced together. The images represent the circumstances that brought these two men together: ships; scientific tools and instruments; rough seas; crazy Navy ship Captains like Marvin Hopkins; foreign encounter; and wonderful deep-sea creatures, such as jumbo squid.

Silverman was not proud of his art as a skill, yet he readily drew images and showed them to his expedition companions. He supported the scientists in the process of exploding TNT in the ocean for seismic profiles, constantly and repeatedly spliced the winch wires when they became tangled or lost at sea, operated instruments such as the temperature probe, gathered data and samples despite inclement weather, rough seas, and the extent to which the ships Horizon and Baird rolled with the waves, participated in Horizon Captain Marvin Hopkins’ ploy to remove a Moai statue from Easter

Island and transport it back to Scripps, experienced amoebic dysentery at the same time, met island women, and helped free Horizon when she ran aground at Rapa. His cartoon offers the story of an expedition in several events, but more specifically, it is a narrative of the work and adventures that stood at the center of a friendship between two men. In making the drawing and giving it to Bob

Fisher as a gift, as he did before the expedition landed in San Diego, Silverman strengthened his personal bond with Fisher around the work they conducted at sea. Fisher continues to show respect for that interpersonal connection today by displaying the original drawing framed in his home.142

142 Personal conversation with Bob Fisher, April 22, 2014.

84 As an engineer, Silverman functioned as a vital member of an expedition tradition built out of an institution sensitive to the role of friendship and family. The ties he formed at interpersonal levels within the Scripps community mattered deeply in making each journey an adventurous rather than unbearable experience and in securing opportunities for participation in future research. He used his hobby of cartooning as a way to individualize his participation in this community. While he expressed a certain level of shyness about his skill, he nevertheless repeatedly drew profiles of the people he travelled with at sea and images of activities he thought others might like to remember.143

Along with the textual forms in this chapter, these cartoons were tools that helped Silverman form friendships and secure a prominent social position in the shipboard community. While he gifted his

Downwind cartoon narrative to Fisher, there were many others he hid or destroyed. Arthur Raff imagined that he did so because he preferred to be known as an engineer and ship designer, not an artistic cartoonist. Silverman created illustrations because of a personal desire to immortalize shipboard realities in image form, and he selectively used them as narrative tools that commemorated shared experience because that process, albeit a genuine gesture of solidarity, was at the center of his strategy of building and maintaining his status as a sought after expedition companion and worker.

Fisher came to rely on Silverman as his primary trusted confidant, companion, and co- worker.144 These men came to work well together at sea. They developed a repertoire and professional work strategy built upon personal interactions and a very close friendship. The social ties between these two men provided the foundation upon which their work at sea unfolded and

143 Arthur Raff tells of a time that Silverman drew another one of Revelle’s portraits, showed it to Raff, and then threw it overboard because Raff wanted to display it on the ship. Raff also states that Silverman often drew pictures of the Navy crew and all the scientists aboard expeditions. Arthur Raff Tapes, SIO Online Archive, 39. 144 Fisher called Silverman his “right-hand-man.” Oral History of Robert L. Fisher by Laura Harkewicz, 17 January 2007, 10-11. Accessed online January 16, 2014, http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/oral/Fisher%20Robert.pdf. Fisher also discusses how the expeditions in the 1950s were led by a small group of senior scientists that were “a very well integrated group,” 19.

85 became successful under Fisher’s leadership, he and Silverman conducted dozens of expeditions over two decades in which they executed seismic profiles, collected samples from the deep-ocean, surveyed the seafloor, and completed many other research activities of deep-sea oceanography. On expeditions at sea, the relationship between these two men came first, and the science they conducted was, in large part, a product of their close bond. The following story illuminates how a medical doctor attempted to perform his own identity as a professional contributor to oceanographic research, but his film is a case in which storytelling alone was not always a sufficient means of building lasting social bonds.

4. A Motion Picture Film Story

As part of the adventure of travelling with a scientific expedition across the Pacific Ocean, medical doctor Robert Bingham, of Riverside, California, extended his filmmaking hobby to record scientific work at sea. Much like Silverman’s cartoon, the silent 16mm motion picture titled

“Downwind Expedition,” relays a series of vignettes that combine to make an altogether different narrative story of the scientific journey to sea. It focuses almost solely on work with observational and sampling instrumentation, and while the author intended it as a tool of social credibility, ultimately it failed in that capacity.

The film opens on land with a brief tour of the Scripps campus, including several of the major buildings and the pier that stretches out into the ocean. A series of hand-crafted information cards, complete with hand-strung shell necklaces placed artistically as borders for the words, specify that the footage about to be viewed comes from Scripps’ Downwind Expedition to the south east

Pacific under the International Geophysical Year. After the ships leave port, each subsequent vignette records men at sea working to take oceanographic measurements and samples. The men analyze slides, practice shipboard safety procedures, take deep-sea cores using multiple types of coring instruments, make a plankton haul using nets, operate various cameras and video recorders,

86 take ocean temperatures using a bathythermograph, explode TNT overboard in the ocean to create sound waves for seismic profiles, and work with electronic instruments that make paper printouts in the ship’s laboratory. At film’s end, the ships return to the dock in Point Loma, San Diego where they are greeted with great fanfare: a large group of onlookers cheers their arrival as a local high school marching band performs a lively tune welcoming home the ships, which have been at sea for four months.

Bingham’s narrative strategy leaves the people shown in the film without identity. There was one exception: he inserted footage of a placard, which explained the presence of the up and coming, soon to be famous, filmmaker Franco Romagnoli from the Lowell Institute in Boston. Yet, by leaving all other participants in the film unnamed, he is able to do something curious: Bingham creates an assumption upon which the film operates that all men onboard the ships act as oceanographers. This includes himself, even though outside of the film he was a medical doctor with almost zero training as a deep-sea oceanographer. Viewed by oceanographers and administrators at

Scripps during the 1950s, the identity of most of the men shown would have been obvious. But

Bingham did not mean for the viewership to stop at Scripps (a point I elaborate on in Chapter 5).

He intended the film for a national audience, and his narrative construction, which lacks clearly identifiable people, allowed him to perform an identity such that during the film, he was an oceanographer.

At the age of 22, Bingham earned his A.B. from the University of Redlands and moved on to graduate from medical school at the University of Colorado in 1938. He completed two different residencies in orthopedics, served in the Army Medical Corps during WWII, and established himself in private orthopedic surgery practice in Riverside by 1946. From 1946 to 1955, Bingham also worked as an Assistant Clinical Professor of orthopedic surgery in Loma Linda, California.

Throughout his career, Bingham acted as an orthopedic consultant, attending surgeon, editor of a

87 health news bulletin, founder of a disabled children’s foundation, fellow of the American College of

Surgeons, and founder of the Rheumatoid Disease Foundation. He wrote one book, titled Fight Back

Against Arthritis. When he practiced under the US Army Medical Corps, Bingham was stationed in the South Pacific. That opportunity to live extensively at the edges of the Pacific Ocean, combined with his many years on the Southern California coast, engendered a deep love of the sea. When he died in 1994 after a hard battle with cancer of the spine, he asked to be laid to rest on the Pacific.

His ashes were scattered at sea.145

As a signal of his love of the ocean, Bingham jumped at the opportunity to volunteer as

Medical Director for a group of scientists setting out from San Diego to study the Pacific in 1957.146

It is unclear exactly how he heard of the opportunity, but by the time Downwind came to his attention, he was 47 years old and had been practicing orthopedic medicine for 19 years. He was a seasoned professional over halfway through his entire career as an active physician and surgeon.

Bingham also happened to love photography. He fancied the art of taking photographs, and he took the art form so seriously that he avidly collected photographic apparatuses. Bingham compiled instruments from all significant phases of photographic history. These included almost every model from three well-renowned manufacturers: Kibbey Zeiss-Ikon, Curtis Polaroid, and

Wodinsky Ihagee-Exacta. He also collected less complete sets from several renowned manufacturers. He owned a Simon Wing multiple lens wet-plate camera, 19th century original Kodak cameras, and a daguerreotype camera made by W. and W. H. Lewis.147 The year before he retired

145 Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr., “In Memoriam Robert Bingham, M.D., Lafayette, Colorado, July 21, 1910, Desert Hot Springs, California, May 1, 1994,” The Roger Wyburn-Mason and Jack M. Blount Foundation for the Eradication of Rheumatoid Disease (1994). Accessed online, May 21, 2014: http://arthritistrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/In- Memoriam-Robert-Bingham-MD.pdf. 146 The title is a little misleading. Scripps hired several doctors to work onboard Horizon and Baird during long expeditions to sea. These professionals typically worked as a team of shipboard physicians. The Preliminary Report on Downwind includes these men as members of the scientific party, but calls them “physician.” 147 UC Riverside California Museum of Photography, Bingham Technology Collection, “About the Collection,” online description accessed Nov. 1, 2013: http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/collections.

88 from active medical practice, Bingham turned over his entire collection to the University of

California, Riverside. His donation included over 8,000 individual cameras and has since been recognized as one of three vital public sets of photographic technology, exceeded only by the

Smithsonian Institution and the George Eastman House collections. In fact, his cameras include many pieces that do not appear anywhere else throughout the world.148 When Scripps confirmed its invitation to the Downwind expedition, Bingham certainly packed his photographic equipment.

While Scripps had not mentioned to him the need for recording activities at sea, Bingham took it upon himself to also plan a film that could provide his version of the southeast Pacific journey.

As he made the film, Bingham enlisted the help of several artistic strategies. First, he inserted himself as one of the core individuals. He shows himself walking through Scripps’ La Jolla campus, analyzing a slide in the ship’s laboratory, taking a bathythermographic measurement out on the deck.

He appears to be welcome even at the land-based campus, although he does not encounter another human being, and the campus in the film appears deserted. Upon viewing this film, administrators and oceanographers who had worked with Bingham would have easily identified him in the footage.

Even so, within the confines of this film, Bingham’s role stretches beyond medical doctor such that he becomes Bingham the oceanographer. Visually, this would have been the case even for those who knew he was not in fact an oceanographer. The film’s strategy where Bingham is concerned is to situate him comfortably within the oceanographic community. The fact that he was actually a medical doctor from Riverside present on Downwind to care for the physical health of the men onboard remains hidden. The beginning frames of the film include a card that identifies Bingham as

“Medical Director,” but subsequent scenes do not connect his face to the name and title on the card.

A second strategy involves Bingham’s narrative content. The first part of Bingham’s story is the journey of Downwind. The film appears to be aimed at offering a story of an expedition from start

148 Ibid.

89 to finish. Bingham starts by showing a little bit of the Scripps campus back in La Jolla, taking the viewer to the docks where Horizon and Baird launched, and then out to sea where the science took place. However, Bingham was only present on the first half of the expedition and was back in

Riverside writing letters urging Scripps Director Revelle to contribute funding for the film’s final production before Downwind even ended. Also, Bingham inserted information cards in between shots of the oceanographers describing the dates and particulars of activities. The last date is in early

November 1957, not even a quarter of the way through the expedition. Thus, when the film ends with the return of Horizon and Baird to San Diego where they are celebrated with fanfare and a marching band, Bingham’s film has missed well over one hundred days at sea, in ports of call, and on islands. He obviously attended the return of Horizon and Baird to San Diego on February 28,

1958 in order to obtain these last frames, but the underlying assumption is that the film covers the entire journey. Further, the film shows instances of measuring, sampling, and laboratory calculating at sea but gives no indication of other aspects of expedition life outside of those specific moments.

Bingham either did not film or edited out much of the preparation work and life onboard ship outside of instances of measurement.

The purpose behind these particular choices became clear to Scripps’ Director Roger Revelle shortly after Bingham left the Downwind expedition. Halfway through on December 21st, 1957, he left the ship and returned home. The ships reaching Valparaíso, Chile marked the end of his journey.

He had been gone ten weeks and needed to return to his medical practice. When Bingham arrived in

Riverside, he went straight to work in finding a photographic laboratory to process the film he shot while away. Having already invested $800 of his own money in the film, Bingham realized that further processing would increase his cost greatly, so he wrote to Scripps’ Director Roger Revelle.

Bingham told Revelle that he had shown the film to professional photographers and filmmakers who were impressed with its quality. One of them – Bingham did not identify these people –

90 suggested that Marvin Miller, the voice-over actor, narrate the production. His hope was that

Scripps would find the film substantial and push for its inclusion in national television programs, especially adventure shows. Really, Bingham wanted to ask Revelle one question: Could Scripps pay to have the film professionally processed from the raw Kodachrome format into a viewable film?149

Revelle’s response politely conveyed appreciation to Bingham but indicated zero interest in his film. Revelle stated that he would watch the film if Bingham could have it processed and sent to

Scripps in a viewable format. He told Bingham that the Institution could not afford to make a special copy to keep on hand, and that everyone had lost interest in Downwind by now anyway

(barely two months after the expedition ended). The Institution had already turned attention to the second IGY expedition, Dolphin.150 Revelle suggested that Bingham begin showing the film within his local community because oceanography, after all, could always use more “proselytes.”151

A growing disinterest in Downwind, however, does not quite explain Revelle’s rejection. The expedition leader of the first half of Downwind, Henry W. Menard, worked with the National

Academy of Sciences in hiring Franco Romagnoli, of the Lowell Institute in Boston, to shoot footage from Downwind for the “Challenge of the Ocean” film. In addition, Dr. Harold Busey from the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico arranged for the filming of another motion picture in collaboration with Scripps’ chemical oceanographers led by Norris Rakestraw. Busey marketed the film to television and received interest in airing his version from the show Bold Journey. Bingham shot the third film, which was not produced in association with anyone from Scripps. The television program, “Challenge of the Ocean,” incorporates footage from many expeditions carried out by

149 Robert Bingham 18 March, 1958 Letter to Roger Revelle. SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 9, “Expedition Downwind October 1957-February 1958. 150 Revelle’s sentiment offers another piece of evidence, albeit minor, indicating the tradition of Sea Search I described in Chapter 1. Downwind was defined by a larger expedition tradition at Scripps more than by International Geophysical Year. 151 Roger Revelle 2 April 1958 Letter to Robert Bingham. SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 9, “Expedition Downwind October 1957-February 1958.

91 multiple institutions across a variety of locations during the IGY. The narrative provides a synoptic review of what oceanographers did out at sea and includes sound, voiceovers, and footage of many ocean creatures under study and offers a glimpse of the ocean environment. Bingham’s film, in a much simpler manner, focused on Downwind only. He captured operation of scientific instrumentation and shipboard safety equipment in such a way as to demonstrate Scripps’ domination of the ocean environment. All three of these films were made on the first half of the expedition as Horizon and Baird travelled from San Diego to Valparaíso, Chile via Tahiti. The footage organized by Menard, filmed by the professional and soon to be famous cameraman Franco

Romagnoli, became part of a formal educational motion picture owned by NAS. Busey’s film is lost.

And surprisingly, two moments of Bingham’s footage made it into the NAS film “Challenge of the

Ocean.” Bingham himself takes a measurement of the ocean water and analyzes his measurement in the ship’s laboratory. Thus, not only did his footage make it into the NAS narrative of oceanographic practice during the IGY, Bingham himself gets shuffled in with all of the other oceanographers.152

Revelle did not know that at the time of Bingham’s request, Bingham had already gone ahead and ordered copies, including a second copy for Scripps, even though he previously indicated that he did not want to pay anymore for producing the film. Also, in the two or so weeks that he waited for Revelle’s response, Bingham began avidly showing the film within and beyond his local community. His audiences included University of California, Riverside faculty and students, the

Rotary Club, the Optimist Club, the Kiwanas Club, participants at a medical meeting, the Science

152 I have not found records clearly indicating how or why Bingham’s footage made it into the NAS film. Considering his investment in spreading the word of the film as indicated in his letters to Revelle, it is likely that he also wrote similar letters to the producers of the NAS film. It is possible that their response would have been different from Revelle’s such that a few frames of his film became integrated into the final NAS footage. I have some indication of Bingham’s interactions with Roger Revelle, through their correspondence, and Bob Fisher, through my personal conversations with Fisher. I have not, however, seen evidence of Bingham’s relationship with Menard. The men travelled on the same leg of the expedition together. It is also possible that Bingham’s footage made it to the NAS producers through Menard.

92 Group of Pomona, attendees of a nutrition convention in Los Angeles, and many showings to his friends and neighbors. No record exists of what transpired during Bingham’s lectures and film viewings, but he clearly worked hard at gaining friends for oceanography, if not himself becoming, in Revelle’s words, a proselyte.

Bingham’s photographic and filmmaking hobby inspired his desire to film his time on the

Downwind expedition. As he shot the footage, he strategically conflated his own identity as medical doctor with the role of oceanographer. In doing so, he provided a visual representation of himself in that new role that he sent back to Roger Revelle, which he hoped would be shared with the oceanographic community. Bingham went on the Downwind expedition and that experience provided justification for him to be considered a part of the oceanographic community. He used his film as evidence for Scripps to make the same conclusion. When Revelle expressed disinterest in the film, Bingham continued to push. He began giving lectures around southern California, which included a viewing of his film. He asked Revelle for the scientific data from Downwind so that he could supplement his lectures and film with oceanographic evidence. And he told Revelle the following regarding his experience with the audiences of his public lectures:

Everyone seems to think that the hard, dangerous and monotonous work of the oceanographer is glamourous and adventurous. In gently disillusioning them I try to stress the importance of scientific research in this field and the role of the University of California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in maintaining the leadership of the United States in this branch of science.153

After Downwind, Bingham situated himself as a representative of ocean science. It became his charge to explain to the public what he experienced and how that could relay the vital nature of the work conducted by oceanographers in this era. Bingham did not convince oceanographers that he deserved a place at their table merely because he made a film about a portion of one expedition to

153 Robert Bingham, “April 7, 1958 Letter to Roger Revelle,” SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind.

93 sea.154 Yet, even though he failed to earn a more permanent position for himself within the oceanographic community, Bingham continued to use the motion picture as evidence of his authority on the value of ocean science in the public arena. Thus, during the process of filming his narrative of Downwind, Bingham created a visual representation of himself as a member of the

Scripps community. However, the editing process, which included correspondence with Scripps

Director Roger Revelle, helped him learn the limits of his place in the oceanographic community.

Therefore, Bingham transformed the film from its failed role as a tool of social credibility into a piece of evidence he used to convince a different audience that he held a kind of authority about ocean science through his work at sea on Downwind.

Bingham’s film was inspired by the novelty of going to sea on an oceanographic expedition.

During the process of filming and editing, however, Bingham came to understand that storytelling was not enough to secure a viable position in the oceanographic community. Revelle sent the film straight to Scripps’ archive and sent Bingham on his way back home on land. While several other medical doctors travelled on multiple expeditions to sea, Bingham was not invited back. The film exemplifies a case in which a medical doctor attempted to align himself with his fellow expedition members through storytelling, but demonstrates how sometimes other social forces (in this case that have been lost in the historical record) sometimes trumped the power of narration.

Conclusion

This chapter offers an opportunity to open new conversations about the ways in which stories shaped the very social ties upon which oceanography in this era relied. Through narrative, the men on ships that made science happen used storytelling as a means of organizing themselves.

154 Chapter 5 shows how one of the forces that made Bingham’s film insignificant for Scripps was the fact that the oceanographers were involved in collaborations with professional filmmakers on Downwind to create a motion picture of their own. Despite his intentions, Bingham’s film was redundant next to these other films the oceanographers helped make themselves.

94 Interpersonal arrangements at sea were vital to getting research done. Shipboard relationships were not merely the product of arrangements made before the ships left port: they emerged, solidified, and shifted while men lived and worked out on the ocean. Expedition participants used stories as tools for figuring out how they could best situate themselves day-to-day as shipboard oceanographic workers and scientists. The authors used narrative to shift social perceptions of themselves from mere expedition participants to effective workers who could be relied upon. Storytelling helped build, support, and place parameters around the everyday social world that conducted the research and turned the ocean into a complex set of data points and scientific conclusions such that oceanography found a viable place on the world stage in this era.

In his Sea Search story, Revelle attempted to capture the special nature of oceanographic research when conducted from the deck of an ex-military tugboat turned scientific research vessel.

He alluded to a kind of wonderment that such a diverse group of workers, “scientists and sea- captains, mathematicians and engineers, artists and dock hands, biologists and fishermen, oilers, chemists and cooks” managed to lower and raise heavy oceanographic instruments into and out of the water for days on end in the difficult environmental conditions provided by the open-ocean.

Revelle characterized being “on station” as a kind of work in which “a flurry of activity takes place.”

Underneath his colorful writing and almost picturesque description of life and work on ships is a harsh reality that coordinating these diverse participants under constantly changing environmental condition on a platform that continually moved, both rolling with the ocean waves and charging forward across the ocean, was challenging at best, near impossible at worst. To deal with these challenges, the men operated in small teams under a maritime hierarchy that attempted to make clear who was responsible for what and when. The ship Captain navigated the open-ocean and positioned the ship in specific spots for research purposes. Navy crew focused on their role in ship operations, and as Revelle described, the cook too held an important role in preparing the food for everyone

95 onboard, which made the expedition possible on a visceral level. Senior scientists directed individual projects that matched their expertise and utilized a cohort of junior student and other assistants

(including the medical doctors onboard who, in absence of medical emergencies, had a lot of spare time). Clear-cut social organization on these ships calmed the flurry of expedition work and provided circumstances under which leaders allocated workers to specific sampling, measuring, observations, and maintenance tasks. In his discussion of the intersection of narrative and science, historian James Bono observed, “The work of scientists continually demands the intimate interweaving of text and action in the making of science.”155 Oceanography, in the middle of the 20th century, included a performative dimension in which expedition participants recorded personal stories of their experiences to alter the very social relationships upon which collecting, observing, sampling, and recording the deep-ocean relied. Historical attention to these acts of storytelling reveals that narration was a tool with which men on ships adjusted and continually readjusted the social ties that were paramount to completing research goals effectively.

The remaining four chapters in this dissertation turn to look ever further at the content of these stories. My approach from here is to examine the ways in which authors spent their narrative energy describing their material world. I read the stories for what they reveal about the convergences of things and objects with the process of oceanographic research. At these intersections I look even deeper into how the science developed a synoptic view of the Pacific Ocean, utilized the U.S. Navy as a primary patron, came to collaborations between diverse expedition participants, and used all of these components in constructing institutional identity and sense of belonging in the Pacific region.

Storytelling held significance for the narrators, but these stories also reveal additional details about how ocean science functioned out at sea.

155 James J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,” Focus: History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences, Isis 101 (2010): 558.

96 Prologue to Chapter 2 Geologist Bob Norris’ Expedition Diary

This diary was written by Dr. Robert M. Norris, then Assistant Professor of Geology at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California.

I came to Scripps in February 1949 to work under Prof. Francis P. Shepard. I completed the PhD degree in June 1951 and then did what would be called today a “Post-Doc” on Amer. Petroleum Inst. Project 51 involving a study of sedimentation along the coast and in the coastal bays near Corpus Christi, Texas, under the supervision of Dr. Shepard (Principal investigator). In June 1952, I joined the faculty at Santa Barbara.156

Robert M. Norris 4424 Nueces Drive Santa Barbara, Calif. 93110

Downwind Cruise Dec 1957 – Feb 1958 December 24157 After receiving the emergency phone call from Russ Raitt at Scripps in which he reported that we must leave for Santiago a day early, I got my things packed and with the family, went out to the Santa Barbara airport, Betsy Anne was asleep when we left and stayed home with her Grandma Marian. We arrived only to find the plane was to be 40 min. late which permitted Donny + Jimmy a lot of time to watch the private planes landing + taking off. At about 10 minutes to 4, my southwest airways plane arrived and I went aboard feeling rather glum at leaving the family in the midst of the holiday season. The trip south was beautiful and followed the Malibu coastline closely as far as Santa Monica. From there we passed over parts of Los Angeles – one thing surprised me – Many of the track houses had swimming pools, either in use or under construction. The plane landed at LA International about 5pm and I went to get a bite to eat. I was not especially hungry because of a cold I was getting and for various other reasons. Russ Raitt met me at the Pan American desk at about 5:45 p.m. and shortly thereafter we went aboard. The plane was comfortable, but not for sleeping and we both had window seats. The airline fed us a reasonably good dinner and about 11pm most of our tourist class fellow passengers went to sleep as best they could.

DECEMBER 25 Russ + I both slept fitfully and not to [sic] well. Our route took us from Los Angeles over Tucson + El Paso too [sic] about Brownsville where we turned south, passing over Tampico and Campeche, neither of which I saw. At about 8 a.m. we landed in Guatamala [sic] City GTA. for a few moments. Since it was Christmas day, Santa Clauses + Christmas trees were in evidence, but it was not possible to mail postcards – a disappointing situation. It was coolish and slightly moist, the kind of morning one

156 These introductory and biographical remarks were typed on a separate page from the handwritten diary. 157 What follows is my typed replication of Bob Norris’ handwritten diary.

97 often has in the tropics. The Guatamalan gov’t serves small cups of excellent coffee to the airline passengers. South from Guatamala we passed many recent + spectacular volcanos [sic], some giving off some vapor, but nothing more. Russ + I took many pictures of these. Nicaragua is a land of lakes and Managua, the capital city is located on one of these. Volcanos dot the landscape everywhere. When we arrived in Managua, it had warmed up considerably and most of the town seemed to be having a family outing to the airport to see the planes – Neither many passengers came aboard or left. We also had a cup of coffee here courtesy of the Nicaraguan gov’t. From Managua, the plane flew southeast to Panama City across the Coastal Plain on the Atlantic side. The area is a vast trackless jungle with occasional small settlements along the meandering streams. About 12:30 p.m. the plane landed at Tocumen field east of Panama. We took a taxi into the city for about 1.50 each. The Panamanian currency is on par with U.S. and no difficulty in exchange is encountered. We checked our bags at the Internacional Hotel[sic], had a few drinks in their cool + quiet bar and then went off to see the city. Russ + I walked all over the old part of the city, looking at the gold altar in St. Joseph’s Church, the famous old flat arch, the promenade along which hundreds of kids were roller-skating and the Presidential Palace which was guarded by numerous soldiers. The older part of the city is fairly dirty and no amount of effort by the city seems to keep them ahead of the game. Taxi drivers were constantly propositioning us about girls they had available. This was especially prominent in the evening. One gets the impression that sex is one of Panama City’s chief tourist attractions. The Canal Zone is divided clearly from Panama City. No signs are posted to indicate that one must is crossing a boundary. However, the Canal Zone bears the stamp of the U.S. architecture of the late 1800’s and more space is devoted to gardens + lawns. We had supper at a place called the Atlas Club, not so much because it was highly recommended, but because rather few other places were available on Christmas night. The meal was fair and the cool beer good as the evening was very warm.

DEC 26 At 2:40 a.m. we were out at the Airport again, surrendering our Tourist cards + other customs data. We boarded the El Interamericano – a large DC-7 of Panagra – which had come in from New York + Miami. The stewardesses were very pretty and pleasant and since the plane was almost empty, we could sprawl out two seats and sleep. I was asleep within minutes and didn’t wake until the next morning when we were over N. Peru. I had crossed the equator for the first time during the night and the 4 hours of sleep was gratefully appreciated. About 8 a.m. we landed at the airport in Lima. It had rained briskly hours before – a very unusual thing for Lima – and the sky was cloudy. Lima, although near the coast, was cool + pleasant. In the station, we were followed by a furtive looking character who wished to sell Panama hats which he kept rolled up. At Lima, as at Panama, A long red carpet was unrolled at the foot of the steps each time the Inter. Americano landed. This looked the most strange and half funny at our next stop at Antofagasta, Chile. The airstrip at Antofagasta is three or four miles from town in the desert, and literally, rolling out the red carpet into the uninhabited desert was funny.

98 Before our landing at Antofagasta, we crossed some of the coastal Peruvian desert – in one case – near Pisco or Ica – I saw a fine group of white barchans dunes marching across the reddish brown desert. Unfortunately, there was considerable cloudiness, which not only blotted out much of the fascinating coastline, but the high Andean peaks to the east as well. At Punta Lomas we left the coast and flew over the sea to Antofagasta. Southward from Antofagasta our route took us along the coast, but mostly over the land rather than the water. The Desert is very barren at the north and gradually becomes more verdant as one approaches Santiago. The geology is beautifully exposed and I took some pictures of the bedding and of faulting where they were well-exposed. Also, going south, the desert area became more mountainous as the broad plains of the nitrate (salitre) desert narrowed. The first green south of Antofagasta was seen at Capiapó, where a river manages to cross the desert all the way to the coast. I asked one of the stewardesses, and Argentine girl, what the name of the valley was. She replied “I don’t know, do you?” I told her I thought it was Capiapó and this was confirmed by a Chileno sitting nearby. Such valleys gradually became more common, the next being Vallenar, Coquimbo, etc. Summer fog hung in patches along the coast most of the way south…

…The countryside looks much like parts of California with the brown grass-covered hills + scattered green trees, not so much oaks as leguminous trees of some sort. The valleys are all irrigated and look quite verdant in contrast with the brown hillsides. Both Russ + I were impressed with the Chileno women – they were to an appreciably larger extent – good looking – more so than in the other places we had been, although we had both admired one very attractive señora who had disembarked from the plane in Guatamala [sic] where she was rec’d by a husband and tres niños. It seemed to make little difference whether one was in Santiago or in the smaller towns on the road to Valparaiso, pretty girls were numerous…

…About 9:30 we arrived in Valparaiso and begun our search for the R/V Spencer F. Baird…

DECEMBER 28 …The morning dawned bright and clear in Valparaiso, unlike the previous fog-enshrouded morning. We were scheduled to depart at 1300, but assorted delays managed to postpone this to nearly 1600. In the meantime I took the opportunity to write numerous letters + to make a trip for some shipboard refreshments….

…We headed out into a rough sea which was not much fun for the crew which had spent much time ashore. I had a bonamine [sic] and only felt a little miserable... …I am sharing a stateroom with Dr. Erwin Schweigger, a Peruvian who is an expert on Guano and the Peruvian current and who teaches part-time at San Marcos University in Lima + where he will go ashore, to be replaced I presume by Bob Parker…

DECEMBER 31 …Inasmuch as it was New Years eve [sic], several members of the scientific staff + ships’ company made up some punch with ingredients obtained at Valparaiso. This enabled us to usher in the New Year properly. During the evening the squid appeared in the water where the spot lights were played, and we found that if we threw in fruit juice cans (about the size of orange juice concentrate) the squid would swim by, inspect them, and then back up and grab the cans and promptly submerge.

99 Attempts were made to spear or catch these animals without notable success…

JANUARY 2 …The mid-watch again. This morning we came in near the coast of Chile at about Antofagasta. The Coastal Cordillera + the well-developed marine terraces were easily visible. The Horizon came along-side and we transferred several persons to her and exchanged our copies of Playboy + Nugget. The constant exposure to pictures of photos of attractive nude girls in these magazines and on the assorted calendars around the ship is pleasurable, but leads to frustration and makes one wonder whether it is worth it. We remained in position most of the day with hydrophones streaming, while the Horizon moved about as directed by Russ Raitt and tossed explosive charges over the side in order to make his seismic studies. We took a second gravity core, this time in green foraminiferal mud much like that off So. California…

JANUARY 4 …Dr. Schweigger and I had our usual cocoa (Hucke Hermanos – Santiago + Valparaiso) and he told me more about Lima + how Peruvians behave and think. It has become obvious that the Peruvians like most other So. Americans, are continually haggling about boundaries and always making a fuss about the accuracy of foreign maps + charts.

JANUARY 5 For the first time today, we attempted to take a core with the big Kullenberg. Our attempt was made in a place off Antofagasta in the South American trench where the water depth was 4210 fathoms (25,260’). When the Kullenberg was lowered, it had a small PBS gravity corer attached as a pilot wt. It took a good many hours to raise and lower these devices and much wire – about 8100 meters158 We did not detect with certainty when the instrument was on the bottom, because the small ball which was to be broken was not heard on our listening gear – not too surprising when one considers the ball was about 3 ½ inches in diameter and that the sound of the implosion had to travel thru 4 ½ miles of water to reach us. In the late afternoon, 7 or 8 hours after the corer had been put in the water, the geological crew gathered on the fantail to see what we had got. The last 400 meters of wire was badly kinked indicating that too much wire had been spooled out. Finally, the end came in view – a tangle of wire + manila line with the tripping mechanism of the corer + the small PBS sampler attached. We did recover a small core from the bottom of the trench, but not the large one (30’ ±) we had hoped for. In the evening, I had a long and interesting talk with Dr. Schweigger about Peru, Peruvians, Peruvian education and his three boys. His oldest boy is 16, and the twins – identical – are 13….

JANUARY 7 …The fleas are at work again and have done a job biting me. I wish I knew why the [sic] find me so tasty.

158 No period.

100 JANUARY 8 More coring + seismic work, and more than our share of wire difficulties. The big winch was used to lower the temperature probe in the morning and all went well until we began to heave in; at that point, for reasons unknown, one of the turns slipped off the winding drum and made a dandy snarl – with 5000 meters of wire out. This will have to be spliced in the next few days and we therefore transferred George Hohnhaus back from the Horizon (he swam) to help Max. In the evening we attempted a core with the gravity corer + the hydrographic winch. We have been losing parts of the red clay cores and Max had used a rubber to prevent this – slipped over the core catcher. When about 150 meters of wire was still out, a big snarl in this wire became obvious. This was duly untangled and the corer brought in – with a good three-foot red clay core. Bob Fisher moved this after I had put the bottom cap on and all the core ran out. Another good core was taken after the bad wire was cut off. On top of this I acquired a new set of intestinal bacteria which have been treating me badly.

JANUARY 9 …Dr. Schweigger explained his version of the “Callao Painter” He says it is associated with abundant jelly fish which sink to the bottom of the sea and decay releasing H2S. He reports that a diver found dead jellyfish 1 meter thick on the sea bottom during one of these occasions…

JANUARY 13 …The Horizon mysteriously struck an object which broke off the sounding head on their Depth recorder. Dr. Schweigger suggested it might have been a whale…

JANUARY 14 …This evening one of the hydrophones went out rather suddenly and the technicians believe that the wire was bitten in half by a shark159 or a squid. Last night a shark chewed a hydrophone wire up leaving part of a tooth embedded in the cable. Dr. Schweigger thought this was very funny as he has not had much faith in the seismic study.

JANUARY 15 Early this morning we arrived in the outer harbor of Callao. The harbor is protected from the open sea by a large, very barren island a couple of miles long called San Lorenzo. Several lesser islands are found near its southern end and one or two of these are guano islands… …Warren Wooster + Bob Parker met us at the dock and we went into town with them…

JANUARY 16 …We rolled out of bed about 7am and went upstairs to have a light breakfast – The finest feature of which was the dark rich Peruvian coffee…

…If the present-day girls are any sample, it must have been spectacular. Santiago is the only other place I have seen where one sees so many pretty girls and even more girls with spectacular figures. If the So. Americans have produced little music, art and almost no science or literature, they

159 This point in the text is broken off into a new page. Before Norris returns to diary entries, he inserted an additional page, which shows a copy of his invitation from the President of the Hydrobiological Research Council to a cocktail hour at Lima’s Club Nacional on January 15.

101 have at least come up with an astounding collection of beautiful women. The girls are, I am told, not a little spoiled by all the male admiration but they enjoy standing erect and wearing flattering clothes.

JANUARY 17 This morning Bob Fisher, Bob Parker, Dale Krauss and I joined Dr. Jorge Broggi, a well- known Peruvian geologist. He brought along a government car – a British Land Rover and two of his assistants. We drove north from Lima on a good divided highway which eventually became a single road, but still remained good. We stopped near Ancón, Piedras Gordas and Santa Rosa to look at the dunes – and the lines of sand dunes which Broggi calls Chiflones. By and large sand is transported in from the coast, sometimes for several miles and often up to altitudes of 1000’ or more. The desert is incredibly dry and virtually rainless, but the air is humid owing to the proximity of the sea. It is an odd effect. North of Ancón, the road follows the coat along a truly amazing route. The coast for several miles is flanked by a steep-faced dune slope approx 1000 ft high and at the angle of repose (≈34°)160

Image 2: Pages 52 and 53 of Robert Norris' Diary. Photo Creator: Denzil Ford, 2012. SIO Archives. Document Collection: Biographies, Autobiographies, Memoirs. Norris, Robert M.” Downwind Cruise, Dec 1957-Feb 1958. Copyright UC Regents. Broggi + his assistants demonstrated with ordinary balloons, that the sand is driven up the slope, and slides, by gravity back down onto the road. The slope above the road is cut with shallow channels which contain small moving streams of sand which rapidly build big deltas on the highway. The sand erodes the surface exactly like water might. Beyond this stretch of road we dropped down into the Chancay Valley where we had a Peruvian lunch of fresh water crayfish cooked entire in a soup… …The trip back was uneventful – with several stops – one of which was to photograph a recent fault scarp across the mouth of the Chancay Valley…

JANUARY 21

160 SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. Online collection: Biographies, Autobiographies, Memoirs. Norris, Robert M.” Downwind Cruise, Dec 1957-Feb 1958.

102 …Tonight, the squids were thick again and many were caught, one about 5’ long. The crew, for some odd reason delights in dissecting these, and one has to be fast to see one intact. It is odd why they react this way, but I know they do the same thing when a shark is caught. Possibly they identify all human suffering with such animals – the poor squids…

JANUARY 31 We sighted little Sala y Gomez at about 10:30 a.m. and began our bathymetric survey of the surrounding area about 12:20 p.m. Fisher plotted, I gave Radar ranges and First Mate Davis read off Pelorus bearings. About 2 p.m. we finished the inshore part of the survey and prepared to send a landing party ashore. The boat was manned by Ralph Long + Bob Nordberg who did a good job. The landing party included Bob Fisher, me, Dick von Herzen, Messboy Vic Vogel + Second mate Bill Clampitt. Von Herzen, Vogel + Clampitt were originally going to dive, but the abundance of sharks deterred them. Sala y Gomez has no beaches owing to the large swell running at the time of our arrival, the waves were breaking rather heavily on the rocks. We attempted a landing on the SW side and had the boat hurled against a big rock and broke the shear pin in the outboard motor. This was duly repaired and we returned to the north side of the island. The entire party was suffering from indecision because of the rough water and the abundant sharks. However, Bob Fisher, encased in an orange life jacket and wearing dark glasses + a straw hat dove into the water – He was followed by the rest of us – I was also wearing an orange life jacket – and we swam 100-150’ to the rocks. Many purple sea urchins grew on the rocks and it was doubtless lucky that I didn’t crawl over any getting up the slippery rocks. We hauled a bag of dry clothes, sample bags, notebooks + cameras along with us – but didn’t bother about much of the stuff as our arrival coincided with a rain squall. The island is nearly all volcanic. The older flow is scoriaceous and varies from red to black in color. The upper surface of this flow is weathered and here + there covered by beach rock suggesting the island was submerged before the second flows were deposited. The second flow is a dense, gray volcanic rock, with insipient pillow structure at its base. Its upper part is locally pahoehoe + aa. Numerous water worn boulders occur on the present island suggesting a possible higher sea- level or a rise in the island itself. There is a crude point system trending much as shown below. The entire upper surface of the island is a jumble of rocks + boulders – with many tide pools.

Unfortunately we did not have sufficient time or equipment to collect in the tide pools. Only two land plants were observed _ Portulaca sp. and a succulent plant resembling verbena (sand) Numerous gulls terns? Albatrosses + little gray birds were nesting on the island. Gull eggs were everywhere. About 30 pictures were taken – including general views – rocks – plants + birds. After about an hour, we made ready to go back to the Baird and plunged in – in pairs – to swim to the boat. The boat would circle, pick up two of us and circle again. The boat was ably handled and we all got onboard without difficulty. When we got back to the Baird we found that about 50 tuna had been caught and that hundreds of sharks were circling about hungrily. I wouldn’t know if the sharks were the kind that would attack a man, but they made us all uneasy going ashore.

103 We continued the bathymetric survey until about 7pm and then go underway for Easter Island….

FEBRUARY 2 …About 10:30 a.m. we anchored off Hanga Roa and were boarded by the Governor – Cdr. Nicale Dorion and his executive officer Lt. Cdr. Davelli. After lunch we went ashore in the Chilean Naval launch, but just before I traded some old shirts + trousers for three tikis – a wooden bird, and two stone images. Most amazing of all was the fact that I sold my 4 year old Westclox Scotty Pocket Watch for $20 U.S. Since the watch cost $2.75 new, this was quite a bargain. Once ashore, we went first to the seismograph station where Russ Raitt and Alan Jones repaired the ailing seismograph which Russ later described as a museum piece. From there (Mataveri) we rode in jeeps across the narrow part of the island to the SE shore at the foot of Rano Kao where the Chileans have installed a long-period wave recorder. The keeper was asleep on our arrival and inspection indicated that repairs could best be made tomorrow. The Governor, then, very kindly, took us on a long jeep ride along the south coast to Rano Raruku where we saw a great many of the famous stone images a number of which were still in place in the living rock. The island is mostly grass-covered and very pleasant in appearance. Many corn fields are present and bananas, figs, and a few other fruit trees were present. Many more or less isolated clumps of Eucalyptus have been planted on the island, some neatly enclose by stone walls. Dry stone walls are everywhere, and in some cases have been surmounted by barb-wire fences to limit the numerous sheep. Señor Gobernador told us (in fairly good English) that he is a sheep, cow, + pig farmer, governor of the island, Head of the Naval garrison and the school teacher for the niños. He and the executive officer server 2 year tours and have their families with them. The total Chilean population is about 40 including Hospital, Naval, Marine, + Air Force personnel. They have an experimental garden near the old sheep ranch at the foot of Mt. Puhi which was run by an Agricultural Engineer for some years, but is now run by a marine!! At Rano Raraku we not only saw numerous statues, but also looked at the lake inside the nearly perfect crater. The jeep ride was very dusty owing to the dirt roads and the brisk trade winds and by the time we got back to Mataveri, we all looked like we had emerged from a coal mine. Just as we were going through Mataveri, some of the Chilean wives shouted at us – so we went back. Perhaps they had intended to invite us in for tea or cocktails, but when they saw us, they said something about “negritos” and we went down to the dock to wait for our boat.

FEBRUARY 3 This morning I went ashore with the group planning to check the wave recorder on the southwest side of the island. This device had broken down yesterday after only a few weeks of service. About the time we reached the summit of the low pass north of Rano Kao, Bob Fisher suggested I leave and hike up the mountain which I had indicated earlier as a project I was interested in. It took perhaps 45 minutes to walk to the top of the 1200 foot mountain. The mountain was covered with bunch grass and loose pebbles of volcanic rock (scaria, agglomerate) plus innumerable shards of black obsidian. Many of the obsidian chips showed some evidence of having been worked but nowhere did I see any carefully fashioned projectile points such as are found on California’s San Nicolas Island. From the summit of Rano Kao one gets a fine view of much of the island to the

104 north + east – Dotted by reddish or blackish cinder cones – and between, the bright green corn + banana fields. The crater of Rano Koa is quite impressive – almost vertical sides with a perfectly flat floor covered with a swamp and small lakes – The flat floor lies about 300 feet below the rim. On the SW side, the rim is somewhat lower as the sea has cut away the flank of the volcano producing the high cliffs we saw on our way to the anchorage. The view is truly spectacular. From the crater I walked down toward Mataveri as Bob Fisher had said he wanted to call on Father Sebastian Englert about 11:30. On my way down I picked up one mace head or chopper made from obsidian – rather crude, but a good artifact. Near Mataveri I asked a man what time it was “Que hora es?” and he replied “Doce” – 12 – I was a little surprised since the walk had seemed short, so I hurried along the dirt road thru Mataveri toward Hanga Roa. Hanga Roa is where most of the Rapa Nui (natives) live and has dirt streets lined with the ever-present dry stone walls. Many of the houses have electricity. The village is neat and most homes are surrounded by flowers – Geraniums, African Marigolds, bougainvillea, etc. Fig trees are very abundant and grow in nearly every yard. Most homes have guavas, oranges ( which all ripen in the winter) bananas and corn. On my way thru the town – no stores – only homes – I was picked up by the Executive Officer in his Jeep – George Hohnhaus and Bob Nordberg were with him. He took us to the old Navy fort and then to his home. He invited us to stay for lunch, but I declined since I had agreed to meet Bob F. at Father Sebastian’s. Off I went to the Padre’s – a bit too full of alcohol, but convinced my Spanish was getting better as I conversed with my guide. Father Sebastian was at home, but there was no Bob Fisher! So the Father and I chatted about many things and I drank his Norwegian Beer + Chilean wine, and gave him two cans of tomato juice – my lunch – I had planned on sharing it with him, but he misunderstood and tucked it away in his larder. He told me he had been on the island since 1936 and during that time had met many famous visitors including – for example – Admiral Byrd. He was quite interested in our visit to Sala y Gomez as he had been there in 1948. I promised to send him some pictures we had taken there. I also learned that he was a member of the National Geographic Society and that he made many collections of shells and the like for interested persons all over the world. His hobby is languages and he has written a book in Spanish about the island which includes a dictionary of Rapa Nui. He spoke very good English, German, Spanish, Rapa Nui and I suppose, French as well. Interestingly, he reported that he was not a Chilean citizen – he said he was born a German and would die one! He was interested in Santa Barbara because it is a Franciscan center. He, himself is a Capuchin – but he knew many Franciscans and had some literature about a big Franciscan convention held in Santa Barbara some years back. We had a pleasant visit of about 3 hours duration during which time Capt. Al Phinney appeared and later Alan Jones Russ Raitt and Bob Parker with J. H. Nanda. They were all plied with beer + wine too, and when they decided to leave, I went along – having decided Bob Fisher + Dick von Herzen had been entertained by the Governor – which later proved to have been the case. We strolled back to the boat at Hanga Piko from Hanga Roa, this time along the beach. I took as many pictures of the local people as possible. The girls and women were shy and had to be caught by surprise. However, once back at the dock, several of the fellows appeared with girls in

105 tow, two of the prettiest I’d seen on the island. Both these girls enjoyed having their pictures taken and squared their shoulders and smiled…

We sailed at 37 minutes past six – with a full moon over the island…

FEBRUARY 26 …Had the midwatch this morning and kept busy plotting profiles + listening to our tape- recorder. Max Silverman spent most of the day working on the large Easter Island wooden tiki to be presented to Roger Revelle on our arrival. We are well out of the trades now and in the northerly swell + wind, the Baird is pitching considerably and taking a lot of spray over the bow. It is thoroly [sic] uncomfortable aboard – Also, the weather is much cooler and less pleasant. About 10 a.m. we passed abeam of Alijos Rocks which were plainly visible. This evening, along with some drinks, we recorded the “Downwind Calypso” with John Andrews doing the solo and a group of lesser singers the chorus. It came out reasonably well.

FEBRUARY 27 The sea continues rough and the wind is still strong from the NNW. About 6:30pm we crossed Lat. 30. Much preparation going on in getting charts + reports completed, under some difficulty because the ship is pitching so much. We are scheduled to arrive tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. It’ll be good to be on land again. I had the last of the scientific watches tonight and secured the PDR at 1700. Afterwards, we had a rousing party in the lab to kill all the stray bottles before arising tomorrow.

106 Chapter 2 Airplanes and Islands: Surveying and “Primitive” Bodies in the Pacific

Introduction

The Downwind expedition did not return any major discoveries, and that was true for most of Scripps’ expeditions that went to sea during the 1950s.161 By and large, these scientific journeys were not valuable as individual episodes that caused ruptures in oceanographic knowledge. They were, however, events that allowed scientists to build incrementally upon what was previously known through an intellectual process that involved establishing similarities and differences between known facts and what was encountered on expeditions at sea. When describing Downwind’s geological contribution, expedition leader Henry William Menard admitted that all major features were known before Downwind left port. He continued on to say:

What we did, as I see it, is make detailed surveys of geological importance in critical areas; namely the Tuamotu and Austral Islands where guyots, atolls, and islands are mixed together, the crest of the East Pacific Rise where a trough was supposed to exist, the Peru-Chile Trench [sic] which is so close to high mountains, and the Nasca Ridge [sic] which one group of northeast trending structures presumably caused faulting.162

This chapter makes an initial and modest effort to extend our historical perspective beyond an overemphasis on quantified data from oceanic specimens, deep-sea cores, and seismic profiles from the surveys that Menard emphasized. Touring, by air in planes and by foot on islands, provided oceanographers with additional means for investigating the environment by way of moving their own bodies through it, essentially flying above and walking around their object of inquiry. Those

161 Downwind data produced only minor adjustments in knowledge of geology, seafloor mineral distribution, carbon dioxide concentrations, and coral distributions. See SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981. Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind, Letter Bill Menard to Revelle, July 31, 1958 and Letter John W. Wells to Roger Revelle, 29 April, 1958; Folder 20: Radio Broadcasts, Mining the Deep, Sunday, Feb. 1, 1959. Norris Watson Rakestraw Papers, Box 1, Folder 18-20: IGY CO2 Program 1958-1959, Report on geochemical work on Downwind Expedition. Also see Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s discussion of Downwind’s failure to confirm or deny the existence of a Pacific rift in Oceanographers and the Cold War, 78. 162 SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 12 Downwind, Letter Henry William Menard to Roger Revelle, July 31, 1958.

107 experiences became a part of the process by which these scientists synthesized myriad pieces of information and devised a synoptic understanding of the Pacific.

The backbone of this chapter forms around Bob Norris’ diary, from the preceding prologue, and a set of photographs from the expedition that belong to one of Downwind’s engineers, Alan

Jones.163 In conjunction, I use archival sources such as reports, correspondence, and publications to look deeper into the ways in which bodily travel informed a synoptic view of the Pacific. With these sources, I examine how seeing coastal areas from the air provided oceanographers with information about similarities and differences in geological relationships that they included in their publications.

This first sub-section argues that Alan Jones’ photographic collection represents the view from the air that oceanographers translated into textual form in the Preliminary Report on Downwind and in the series of publications that emerged from the Downwind expedition research program. I establish a link between the perceptions oceanographers obtained from above the ocean, as documented in

Jones’ photographs, and their descriptions of geological relationships in official scientific texts. With that link as my foundation, the second sub-section digs deeper into the oceanographic gaze and examines islands as another alternative point from which scientists saw the Pacific. I argue that because expeditions incorporated island touring as a form of surveying, “primitive” bodies became a component of oceanography’s synoptic conception of the Pacific Island regions. Oceanographers claimed, like their anthropological counterparts, that island peoples held vital clues for understanding environmental health and the distribution of oceanic resources.

163 Bob Fisher asked Alan Jones to send me a copy of all images from Downwind. He sent them on a DVD in June of 2013. The collection consists of 414 images divided into two folders: Downwind I Final (175 photos) and Downwind II Final (239 photos.) He simultaneously submitted all of these photographs to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archive, but has indicated that he is uncertain of their fate in the archive due to administrative changes. He also granted me permission to freely use the images in my work. The photographs that appear in this dissertation represent the range of image content, but of course, cannot convey everything that the entire collection does. Part of my method here was in choosing an appropriate sub-set of images that tell the larger story captured by the entire set.

108 During the 1950s, oceanographers were in the midst of a process of discovery. Interested in uncovering how oceanic phenomena related to one another, they debated whether the relative motion of plate tectonics could account for the wide range of oceanographic observations. Research took information about the present state of geological features and extrapolated a historical narrative for the development of the world under the sea across deep time. As they investigated any one component of the ocean, scientists looked for the ways in which that unit related to, differed from, or extended into other juxtaposed features. Oceanographers thought about individual features of the

Pacific Basin, the Basin as a whole, its adjacent mainland structures, and the entire system of oceans on Earth in terms of relationships involving similarity, difference, and juxtaposition.

A contradiction exists between what has been said about oceanographic practice and what was actually done during the entire process of any one expedition.164 Bruno Latour made this sort of framework famous in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). In this text, Latour worked to find his way out of the nature-culture divide that he sees as tightly linked to concepts of modernity. He highlighted a great difference between what moderns have said and what they have actually done.

That is, all modern thinkers revel in their ability to draw distinctions between nature and culture, thus allowing them to marginalize “others” that are not able to do the same. These “others” go by many names, such as “primitives” or “premoderns.” Latour inspired my approach because I want to draw specifically from his attention to the practices of the modern oceanographic world that inherently intertwine the natural and the social while discourses of the modern world claim a separation between them. Latour showed inconsistencies between what societies articulate and what they do not. In oceanography, sharp differences existed between how scientists valuated expedition

164 As this chapter develops, I will make a few more links to Latour’s work with more specific attention to the role of “primitives” in oceanographic practice.

109 activities, with the primary focus being data acquisition from the deck of ships, and how journeys to sea actually unfolded in other locations, such as airplanes and islands.

It is clear that the end of WWII brought both a heightened interest in oceanic work and availability of the ocean going ships.165 The path to expand oceanography came very tightly tied to military money and agendas. When explaining their research in public and professional arenas, oceanographers focused on their work as a process of sampling, measuring, and analysis. They highlighted their field of science as a kind of revolutionary investigation of the Pacific Ocean. In the

1950s, oceanographers saw access to ex-military WWII open ocean research vessels as fundamentally transformative to their field because it allowed them to travel regularly out onto the ocean and gather data about the environment that was the object of inquiry.166 In much of their professional and public discourse, learning more about the Pacific meant fashioning research agendas that were compliant with the postwar wave of Big Science. Quantified parameters like temperature, salinity, and the composition of the sea floor at specific oceanic points, called

“stations,” single points on the globe defined by latitude and longitude coordinates, emerged as primary components of this discourse.

As much as oceanographers collected and analyzed vast amounts of data in this era of Big

Science, quantifiable information was not the only way these scientists came to understand their object of inquiry, and I argue that we should not automatically assume it was the most important.

Oceanographers in Scripps’ era of Sea Search focused heavily on comparative analyses. They paid attention to alikeness and dissimilarity between features that occurred across the ocean region in order to explain how individual features related to one another. For instance, they came to

165 A point agreed upon by every history of oceanography I have seen regarding this period. For a specific discussion of this proliferation see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, pp. 10-31, 40-41, 66, 76, and 78 (Downwind specifically on 78) among other pages. Also see this dissertation Chapter 3 Ship: Vibrant Malfunction. 166 Prior to 1947, for example, Scripps only had access to one ship, which was a borrowed private sailboat, E. W. Scripps.

110 understand the geology off the coast of South America in large part by comparing similarities and differences between Chile and Peru’s sediment and seafloor crust.

Time spent looking down on neighboring mainland areas from airplanes and walking around islands allowed oceanographers to account for aspects of the region that were not accessible from the decks of ships. A view of the land from the air allowed oceanographers to visualize how island formations flowed into underwater peaks, construct analogies between geological layering on land versus under the ocean, and consider if deep-sea mountain structures extended under continents.

Foot-surveys on islands put oceanographers in contact with indigenous Pacific Island peoples.

Scientists incorporated these casual cross-cultural exchanges into their professional knowledge base, which they used to piece together a general understanding of environmental health and resources that included supposedly “primitive” exotic island peoples as specimens alongside the other flora and fauna. This chapter explains how travel on airplanes and walking around islands were not tangential to oceanographic research. These activities supplemented the work conducted from the decks of ships and provided scientists means to acquire alternative vantage points and make environmental health and distribution of resources legible by comparison rather than quantification.

Seeing the Pacific from Clipper Mohawk

Valparaíso, Chile marked the halfway point of Downwind and the stopover where major staff changeovers occurred. Oceanographers scheduled for the second half of the journey from

Valparaíso back to San Diego travelled together by plane to Chile. As Bob Norris’ diary indicates, he flew to South America with Scripps geologist Russell Raitt. These men knew each other before the expedition brought them together, and as they made their way in groups of two or three by air they passed the time discussing what they saw and getting to know one another even better.

Raitt was a geophysicist who had specialized in seismic-reflection studies of the Pacific basin since 1935, when he and his college buddies created an oil-prospecting company shortly after

111 graduation. In 1941 he secured a position in San Diego with the University of California’s Division of War Research. Thereafter, Raitt was able to extend his work studying the underwater geology of the Pacific beyond Los Angeles, where his company originated.

Most of his early work involved reflecting ultrasonic waves off of the bottom of the ocean to determine sea floor topography. By the end of the decade, Raitt began developing his own methods for creating sound. He figured out that the sound generated by detonating explosives could penetrate the sea floor and then be measured after those sound waves bounced back to the surface.

He came up with a process where two ships worked in tandem at sea. The first ship, the shooting vessel, detonated the explosives. The second ship, the receiving vessel, monitored and recorded sound waves. With this method, Raitt extended his geo-prospecting work in order to determine the structure and composition of the earth’s crust below the sea floor. Raitt first officially implemented his technique in 1950 on the Midpac expedition, and over the course of the 1950s he refined his method to map the structural elements of the Pacific basin. This work inspired a major component of Downwind research.167 The second half of the expedition, from Valparaíso to San Diego, was almost entirely dedicated to Raitt’s seismic profiles, and the first leg of the journey completed dozens of profiles as well.

Bob Norris came to travel with Downwind as an observer, but ended up co-authoring a journal article from his participation.168 Henry Menard, expedition organizer and leader of the first half of the expedition, invited him as a fellow colleague from another UC campus. But Norris was not an institutional outsider per se. He had earned his doctorate in 1951 from Scripps under the

167 Robert L. Fisher, George G. Shor, and Fred N. Speiss, “Russell Watson Raitt, Geosciences: San Diego,” University of California: In Memorium, 1996. Note that Raitt was not the only one to modify techniques in explosion seismology. Thomas D. Cornell explains Merle Tuve’s involvement in technique development after WWII as well as how seismology existed as a field of study in the 19th century in, “Merle A. Tuve’s Post-War Geophysics: Early Explosion Seismology,” in Gregory Good, ed., The Earth, The Heavens, and The Carnegie Institute of Washington, Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union (1994): 185-214. 168 Robert L. Fisher and Robert M. Norris, “Bathymetry and Geology of Sala y Gomez, Southeast Pacfic,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71, no. 3 (April, 1960): 497-502.

112 prominent marine geologist Francis P. Shepard. Norris specialized in Quaternary geology and spent his efforts trying to understand shoreline sand dunes and erosion. He approached his research through experience and defined himself as a field investigator. As a professor he regularly took his students out into the field on day trips so that they could experience their objects of inquiry. Many of his students came away from these opportunities greatly inspired to pursue careers involving field research. One such student was Bob Ballard, who would go on to be part of an expedition that located the Titanic in 1985.169

Robert L. Fisher and Norris Rakestraw also travelled on the second half of the expedition and spent much of their time with Raitt and Norris. Fisher had defended his doctoral dissertation a few months before Downwind began, and like Bob Norris he had worked under Francis P. Shepard.

Regardless of his relatively junior status, he acted as expedition leader from Valparaíso back to San

Diego. For his part in conducting research, Fisher worked on Downwind as part of Raitt’s seismic refraction team, and his real passion was the deep ocean trenches. Rakestraw was an established marine chemist who had previously worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He came to Scripps in 1946 already an established scientist. He was so trusted by Scripps administrators that when Roger Revelle became acting director in 1950, Rakestraw covered the directorship for four months while Revelle went out on the Midpac expedition with Raitt.

Although Norris worked at another institution, he had not been gone long enough to alter his standing within the Scripps community. He was well known and well respected as a core geologist. Menard had every confidence that Fisher could be an effective scientific leader on the expedition. These men – Norris, Fisher, Raitt, and Rakestraw – made up the core group of senior scientists on the second half of Downwind.

169 Arthur Gibbs Sylvester, “Memorial to Robert M. Norris,” Geological Society of America Memorials 42, May 2013.

113 The ships left port in Valparaíso on the 28th of December, yet their scientific journey through the Pacific region had already begun. Valparaíso marked the halfway point of the expedition, and major changeovers in staff occurred. Since Norris, Fisher, Raitt, and Rakestraw had not been travelling on the previous legs of the expedition, they flew by plane to meet the ships in

Valparaíso.

Image 3: Airplane propeller travelling to Downwind over Guatemala. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use granted by Alan Jones. The Jet Age with long-range turbine engines had not yet quite set in. Air travel from North to South America utilized piston powered propeller aircraft, especially the Douglas Aircraft

Company airliner series, and required multiple stops for refueling and plane changes. The men stopped in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru before reaching their final destination in Chile.

Image 4: Panagra DC-6 [named Clipper Mohawk] unloading in San Salvador. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use granted by Alan Jones.

114 Many of Jones’ photo document the aircraft they flew on, such as the one in Image 3, a DC-6 named Clipper Mohawk. The various layovers allowed them to spend several nights touring various cities where they awaited their next flight in the morning. In these places, the men took special notice of the land-based geology around them.

Image 5: Volcano at Atitlan, Guatemala. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use granted by Alan Jones. That part of their trip by plane allowed these men to take detailed accounts of the geological structures from southern California, through central America, and down into Peru and Chile. From their seats aboard a series of old piston-powered military transport DC-4 and DC-6 airliners, Fisher and Jones had a new view of the coastal Americas. They made detailed recordings of these experiences, primarily with photographs, although Norris also wrote about his journey via airplane in his diary. Oceanographers observed the coastal regions from the air as they travelled from

California to South America, which provided them an additional perspective on what lay adjacent to the Pacific Ocean itself.170

Because he was the expedition leader for the second half of Downwind and had to make many preliminary preparations, Bob Fisher made his way to South America before Norris and Raitt.

He was in Valparaíso awaiting Horizon and Baird’s arrival from the open ocean on December 21st.

And he had just completed his own air and land-based tour on the trip down. Fisher had a

170 Proximity is a common for of evidence across many fields of science. For instance, in the context of what he calls “border biology” in the 1930s and 1940s, Robert Kohler describes proximity as a form of evidence for phylogenetic closeness. Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes, 225.

115 companion as well, Scripps engineer Alan Jones. Fisher and Jones flew a similar set of flights as

Norris and Raitt, but they made an additional stop to allow for exploration of ancient ruins and contemporary people.

Image 6: Robert Fisher with child at Saksaywaman, Cusco, Peru. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

Image 7: Lake Nicaragua. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. From the air, they photographed a wide array of mountains, rivers, sunsets, open country spaces, volcanoes, lakes, rainforests, islands, coastal dunes, gorges, peaks, ponds, summits, and geological flows. As they travelled through the region, oceanographers were able to view land-based geological structures that existed separate from seawater and adjacent to it.

116

Image 8: Coastal dunes near Chancayao, Peru. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. They treated these as the same kinds of structures they looked for under the ocean, which they could not experience directly with any of their own bodily senses.

Image 9: Transition to Andean Peaks. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. It is important to remember when thinking historically about this scientific work that the

1950s were a time of ocean discovery. In a broad sense, this decade saw the uncovering of several pieces of evidence toward proving plate tectonic theory. While many scientists participated in debates regarding the theory at the time, it was not until the early 1960s, at least, that the idea of seafloor spreading gained serious momentum and the under seawater surface of the globe became a coherent and identifiable object of scientific inquiry in its own right.171 The language scientists used

171 For more detail on the development of the history of plate tectonics see, Naomi Oreskes, ed., Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, New York: Westview Press, 2003, especially Naomi Oreskes, Chapter 1 “From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics,” 3-27.

117 indicated the existence of the Earth’s oceans as an interlocking system of regional oceans, but there was no confirmed explanation of how those systems, plate tectonics or otherwise, might relate systematically to one another.172

Scripps Director Roger Revelle often referred to this region as the scientifically least well- known area of the world.173 In discussing the IGY to the Associated Press in 1955, Revelle said that even though people had lived on earth for more than a million years, it was only within the last few moments of man’s life on earth that they had come to understand where they lived. He said that oceanographers were “like children exploring a new home in a new neighborhood.”174 Less than four months later, Revelle told the US House of Representatives that the problem of knowing practically nothing about the Pacific would be remedied during the IGY through recently developed scientific methods from the decks of ships.175 He went on to outline those methods and how they related to specific research questions. While he often called the Pacific by name, his primary concern was to describe the ways in which oceanic components would become more clearly understood through specific forms of sampling and measuring.

The journal publications written by Downwind scientists with the expedition’s data and published throughout the 1960s told essentially the same story.176 These articles described the first

172 Oreskes explains how “a synthetic, quantitative theory” of the global oceans was established in 1967-1968. Ibid., 27. 173 For example see Roger Revelle, 12 October 1957 IGY Downwind Press Release, SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 10 Expedition Downwind, pg. 1. 174 Roger Revelle, “An Address by Professor Roger Revelle…to the 22nd Annual Meeting Associated Press Managing Editors Association, November 17, 1955, SIO Roger Revelle Papers, 1910-2009, Box 4, Folder 37 “Oceans and the Earth talk,” pg. 5. 175 There are many examples of Revelle making these sorts of advertisements for Scripps’ participation in the IGY. One particularly thorough account of measuring techniques is “Statement by Dr. Roger R. Revelle…before the Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Independent Offices U. S. House of Representatives,” given January 1956, SIO Non-SIO Series, Box 75, Folder 23: IGY Statements House of Representatives Committee. 176 Edward Brinton, “The Distribution of Pacific Euphauslids,” Bulletin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1962; Robert L. Fisher and Robert M. Norris, “Bathymetry and Geology of Sala y Gomez Southeast Pacific,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71 (April 1960): 497-502; Robert L. Fisher and Russell Raitt, “Topography and Structure of the Peru-Chile Trench,” Deep Sea Research 9 (1962): 423-443; H. W. Menard, “Consolidated Slabs of the Floor of the Eastern Pacific,” Deep Sea Research 7 (1960): 35-41; H. W. Menard, “Geology of the Pacific Sea,” Experientia 15, no. 6 (1960): 205-213; H. W. Menard, Marine Geology of the Pacific, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964; H. W. Menard, “The East

118 systematic survey of Sala y Gomez Island, the geomorphology of the East Pacific Rise, characteristics of seafloor fractures and other phenomena, the presence of manganese nodules and other rock forms at the bottom of the ocean, concentrations of carbon dioxide near the sea surface, and geographically specific flows of heat through the sea floor. On the surface, the methodologies in these publications attend to the ways in which direct measurement, systematic surveying, sampling and measuring at seismic stations, temperature gradient measurements in sediment, measurements of sound waves bounced off the sea bottom, and photographs of the sea floor produced quantifiable data which oceanographers then interpreted in order to describe oceanic components more fully.

These articles, however, contain many references to the other ways in which oceanographers gathered information about the Pacific.

Just two years before Downwind, expedition leader Henry W. Menard published an article in

Scientific American in which he explained that oceanographic discoveries were almost always

“predicted before the exploring vessel left the dock.”177 He went on to explain that scientists often intuited what was unknown from other phenomena that were known. A cliff off of Cape

Mendocino in northern California, for example, led scientists to predict another similar ridge in the region. In this same area, oceanographers also made analogies between geological mountains underwater and similar peaks found on land in order to look for the western extent of a range in a smaller area of inquiry. Menard used things he understood clearly on land to visualize what was unclear under the ocean:

Pacific Rise,” Scientific American 205, no. 6 (Dec., 1961): 52-61; H. W. Menard, “The East Pacific Rise,” Science 132, no. 3441 (Dec. 9, 1960): 1737-1746; H. W. Menard and C. Shipek, “Surface Concentrations of Manganese Nodules,” Nature 182 (1958): 1156-1158; R. W. Raitt, “Geophysics of the South Pacific,” in Hugh Odishaw, ed., Geophysics of the South Pacific, MIT Press, 1964; William R. Reidel, “Oligocene and Lower Miocene radiolarian in tropical Pacific sediments,” Micropaleontology 5, no. 3 (July 1959): 285-302; Carl Shipek, “Photographic Study of Some Deep-Sea Floor Environments,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71 (July 1960): 1067-1074; R. Von Herzen, “Heat-Flow Values from the South Eastern Pacific, Nature 183 (March 28, 1959): 882-883. 177 Henry W. Menard, “Fractures in the Pacific Floor,” Scientific American, (1955): 36-41.

119 Although features of this scale do not exist on dry land, we can visualize the Mendocino Escarpment in terms of the Sierra Nevada in California. Imagine that the whole Sierra Nevada is lifted bodily, turned so that its steep side is on the south, and submerged two miles. Multiply its length by four and you have the Mendocino Escarpment. South of the Escarpment are parallel ridges and troughs resembling the Panamint Range and Death Valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. North of the great submarine ride the sea floor for hundreds of thousands of square miles is about half a mile higher than the floor to the south. There is an analogous difference in the elevation east and west of the Sierra Nevada.178

His publication continued on to establish similar associations between several other geological features and attributed historical formation to equivalent natural forces at sea and on the land.

The publications from Downwind similarly called out relationships, similarities, differences, and made analogies between that which was under the ocean and the kinds of structures Jones documented in his photographs from the air. Fisher and Norris established a geological relationship amongst Sala y Gomez, Easter Island, and the East Pacific Rise (EPR). 179 They examined interconnections between geological structures and ocean swells off of the islet Sala y Gomez with those off of mainland Southern Chile. Oceanographers also investigated whether the EPR extended in geology and heat flow underneath continental North America,180 linked the San Andreas Fault to mainland California,181 examined how different zones interacted with one another,182 pondered the extent to which heat flow and the crest of the EPR passed through the western United States,183 and indicated how individual features of the Pacific often reflected “similar patterns in continental regions.”184 In their scientific publications, oceanographers repeatedly made associations between the oceanic and mainland structures. Specifically related to the EPR, Menard also explained:

178 Ibid, 36. 179 Robert L. Fisher and Robert M. Norris, “Bathymetry and Geology of Sala y Gomez Southeast Pacific,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71 (April 1960): 180 Henry W. Menard, “Fractures in the Pacific Floor,” Scientific American (1955): 36-41. 181 Ibid., p. 40. 182 Ibid., throughout the article. 183 H. W. Menard, “The East Pacific Rise,” Science 132, no. 3441 (Dec. 9, 1960): p. 1745. 184 Quote from R. Von Herzen, “Heat-Flow Values from the South Eastern Pacific, Nature 183 (March 28, 1959): 882- 883., p. 883. H. W. Menard, “Consolidated Slabs of the Floor of the Eastern Pacific,” Deep Sea Research 7 (1960): 35-41;

120 Although no single line of evidence is wholly conclusive, the rise and fractures probably are genetically related…the crest appears to pass under western North America…[and] The [EPR] is only one part of a world-girdling oceanic mountain system, and one may wonder whether the obvious implication of a single origin is correct.

Scientists looked for possible connections between different oceanic phenomena, but also spent significant energy trying to figure out how local and global land-based features they could view with their own eyes enmeshed with what their instruments detected under the sea.

When Norris with Raitt and Fisher with Jones travelled to their South American destination to meet Downwind, they took notice of the coast of Chile and Peru and out further toward Easter

Island. Alan Jones’ photograph collection exemplifies what these scientists saw.

Image 10: Chilean central coast. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Even though they were not using official instrumentation to sample and measure the ocean, air and island travel provided the opportunity to gather spatial and ecological information about the region first-hand. Oceanographers used circumstantial evidence from informal surveys as supplemental information that worked alongside the quantified data.185

H. W. Menard, “Geology of the Pacific Sea,” Experientia 15, no. 6 (1960): 205-213; H. W. Menard, Marine Geology of the Pacific, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964; H. W. Menard, “The East Pacific Rise,” Scientific American 205, no. 6 (Dec., 1961): 52-61; H. W. Menard, “The East Pacific Rise,” Science 132, no. 3441 (Dec. 9, 1960): 1737-1746; H. W. Menard and C. Shipek, “Surface Concentrations of Manganese Nodules,” Nature 182 (1958): 1156-1158; Carl Shipek, “Photographic Study of Some Deep-Sea Floor Environments,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71 (July 1960): 1067-1074. 185 See H. W. Menard, “The East Pacific Rise,” Scientific American 205, no. 6 (Dec., 1961): 52-61, and H. W. Menard, “The Deep-Ocean Floor,” Scientific American (1969).

121

Image 11: Guano Islands, central coast, Chile. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. While they travelled, the scientists kept their senses tuned into everything around them. In his diary,

Norris paid attention to the desert as an ecological zone that included barchans dunes. He noted colors in the environment and how changing weather patterns inhibited his ability to examine features of the coastline and the Andean peaks. Norris’ text recorded his view of resource distributions, exposed bedding and faulting, transitions in species allocation, the transformation of mountains into nitrate plains, river trajectory, and the increasing frequency of valleys that he witnessed as he moved through the region. He even compared the coastlines of Chile to those of

California.186

Image 12: Peak from 22,000 foot altitude (unpressurized). Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. The objects of their oceanographic investigations, such as the Nasca Ridge, were covered by thousands of feet of water and required indirect measuring techniques to access. From the air,

186 See Bob Norris’ diary in Prologue to Chapter 2, December 26.

122 however, proximate if not potentially analogous structures, formations, and relationships were readily available in plain sight. On airplanes, oceanographers made comparisons between local areas, such as Chile and Peru, that showed similarities and differences in structures found far apart from one another but related because they underwent similar processes of formation.187 These connections between the geology of mainland Chile and Peru extended to the underwater environment off of their coasts.188

Robert Kohler has pointed out that modern scientific field practices depend greatly on the ability to read spatial evidence, but historians have not looked at the specific ways in which oceanographers read the Pacific region. The arrangement of spatial elements in environments,

Kohler argues, allows knowledge makers to understand relationships between different things in those environments.189 During Downwind, engineer Alan Jones captured the Islas Hormigas from two different vantage points. First, he photographed the area from a commercial airplane, which provided a spatial map of the islands present and how they related to one another in distance.

Image 13: Islas Hormigas off Callao, Peru. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

187 Similarly, Robert Kohler explains how early biologists used comparison to develop causal relationships, and they gathered their evidence simply by walking around in their environment of study. Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes, 227. 188 These sorts of comparisons between Chile and Peru’s underwater environment can be found all throughout the Preliminary Report on Downwind “Preliminary Reports” section. 189 Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes (2002): 212-213. Kohler’s goal is to understand how field biologists in the 1930s and 1940s reconstructed the processes that made the places and biota they studied.

123 Jones also photographed the islands from the ship. From that point of view oceanographers took note of the strength of the Peru current around the Islas.190 In addition to their shipboard impressions made by sailing around the area, scientists used oceanographic instruments to determine the deep-scattering layer, four geological strata, and discrete echoes received off of the seafloor.191

These images captured the exact structures that turned out in scientific texts and publications because oceanographers used airplane travel as a way to supplement the understanding of the Pacific gained through quantified measurements of the deep-sea.192

Image 14: Islas Hormigas off Callao, Peru. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. For oceanographers, travelling by airplane allowed them to observe the Pacific with an alternative perspective.193 Seeing from above allowed them to imagine and ponder relationships based on a different kind of evidence – visual experience – when available technology required their measuring and sampling to focus on extracting information about individual components of the sea.

190 The photo shows the ship making its way through the current that was under study and the Preliminary Report on Downwind discusses three stations (sites of sampling and measuring) completed, which provided evidence for deep- scattering layers, four strata, and discrete echoes. 191 Preliminary Report on Downwind, 10. 192 Fisher and Norris make explicit the way Sala y Gomez island looked differently from the ship versus while standing on the islet. Robert L. Fisher and Robert M. Norris, “Bathymetry and Geology of Sala y Gomez, Southeast Pacfic,” Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 71, no. 3 (April, 1960): 497-502. 193 Environmental history also grapples with the issues that have emerged as different groups read environments in order to understand them. For instance, Tina Loo fleshes out an example from British Columbia in which politicians and entrepreneurs used a bird’s eye view, literally seeing the region from mountaintop viewpoints, to envision the Peace River system as part of an industrial development plan. Loo argues that high modernists schematic picture of the river system allowed them to reduce a natural ecosystem to quantifiable parameters, such as elevation and megawatt-hours, in order to transform the environment into a power producing system of dams, roads, highways, bridges, and communities.

124 It gave them visual access to the scale of the region in a way not available on the ships. From their cramped chairs in airplanes, oceanographers conducted airborne visual analysis of geological phenomenon from the same region and formed on the same geologic scale as what lay beneath the sea. And importantly, they discussed what they saw with their fellow oceanographer travel companions. Flying also provided concentrated time with little distraction for scientific discourse to emerge in small groups.

These traveling methods turned scientific practices were commonplace in Scripps’ era of Sea

Search. With only one or two exceptions on the major expeditions in this period, senior scientists – those who used the expeditions to gather evidence and publish professional scientific journal articles and disseminate their findings in professional and public arenas – did not travel on the entire journey from start to finish. Rather, they chose one portion of the expedition track to go by ship and made the remainder of their journey across the Pacific via commercial airlines. Their intentions stemmed from a practical need to travel via airplane to meet the ships. As Norris’ diary explains, oceanographers enjoyed this time and consciously saw it as an opportunity to tour far away places.

In practice, however, an unconscious way of seeing the Pacific crystallized. Oceanographers used commercial airplanes, such as the DC-6 called “Clipper Mohawk” and other planes that Alan Jones captured repeatedly in his photographs, as oceanographic observational instruments. The airplanes were a second type of vehicle, in addition to open-ocean research vessels, that moved oceanographer bodies through the region that was their focus of study.194

Kohler calls these sorts of practices aimed at understanding and interpreting spatial arrangements “field craft,” and he goes on to add that sometimes evidence gathered in this manner

194 Open ocean research vessels held a significant place in the cold war program aimed at fostering international cooperation. The practices of making valuable observations and personally experiencing the coastal region from airplanes got shuffled to the sidelines of professional oceanography when discussing scientific methodology. This happened within the community of oceanographers, and it has proliferated in historical accounts of this period. However, the frequency of these opportunities for oceanographers to observe the Pacific region from an airplane and the repeated urge to document these experiences attest to the vitality of air travel within oceanographic practice.

125 lends to speculation and other times to incredibly valuable information for understanding environments. While Kohler’s work centers on biology, I argue that the same is true for oceanography. These planes took oceanographers up to the air and across the Pacific coastal regions where they viewed the massiveness of geological structures, noted geomorphic transitions from land to water and valley to peak, and experienced these transitions at the speed of flight travel, much faster than both land-based and oceanic travel options. 195

Kohler’s biologists claimed the right to knowledge about natural systems based on the practice of walking around inside those environments and observing shape, form, quantity, and activities of certain significant components.196 As they flew, oceanographers experienced changes to the landscape and intersecting geological structures, which provided several new ways to understand the region. These interactions occurred on a time scale much faster than what was possible as they sailed more slowly across the surface of the ocean, sometimes separated from their object of inquiry by miles of seawater.

When considered together, Alan Jones’ photographs, Bob Norris’ diary, the Preliminary

Report on Downwind, and the publications that emerged from this expedition demonstrate that seeing the Pacific from alternative viewpoints provided oceanographers with crucial evidence toward making the Pacific legible. Airplanes turned the Pacific into a visually accessible object that could be apprehended over the course of a forty-eight hour process of flying and landing. The Pacific was a

195 For another example of how viewpoint, the body, and the experience of time affected knowledge creation and environmental engineering (pp. 900 & 905 for the value of a “bird’s eye view”) (pp. 906 for use of the body in understanding change) (pp. 910 for difference in time) see Tina Loo, “Disturbing the Peace: Environmental Change and the Scales of Justice on a Northern River, Environmental History 12, no. 4, Special Issue on Canada (Oct. 2007): 895-919. Annemarie Mol works to shift scholarly perspectives away from observers’ eyes and to the practitioner’s hands, The Body Multiple, 152. This case of the oceanographers involves “seeing” with the eyes, however being on the airplane allows the act of viewing to morph into a much more complex practice involving the combination of not just sight, but a bird’s eye view, and the relatively quick passing of time as the plane travels. While at the surface I am talking about what oceanographers saw, on a deeper level I am calling attention to the impact of the fact that their entire bodies experienced the Pacific as a region by flying over it. 196 For instance see Robert Kohler, “Chapter 8 Border Practices,” in Robert Kohler Landscapes and Labscapes, pp. 252- 292, especially p. 256.

126 region of large-scale geological structures both above and below the surface of the sea – from an airplane, under the scrutiny of the oceanographic eye, over the period of travel time set by commercial airlines across North and South America. From the air, oceanographers attuned themselves visually to land-based geological structures and pondered the natural history of the region adjacent to their primary object of inquiry. The scientists contextualized the Pacific as a whole and made comparisons between locations based on similarities and differences that might reveal clues about how the region formed and changed over time. Touring the region by air provided information about relationships between geological structures that came to supplement quantified data from the deep ocean for which oceanographers had very little visual access.

The Moonlight Tiki Sneaking Society

As part of his oral history, the interviewer asked Scripps research geologist (and

Downwind’s expedition leader from Valparaíso to San Diego) Robert Fisher how he became involved in oceanography. Fisher replied, “I mean, the flip answer was that as a boy I was a stamp collector of worldwide stamps, and that, of course, gave me an interest in travel.” He continued,

“…the schools I attended, and my father, encouraged me very much to discuss and to look at scientific-type things.”197 The personal interests that led Fisher to oceanography represent a much broader tradition in which a private desire to collect and tour the world underlined involvement in science at sea. Being on an expedition was an act of exotic gathering. Men brought new, exciting, and unfamiliar data and scientific specimens on board in massive numbers. On Downwind, water, air, fossils, rocks, clay, fish, squid, shark teeth, and corals were brought onboard alongside shell necklaces and Easter Island carvings. I acknowledge that the scientists themselves in general believed there to be a distinction between scientific and personal collecting. I argue, however, that

197 Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of Robert Fisher,” 17 January, 2007, p. 6.

127 while constructing a natural history for the Pacific, oceanographers accumulated shell necklaces and island carvings as part of the process of reconciling the presence of indigenous Pacific Island peoples into their understanding of the region as a whole. Below I discuss a pivotal event where the quest to bring an island statue back from Easter Island to Scripps signaled scientific accounting for

“primitive” peoples as a more pristine human form whose societies held clues to deeper understandings of environmental health and resources in the Pacific. Expeditions, which put oceanographers in direct contact with island peoples, intertwined “primitive” bodies into the overall synoptic conception of the Pacific Island region.

From the air, oceanographers looked for ecological and geological clues. On islands, they were actually able, in a way, to walk around inside their object of study where they encountered not only ocean water patterns, animals, and plants, but also supposedly “primitive” peoples.

Image 15: Cap Roggeveen, Easter Island from Baird. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Where their attention turned when their feet hit island dirt reveals how dabbling in ethnographic observations of the region provided another layer to their understanding of the Pacific Ocean environment.

In the atomic era, human biologists from other institutions travelled the same oceanic environment as Scripps oceanographers in search of knowledge about primitive peoples. These biologists came to believe that the bodies of “primitives” held the answers to how modern society could survive the increasing risks associated with the dangers of industrialization and development.

128 In order to gather this information, they travelled the Pacific collecting human samples, especially blood, from the bodies of islanders. Specifically, “primitives” represented human baselines: scientifically naïve bodies against which the modern body could be compared. Biologists hoped to look into the deep past by collecting from and examining human populations thought to be geographically isolated and primitive.198

Scripps oceanographers also sought to look into the deep past of the Pacific. Their research sampled, measured, and surveyed current states of geological and oceanic structures, waters, and biota in order to determine relationships as evidence for a much longer and synoptic natural history of the ocean. Biologists used accessible humans they believed provided clues into the deep past while oceanographers used accessible oceanic phenomena.199

At first glance this may seem odd. Why analyze Polynesian people and the various measured components of the sea as objects of scientific inquiry across two entirely separate fields of science? I bring these together because while conducting research on Pacific water chemistry, geology, and biota, oceanographers also claimed that they conducted research on the “native” human beings within their object of study. Although their public image primarily acknowledged geological, chemical, and biological methods, when at sea oceanographers extended their practices to include scientific observations, what they literally referred to as “ethnology,” of island inhabitants.

198 Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice,” dissertation (2012). 199 That is, oceanic phenomena newly accessible since WWII and the introduction of multiple ocean-going vessels that provided a platform from which scientists could measure the deep sea.

129

Image 16: Walking tour through Easter Island farm. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. As Bob Fisher reported back to Director Revelle just after leaving Easter Island on the Downwind expedition:

Both ships arrived Easter Sunday morning. Departed Monday evening. In best tradition Scripps moonlight tiki sneaking society covered other side island like locusts. Traveled on foot, by borrowed jeep, and groan, on horseback. Examined pictographs, statues, craters, made ethnological studies. Warmly welcomed by Governor Dorian Dash Nicolet, his aide Lt. Dabelli, also Father Sebastian Englert despite spate tourists already this year. SIO seismologists helped put seismograph back in operation. Intrepid SIO divers checked Peralta installation long period wave recorder, found very satisfactory. Hanga Roa carvers up all night but successfully glutted market. All old some new clothes aboard traded.200

This message from Downwind expedition leader to Scripps Director is particularly revealing in that it demonstrates an interest in ethnological observations on humans and points to the rich array of ways oceanographers experienced their object of study and therefore came to understand it by first, moving their own bodies in different ways throughout it and second, by encountering and investigating other bodies indigenous to it.

200 Bob Fisher, “Feb. 7, 1958, shipboard message to Revelle, SIO, Menard, Frautschy, Shor, Riedel, SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind. Folder contains a selection of telegraphs and letters.

130

Image 17: Robert Norris and women from Easter Island. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. The oceanographers toured the island to examine the ancient island relics and observe and record details about the living population. They met with the indigenous Governor Nicolet and his aide. Many of them met Father Englert, and Bob Norris had the opportunity to spend three hours alone with him discussing various topics, including details about indigenous Pacific peoples.

Image 18: Easter Island church of Father Sebastian Englert. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. What was the purpose of paying attention to island peoples while touring if their goals as stated in

IGY arenas, news releases, and later journal article publications were to characterize Pacific geology, deep water, and carbon dioxide concentrations? To begin answering that question, I offer Director

Revelle’s reasons for studying the deep ocean itself:

It is easy to give several practical reasons – one is that the deep currents may be of great importance in long-range weather forecasting…Second, fertility of the ocean depends upon the water exchange between the deeps and the surface; that is, the amounts of fish and other food we can harvest from the ocean are finally limited by the rate at which the ocean overturns and thereby fertilizes itself. In order to get a better estimate than we can make at present of what the potential food supply from the ocean is…we have to know about the deep currents. Third, the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy will

131 probably result in the production of unbelievable quantities of radioactive substances, and somehow these must be safely disposed of. One possible thing to do with them is to dump them into the deep sea. But we don’t really know [if currents might spread the waste out] because we don’t know how fast the deep waters move or how they mix with the waters near the surface…we can’t get much further with [the history of the earth] until we find out more about that part of the earth that is covered by the ocean. At present we know less about it than we do about the surface of the moon.201

At the heart of Revelle’s justification for oceanic studies was risk to human society. In fact, Revelle often replicated that message of oceanography’s ability to help the world manage risks to society from modern environmental degradation. His address above moved on to specify that by knowing more about ocean environments humanity could ensure a bright future in which weather would be pre-determined rather than periodically devastating, marine food resources could be managed so as never to overextend natural supplies, and perhaps, the deep oceans could solve one of the most terrifying environmental waste problems in human history, the disposal of radioactive nuclear materials. At stake in oceanography for Scripps via Revelle on the public stage was human survivability. That message significantly overlapped with biologists who studied “primitive” peoples of the region. Scientists in this era across many fields based research questions on the premise that bodies untouched by the modern world, so called primitives, could reveal a model for a better way of life.202 While oceanographers worked from that same assumption, the effort they expended to understand island peoples emerged out of their desire to characterize the ocean as a dynamic environmental system – the people who lived there historically were but one component of the complexity.

201 Roger Revelle, “The Oceans and the Earth – Oceanographic Program for the International Geophysical Year,” Tuesday morning, December 27, 1955, Session X6 – A.A.A.S., Symposium on the International Geophysical Year, SIO Non-SIO Series, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 87, Folder 35L: IGY US National Committee, July 10, 1957-Feb 5, 1958. Revelle originally made these statements 12 October 1957 in a press release regarding Downwind to the University of California. SIO Subject Files AC 6, Box 23, Folder 10: Expedition Downwind. 202 See Joanna Radin’s dissertation Life on Ice for a thorough discussion of biological anthropologist activities. One of the primary differences was that for biologists, the “primitive” humans were the objects of scientific inquiry and scientists collected human blood samples from those people. Oceanographers collected no human samples, but they did trade their clothing for wooden statues and other local items.

132

Image 19: Easter Island Ranch house. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. When she travelled on the 1952 Capricorn expedition, Russell Raitt’s wife, Helen, became enamored with the Tahitian way of life. She felt that their culture differed greatly from North

American standards and traditions.203 Yet, while they referred to their work as ethnology, oceanographers did not suffer under the delusion that they were anthropologists. They never actually sampled or studied the populations they encountered in any depth or with systematic methodology. One might argue that Helen Raitt with no scientific or anthropological training, not the oceanographers, conducted the most extensive investigations of Pacific Island peoples of anyone at Scripps in this period.204 Nevertheless, experiences on islands provided them with information about the Pacific that they did take back with them to their scientific work. Even when they were touring around various archipelagos, these men took note of their environment and analyzed the ways that the people living there came into contact with prominent flora and fauna.

When possible, oceanographers referenced others who studied the very places they visited. A little over six months before it was published, Thor Heyerdahl unexpectedly sent a copy of his manuscript AkuAku, recounting his 1956 expedition to Easter Island, to Director Roger Revelle.205

203 Helen Raitt, Exploring the Deep Pacific, New York: W. W. Norton (1956). Also see her biography for a more extensive description of her continuing work with the Tongan people, “Helen Raitt Biography,” SIO Archive online files: http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/Raitt_Helen_Biogr.pdf, accessed December 18, 2013. 204 For a brief but thorough introduction into Helen’s activities see her biography as made available by the SIO online archive: http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/Raitt_Helen_Biogr.pdf, accessed December 18, 2013. 205 Roger Revelle, “December 27, 1957 Letter to Thor Heyerdahl, Majorstuun 8 Oslo, Norway,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 11: Downwind.

133 Revelle passed it along to the last person travelling to meet Downwind in Valparaíso. Expedition participants viewed it before landing on Easter Island. Revelle and Downwind participants were ecstatic at the possibility of ethnographic observations based on Heyerdahl’s prior work. As they passed each day at sea getting closer to this rare opportunity to visit such a remote Pacific civilization, some of the men drafted a plan to obtain something from the island and take it back with them to Scripps. They weren’t interested in collecting blood samples as their human biological anthropologist counterparts did, and they weren’t interested in any one of their typically sampled oceanographic objects. The men came up with the idea that they would obtain one of the full-sized ancient Easter Island Moai statues and tow it some four thousand nautical miles back to California.

This episode is documented fairly well in Scripps’ archive.206 However there are a few pertinent details missing that have been graciously filled in for me by expedition leader Bob Fisher.

Fisher told me that the idea to take the statue originated from Horizon’s Navy ship captain, Marvin

Hopkins, who was not an oceanographer at all.207 Apparently, Hopkins planned to secretly anchor

Horizon just off of the island’s quarry on a night lit only by the moon, hence the phrase “moonlight tiki sneaking society.” He then would send a few men on land to tie a rope around the statue, blast the ship’s engines, and pull one of the statues off of the island into the sea where it could be towed all the way back to Scripps. There, the statue would be placed on display as a representation of

Scripps’ scientific endeavors in the Pacific.

Regardless of who came up with the idea, Scripps senior oceanographers, Downwind’s expedition leader Bob Fisher himself, and Director Roger Revelle rallied together to try to make it happen with the permission of the Chilean government. On January 16, 1958 while the expedition

206 For the most concentrated set of references see the series of correspondence regarding the statue throughout SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Folder 12: Downwind. 207 This is fairly consistent with the archival record that says “Horizon” was eager to get the 8-ton statue.

134 was underway, Revelle wrote to his contact Commandante Alberto Andrade Taraba at the

Departamento Navigacion e Hidrografía in Valparaíso, Chile:

Scripps greatly desires a symbol of the international scientific exploration of the deep Pacific during the IGY to adorn its campus. We can think of nothing more distinctive and symbolic of the Pacific than a giant statue from Easter Island. Our Downwind Expedition will visit Easter island about 28 January. Could we obtain permission to remove one statue at that time if feasible?208

Bob Fisher wired the following in a message to Revelle in the days prior, which caused Revelle to write his letter to Chile:

Horizon in particular enthusiastic obtain monument Easter Island for SIO. Project does fire imagination. Captain Horizon feels three days sufficient to accomplish. Has SIO definite permission from responsible Chilean officials to allow transfer. Otherwise might be sticky wicket. If project both practical and advisable and permission not yet requested, suggest you contact Chilean government. Would require three repeat three minimum days Easter. Advise.209

As they and their ships travelled across the Pacific, oceanographers decided that they wanted to acquire and display at Scripps a full-sized Moai. These statues average 13 feet in height and weigh an average of 13 tons. It is unclear why, but on the letter to Chile requesting permission to obtain a

Moai, someone, likely a secretary, wrote: “Dr. Revelle decided against this. Told Bill Menard 1/16

[on Jan. 16]. 8 Tons. Several Hundred.”210 Perhaps the logistics of traveling with a statue weighing several tons overshadowed the value of having such as statue on display. Perhaps the Chilean government’s response to the request was unfavorable.211

208 “Roger Revelle Letter to Commandante Alberto Andrade Taraba,” SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 11 “Downwind.” 209 “Wire NR 2 KIBR BAIRD DTG111603 2 Revelle SIO,” SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 11 “Downwind.” 210 Written in pencil on the letter: “Roger Revelle Letter to Commandante Alberto Andrade Taraba,” SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 11 “Downwind.” 211 Beyond the scope of this dissertation is this episode’s relation to a much longer history of collecting and raiding foreign and exotic lands, cultures, and artifacts, which in much more recent years has transformed into an ethic of permission and acknowledgement of nations’ and people’s rights to protect and control their own heritage. The people of Easter Island, still colonized by Chile, continue with these struggles to this day. Several reviewers of this dissertation commented that this episode in history overlaps significantly with issues of indigeneity and homosociality. I agree that these themes are strong, however, my goal in this project was something different. In order to take the stories and their material content from oceanography in this period seriously, I chose not to put my dissertation in dialogue with gender studies and histories of indigenous peoples and instead to weave scholarship on literature and science and things and

135

Image 20: Tour of Easter Island in Chilean military jeep. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Nonetheless, they imagined and described this eight-ton trophy as a symbol of “international scientific exploration.” It was supposed to make the journey from Easter Island to the La Jolla,

California campus where it likely would have remained permanently as a representation of Scripps’ work as conducted under the International Geophysical Year. However, the statue acquisition was not meant to represent collaboration with Chilean or other foreign scientists on the cold war stage as

“international” in the sense the phrase “international cooperation” and “International Geophysical

Year” typically signified. In this instance, it was a symbol of contact with and power over relics from ancient Polynesian culture and testament to Scripps’ power over knowledge created about the

Pacific basin.

The Moai back at Scripps would have represented the exotic world touched, smelled, tasted and essentially dominated by oceanography as it travelled through and created knowledge of the

Pacific basin. The appeal also lay in the fact that the statues were enormous pieces of rock.

objects into my methodology. Gender and the indigenous are fruitful possibilities, but they are for a different project than this one.

136

Image 21: Alan Jones and Moai on Easter Island. Photo Creator: Unknown photographer. Image from Alan Jones' personal collection. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. There would have been incredible adventure in the story of facing the high seas, obtaining such a foundational symbol of the Polynesian culture, and bringing it to Scripps to represent the kind of

Big Science oceanographers conducted. The plan was to drag it hanging in the water behind the ship with a single rope!

But the 8-ton statue never made it to Scripps. In its place, oceanographers returned with a

33-inch wooden “exact replica of the stone statues”212 that Bob Fisher traded for his freshly pressed trousers.

212 Horizon Captain Hopkins description of the statue sent to Director of Scripps’ Aquarium-Museum, March 12, 1958. SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 11 “Downwind.”

137

Image 22: 33-inch Moai carved in wood. Photo Creator: Unknown. Photo from personal collection of Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. In our conversations, Bob Fisher explained that the whole idea came about because the scientists wanted to obtain a wooden statue from Easter Island to present to Director Revelle upon

Downwind’s return to San Diego. Captain Hopkins thought it would be funny if they brought back a real Moai. But since Hopkins’ plan to get a full-sized one did not come to fruition, a competition ensued among the expedition members to get the next best thing: an authentic wooden statue.

As I said, oceanographers did not think they were practicing formal ethnology on these expeditions. They encountered what they considered to be “primitive” peoples, but they were never actually concerned with them as (human) objects of inquiry. Much of their interactions involved superficial acquaintances, informal photo documentation, sexual encounters,213 and trading for

213 A variety of archival sources allude to the admiration the men on Scripps ships had for women across the Pacific region. While I cannot be certain of the details of who engaged in what activity with whom, I do know that the medical doctors ordered medical supplies from Scripps’ Marine Facilities to be used onboard the ships during the expeditions. During Downwind, one of the doctors mildly complained to Director Revelle that someone involved in gathering these supplies from a list of requested items had deleted the condoms from the list. Because of this omission, the ship doctors became involved in treating various venereal diseases. There were four cases on Horizon and even more on Baird after leaving Tahiti. The doctor anticipated the transmission of disease and gave Penicillin tablets to both the Navy crew and scientists before and after visiting island destinations. Robert Bingham, Medical Director on the Downwind Expedition, “Letter to Director Roger Revelle, R/V/ Baird, at sea, Sat. Dec. 14, 1957,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind.

138 tourist items. In describing the Pacific Islander way of life, oceanographers often based their judgments about these cultures on fleeting engagements and misconstrued information.

Image 23: Navy crew meet people from Easter Island. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. For starters, the word “tiki” did not exist within the Rapa Nui language or culture. Thus,

“moonlight tiki-sneaking” was meant to be cute, but the phrase actually represented a complete mischaracterization of Rapa Nui people and culture.214 More seriously, the official Preliminary

Report on Downwind Expedition submitted to the IGY World Data Center compared the people of

Easter Island with those of Tahiti which the ships had encountered almost two and half months earlier. Remember, however, that the core group of oceanographers who went to Easter Island were not on the expedition at that time the ships stopped in Tahiti. Therefore, information gathered on

Tahiti about the “native” people was transferred from the first half to oceanographers on the second half of the expedition. Mixed together with descriptions of intertidal flora and fauna, wave activity, and conversations with Father Englert, Downwind’s Preliminary Report states that Easter Island people lived on the land and did not fish. The Report placed land-based Easter Islanders in contrast

214 From the Polynesian Lexicon Project accessed December 6, 2013: http://pollex.org.nz/entry/tiki.1/. Also at stake here is a bigger debate about the history of the decline of trees on Easter Island. If trees disappeared by the 19th century, it is likely true that the practice of carving wood grown on the island would have also been greatly diminished by the time Downwind reached the island. There is much debate among anthropologists regarding the environmental degradation of the island. I only briefly mention these issues here to point to another small layer in which Scripps scientists acted on the assumption that all Polynesian cultures produced wooden carved tiki statues when it is possible that by the 1950s, it was merely a tradition continued to appease tourists.

139 to Tahitians who “live on the sea.”215 It emphasized the fact that Easter Island people did not desire to fish because the waters around the island did not contain abundant sea life. The report continued:

One can sympathize with the obsession of the “Long Ears” with stone carving and the frustration of the “Short Ears” in this environment. It might be noted, however, that a fairly large school of tuna was observed in the vicinity of Sala y Gomez Island, two hundred miles east of Easter Island.216

While oceanographers characterized their work in public channels across the University of California system and within the IGY planning discourse as concerned with ocean geology, chemistry, and sea life, they reported back through official IGY channels what they learned from Heyerdahl’s book, conversations with Englert about the ancient history of Easter Island groups, the Long Ears and

Short Ears, and what they observed from their casual and sometimes very personal encounters with contemporary Rapa Nui people.

Recall from earlier in this chapter that Bob Fisher referred to this kind of work at sea as

“accounting expeditions.”217 Scripps oceanographers were actually continuing to construct their vision of the Pacific as an oceanic region by accounting for the presence of “native” humans because that region was the object of their study and the people there existed as one among many kinds of living species. The people of Easter Island were one component to be accounted for. To oceanographers, islanders were certainly a human species, but of a “primitive” kind more appropriately likened to other animal inhabitants of the Pacific than to modern humans. Bob Norris’ diary interpreted an animal-like character for the islanders as much as the Preliminary IGY report on

Downwind, which offered official analyses and conclusions about Pacific Island Peoples under

“Section G. Biological Reports. ” This section discusses the presence of plankton, fish, crustaceans, giant squid, ocean and land birds, pelagic gastropods, coelenterates, dragonflies, spiders, land snails,

215 Preliminary Report on Downwind, 48. 216 Ibid. 217 Robert L. Fisher, “Memorandum to Columbus O’D Iselin, Chairman, SCOR Indian Ocean Program Working Group,” September 2, 1959. SIO Russell Watson Raitt Papers, 1922-1996, Box 11, Folder 5 Indian Ocean Cruise, 1958.

140 barnacles, seaweed, sea urchins, cowries, and mollusks, and then without skipping a beat moved into the “abundant well-being of the ‘Pasquenses,’” the people of Easter Island.218

Oceanographers came to understand certain aspects of the people from Pacific islands, but their knowledge was always incredibly superficial and many times flat out wrong. They also misunderstood where the Rapa Nui people spent their time on Easter Island and why. In 1958, the island was under the strict control of the Chilean Navy, which confined the Rapa Nui indigenous population, at military gunpoint, to the port city Hanga Roa. Rapa Nui who lived through that period have said that in the 1950s Easter Island was run like a “concentration camp.” The Chilean military literally prohibited islanders from leaving the island, moving beyond the confines of Hanga

Roa, and using the ocean waters for anything, including fishing for food.219 Scripps oceanographers did not acknowledge these realities at all in their accounts of the island. For instance, their IGY report attributed their limited range of mobility and resource extraction to cultural preference and perhaps lack of fish to acquire. Bob Norris’ diary, while it discussed many aspects of the people he encountered, displayed no concept of the profound impact the Chilean military had on the Rapa Nui people at that time, even though he was picked up and escorted by military personnel who were unhappy with him walking for too long by himself through the Hanga Roa neighborhoods.

These details of oceanographic encounters with Easter Islanders and the Chilean government’s presence demonstrate that oceanographers used informal ethnographical encounters with Pacific Islanders to conduct superficial observations that led them to faulty conclusions about the way of life on islands and a lack of understanding of the national power structures involved in dominating indigenous populations across the region in this period. Even so, information they

218 Pasquenses is the Spanish name for the Easter Island people from the phrase, “Isla de Pascua,” meaning Easter Island. While I see the word spelled both “Pasquenses” as by Scripps scientists, more often I see it spelled “Pascuenses.” Preliminary Report on Downwind, 43-54. The squid they saw was the “jumbo” squid, Dosidicus gigas, not actually the “giant” squid, which has eight species in the family Architeuthis. The Preliminary Report is interesting in that is references the proper scientific name but uses the inappropriate common name. 219 Simon Romero, “Slow-Burning Challenge to Chile on Easter Island,” New York Times, Americas, October 6, 2012.

141 gathered about Pacific islanders did not have to be accurate or collected by professional anthropologists to be useful for oceanographic purposes. Oceanographers were well aware of the research of human biological anthropologists who worked from a similar premise that studying components of the Pacific world, a more untouched natural world, could provide answers to the uncertainty of modern life. Biologists believed that “primitive” bodies contained clues that would help scientists formulate solutions to increasingly troublesome human problems. Oceanographers worked from the belief that the Pacific was a more “primitive” environment that would also provide the same kinds of clues. Thus, oceanographers situated “primitive” peoples as one more living component of this more primitive and in Revelle’s words “almost entirely unknown” environment.

The point was not to actually understand Rapa Nui and other Pacific peoples. However that does not mean these activities were unimportant to understanding the Pacific. Rather, ethnological attention, albeit limited and misguided, allowed oceanographers to account for the presence of these more “primitive” people as living dwellers of the Pacific by encountering them first hand. They used those accounts when constructing their vision of the region. The Pacific was a hybrid space of oceanic phenomena that intertwined with “primitive” human beings. Through conducting oceanographic ethnology, oceanographers used their personal encounters to account for the mosaic of components that made up the Pacific.

Conclusion

The knowledge oceanographers gathered from their time spent on airplanes and islands supplemented what they came to know through quantified data generated from sampling and measuring the ocean. The addition, however, was not extraneous. First, knowledge acquired through touring significantly enhanced oceanographic understanding of regional geological relationships.

From the air they could see with their own eyes how various structures flowed together. Second, indigenous peoples, when viewed as natural components of the ocean, confirmed the Pacific as a

142 more primitive place that could help modern society answer its questions about future global risks to humanity. The first fifteen years of oceanography after World War II were defined by what

Downwind expedition leader Bob Fisher likened to finding the pieces of a puzzle that would only later be assembled. To a great extent, oceanographers who worked in this period did not know which components of the ocean were vital to understanding it. Scientists were in the midst of constructing their research approach and continually forming and reforming their social relationships in science. A major component of that process involved reconstructing the events that made the Pacific at that point possible. Spatial arrangements of geological structures and natural relationships between flora, fauna, and even indigenous peoples were critical evidence of the environment’s past and thus keys to its present, and possibly future. Personal touring was a crucial component of expedition practice that helped oceanographers make the Pacific legible as an object of inquiry for which executable research questions could be constructed.

The remaining three chapters return to shipboard activities. Next, I address the role of the ships themselves in life and work at sea. The vessels literally launched oceanography out to sea and into a new manner of practice not limited to the shore. Research vessels were not, however, unproblematic technological advancements. These instruments malfunctioned to the point that they drove a wedge between Scripps and its primary patron, the U.S. Navy.

143 Prologue to Chapter 3 Doctoral Student & Navy Sailor John Knauss’ Memorandum

La Jolla: Scripps Inst. of Oceanography 12 January 1956

MEMORANDUM

To: Members of Marine Operations Committee (Frautschy, Haxo, Colbeth, Isascs, Marr, Short, Wooster)

Having just returned from the East Tropic Expedition I would like to pass on a few observations I made about the Horizon as an oceanographic research vessel. The first point I would like to make and one which I hope the Committee will bear in mind throughout this memo is that from the first hand inspection of much of the oceanographic fleet of this country, it is my opinion that the Horizon is presently the most efficient open ocean research ship in this country; and I suspect from what little I have heard, read, and even seen that she is the most efficient in the world. The officers and crew on this cruise, with minor exceptions, impressed me as being highly competent. They were all cooperative. The ship was in good condition when we left port. She was well maintained at sea and she returned in good condition. Having said all this, I would now like to talk about the few things that were wrong with the Horizon and how I think she can be improved.

Berthing: The problem of bunk distribution on a major cruise when there may be as many as sixteen or so in the scientific party has always been a difficult one. All of the scientific party feels, and I believe rightly so, that they deserve better accommodations than seamen, oilers, and mess cooks. On the other hand there just aren’t that many cabins to go around and some of the scientific party is going to have to sleep below. The compromise solution…is to provide as much cabin space for the scientific party as is available for the ship’s personnel. Six of the ship’s officers on the Horizon sleep in staterooms. There are two staterooms for the scientific party…we also slept two scientists in the sick bay. I’m not sure about the legality of this, but it does make an adequate stateroom…

Equipment: The most expensive failure was the radar…it was a continual disappointment…The constant frequency sources used by our ships must be considerably under designed. Life was one long series of open condensers and smoking transformers. I believe the Baird had the same difficulty…

Scientific Equipment: …The mid-water trawl is a potential killer, and the chief reason it is I believe is because the bridle is too long. There is not enough clearance for net and beam to slide over the bucket on the fan tail and someone has to be in the bucket to the last moment clearing the net. More often than not the net still hangs up on the bucket and while everyone else holds back on the beam, someone risks his hands in clearing the net. On one trawl the bridle was so long that even the beam didn’t clear the bucket and had to be lifted over. Luckily this particular trawl was lost at sea.

Maintenance of Scientific Electronic Equipment: Much has been said about this problem already…no scientist should become a slave to his equipment, and…if he is going to depend upon electronic equipment he should at least develop the basic skills necessary to trouble shoot equipment failure…There is an important distinction between standard and experimental equipment. The

144 former has been to sea before and used successfully. If something goes wrong with it now, it is probably only an unsoldered joint, a bad tube, open condenser, etc. It is probably something which anyone could fix if he had a little electronic skill and was armed with a circuit diagram and some hints on trouble shooting this particular instrument. By experimental gear I mean equipment which is as yet untried or at least not thoroughly tested at sea. This equipment which should have its father along…[or] we should incur the additional expense of having an electronic technician assigned to each ship…

Ship Maintenance: I was impressed with the effort of Captain Hopkins and the crew of the Horizon made in trying to keep the ship looking well…However, try as they would, it was impossible for the Horizon to make a smart appearance in port…because of the absolute impossibility to keep that white hull looking good three days after clearing San Diego. I would like to suggest that thought be given to painting the hulls of our Scripps ships a darker color, maybe black.

Ship Personnel: The matter of the hiring of ship’s personnel bothers me somewhat. Unless I have completely misunderstood, men are hired and assigned to ships by the Marine Facilities Division. The only recourse the captain of the ship has is to recommend firing a person after he has proved unworthy. It seems to me that common courtesy, as well as good sense, dictates that the captain, or some other responsible officer of each ship, should be given the opportunity to interview applicants and to decide whether or not he wants them on his ship…

Again, I would like to reiterate what I said in the beginning. I was very happy with the Horizon on East Tropic. I think it is at present the best oceanographic ship afloat in this country. It may well be the best in the world. Compared to her over-all effectiveness, my comments are very minor.220

John A. Knauss

cc: Roger Revelle

220 John A. Knauss, “Memorandum To: Members of the Marine Operations Committee (Frautschy, Haxo, Colbeth, Isaacs, Marr, Short, Wooster) 12 January, 1956,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19 “Ships Horizon, 1952- 1956.”

145 Chapter 3 Ships: The Social Life of Two Research Vessels

Introduction

In her book, Vibrant Matter, political theorist Jane Bennett suggested that when we ignore associations between people and things, we misunderstand the human condition because individuals are “incapable of bearing the full responsibility for their effects.”221 Humans and their motivations obviously participate in shaping the world, but Bennett urges us to understand that people “are not the sole or always the most profound actant in the assemblage.”222 With Bennett’s insight in mind, this chapter considers oceanography as an assemblage and illuminates how scientific research vessels were actants in the production of deep-sea oceanography. Scientists converted ex-military tugboats into platforms from which they conducted their work. These ships, however, impeded the will and designs of oceanographers and created deep rifts between the people who used them. Specifically, this chapter argues that the two vessels from the Downwind expedition, Horizon and Baird, exercised a causal force in breaking the bond between Scripps and the Navy.

During World War II, the American military built hundreds of ships meant to participate directly in battles or to operate as support vessels. After the war, many of these ships no longer served combat purposes, and several found new life as scientific research vessels. Surplus military ships deeply altered oceanographic practice.223 They provided American oceanographers the means to move their investigations from the ocean’s shore to the deepest depths of the ocean. At Scripps

Horizon and Baird emerged as the two ships most often used. On these vessels, scientists took their

221 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 37, emphasis original. 222 Ibid. 223 Scripps and other oceanographic institutions used ships prior to the war, however, the scale of deep-sea research changed radically after the war. See Naomi Oreskes, ““Laissez-tomber”: Military Patronage and Women’s Work in Mid- 20th-Century Oceanography,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 30 no. 2: esp. pp. 381-384 for a discussion of the changes to the research program after WWII that occurred because oceanography could now conduct even more research at sea.

146 work out to sea on a scale that was not possible before the wartime excess of ocean-going ships.224

The existing historiography casts these ships as a fundamental component of the growth of deep-sea expeditions after World War II.225 In the literature, ex-military research vessels offered an unproblematic benefit because they opened numerous opportunities to transform small-scale beach or pier-based research into a worldwide scientific effort to understand the Earth’s ocean system. The reality of living and working aboard these ships, however, indicates that surplus military vessels were ships of sometimes questionable seaworthiness. Oceanography’s unprecedented growth after World

War II depended upon expeditions going to sea, and these research journeys happened from the decks of ships that were in a continual state of malfunction.

Immediately upon their arrival, the ships underwent extensive re-design and construction processes to turn them into vessels appropriate for science. Scripps carried out fundamental transformations such that the ships emerged as new versions of themselves. Administrators and oceanographers intended scientific purposes for these instruments, and their actions fall more specifically under what we think of when describing a translation. Under the auspices of oceanography, Horizon and Baird underwent a process of transformation, a translation, that greatly altered the structure, function, and working personnel aboard, yet they retained many remnants of the vessels’ original military essence. Robert Kohler’s used the word “translation” to describe 19th century field biologists who brought physics instruments into the field. Kohler focused on the fact that taking the instruments to a new environment for new kinds of work was not as easy as modifying them because the original construction inherently adapted the instruments for a particular kind of work: in his case precision instruments were meant for controlled environments, not the

224 Before the war oceanographic institutions generally had one or two operational ships (often donated private yachts), but after the war they were able to amass, maintain, and operate a fleet of five or more. 225 See Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s Chapter 1 “Beginnings of Postwar Marine Science,” in Oceanographers and the Cold War (2005): 3-31, especially pp. 10-13.

147 “violent conditions of nature.” Kohler also focused on other physical limitations that did not translate well from the lab to the field: weight, robustness, and complexity. More pertinent to my purposes here, Kohler mentioned issues of design. For field biologists, issues around design involved instrument precision. In oceanography, ship design was one of the primary points at which intended function failed. Horizon and Baird were originally constructed to tow other broken ships from the edges of combat zones back out to sea for repair, and they were not built to travel repeatedly thousands of miles across the open ocean for scientific research. Try as they might,

Scripps administrators, oceanographers, and Naval crew never translated Horizon and Baird into oceanographic research vessels. Rather, the ships maintained some of their original essence as aging military hand-me-downs.226 If we pay attention to what expedition participants said about these ships it is clear that cold war oceanographic practice at sea conducted by Scripps emerged on vessels that did not work as well as oceanographers wished and continually required maintenance and troubleshooting attention. Their architecture, regardless of multiple translations, continued to articulate an original design scheme that scientists were forced to work around.

This chapter reconsiders these ships as instruments in oceanography and examines for the first time the extent to which malfunction was not just a typical and relatively minor layer of reality at sea, but a causal force in Scripps’ increased desire to replace Navy ships with private patronage.

Foucault illuminated “the ship” as a kind of space we ought to reconsider. His essay “Of Other

Spaces” climaxes with a description of how ships are the quintessential example of a heterotopic space in which passengers can escape societal norms, repression, and authority:

Think of the ship: it is a floating part of space, a placeless place, that lives by itself, closed in on itself and at the same time poised in the infinite ocean, and yet, from port to port, tack by tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies, looking for

226 This lag in American scientific ocean-going technology did not go unnoticed in the political arena. See Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, 69-70.

148 the most precious things hidden in their gardens…it has been…the main means of economic growth…[and] at the same time the greatest reserve of imagination.227

Foucault’s description eerily resembles Revelle’s Sea Search story (Prologue to Chapter 1), which describes oceanographic ships as places separated from the mainland world in which practices differed greatly from shore-based science. Revelle told us, “But the greatest mystery of all, man is just beginning to uncover. The story of the things that lie beneath the surface of the sea is that mystery.” He also attributed the ability to uncover the answers to that mystery to science on Horizon and Baird. Both Foucault and Revelle posed ships as formative things in human lives and posited that we should think more intently about them. In writing this chapter, my inspiration stems from an even larger group of scholars who have pushed to understand the complex roles ships have exhibited. Christopher Monroe, for instance, has written about a fundamental misunderstanding of ship size that proliferated amongst Bronze Age maritime historians.228 Within the military context of

WWII, Malcolm Muir Jr. concluded that ships built by the United States to seek out technical secrets of wartime enemies failed in that respect but succeeded in assisting U.S. efforts to track and counter enemy movements at sea.229 Muir is one of several scholars who have begun to open conversations about the ways in which ships have been imbued heavily with the assumption that original design and intention manifested as functionality, even when that was not the case. Scientific vessels are a premier example in which our expectations sometimes do not match lived reality: we often expect that a ship used for scientific purposes operated as a laboratory when evidence of practice suggests

227 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge (1997): 330-336. 228 Christopher M. Monroe, “Vessel Volumetrics and the Myth of the Cyclopean Bronze Age Ship,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 2 (2007): 1-18. 229 Malcolm Muir, Jr., “Rearming in a Vacuum: United States Navy Intelligence and the Japanese Capital Ship Threat, 1936-1945,” Journal of Military History 54, no. 4 (Oct., 1990): 473-485, pp. 483. For an example of the effects of ship design in this WWII military context see Timothy P. Mulligan, “Ship-of-the-Line or Atlantic Raider? Battleship “Bismarck” between Design Limitations and Naval Strategy,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 4 (Oct. 2005): 1013-1044.

149 otherwise.230 Joanna Radin, for example, determined that while the Alpha Helix was built in the

1960s for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and contained ample space designated as

“laboratory,” when it was used by biological anthropologists the ship functioned as a floating freezer.231 Thus, Alpha Helix in this context was a time machine capable of preserving human body tissue, but for these anthropologists in the sixties the ship did not function as a space for scientific experiments, observations, and thinking. It was a moving icebox that preserved specimens.

Making sense of what Horizon and Baird meant in the context of Scripps’ Sea Search during the 1950s requires reconsideration of their place within oceanography. Unlike Sorrenson and Radin’s examples, these ships did function in part as laboratories. Yet, they were also temporary homes; platforms for adventure; spaces of conflict, friendship, and discomfort; locations that hybridized the

U.S. Navy with American oceanography; and vehicles that carried scientists across vast expanses of the ocean world. The story of Horizon and Baird is a tale of two ships that existed within the Scripps community as composite gatherers: artifacts that brought together divergent social and material elements together.232 In historian of science Lorraine Daston’s words, “Things that talk are often chimeras, composites of different species. The difference in species must be stressed: the composites in question don’t just weld together different elements of the same kind (for example,

230 One example comes from Historian Richard Sorrenson who highlighted how Captain Cook’s editor and biographer explained Cook’s choice to use the ship Resolution not because it was a “passenger ship or a floating laboratory or an artist’s studio, but precisely because she was what she was – a soundly-built collier, with adequate room for her crew and her stores,” John C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, London: Adam & Charles Black (1974): p. 293, in Richard Sorrenson, “Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth century,” Osiris 11, (1996). In her dissertation, Joanna Radin calls attention to Sorrenson’s discussion of this reference to Resolution’s status as a “floating laboratory,” Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: Frozen Blood and Biological Variation in a Genomic Age, 1950-2010” diss., University of Pennsylvania, (2012):” diss., p. 216. Sorrenson’s point about Cook’s ship being or not being a “floating laboratory” is a minor component of the primary argument of his essay: for Cook, the ship was more than a vehicle or platform for instruments to use for observation, “they shaped the kinds of information observers collected,” p. 227. 231 Joanna Radin, “Chapter Four – Into the Field: Fathoming the Primitive Via the Alpha Helix,” in Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: Frozen Blood and Biological Variation in a Genomic Age, 1950-2010” diss., University of Pennsylvania, (2012): 170-215. 232 Lorraine Daston, Things that Talk, 21. Incidentally, while her main contention is that the Alpha Helix was a floating freezer, not a laboratory, she also attends to the ways in which that ship simultaneously held multiple functions, “Life on Ice,” 215.

150 the wood, nails, glue, and paint stuck together to make a chair); they straddle boundaries between kinds. Art and nature, persons and things, objective and subjective are somehow brought together in these things, and the fusions result in considerable blurring of outlines.” Oceanographic ships did not merely connect scientists with various assistants who then generated data about the deep ocean.

On these vessels, the boundaries between science and everyday activities became fuzzy. Their gathering effect sometimes brought men closer together. At other times, the difficulty the ships caused at the boundary between life and work generated deep social rifts.

Horizon and Baird

In 1957-1958 as part of the International Geophysical Year, Scripps sent the Downwind

Expedition to the Southeast Pacific. To declare Downwind’s importance as a vital component in extending oceanic work in this region, Director Roger Revelle repeatedly expressed its novelty:

“Very few scientific vessels have ever visited this vast and empty area of the earth.”233 Under the leadership of Revelle, Scripps attached the military goals of understanding the Earth’s oceans as a battlefield to the oceanographic goals of conducting basic research on a largely unknown part of the

Earth – the ocean.234 Ships allowed oceanographers to expand their area of study from coastal regions of the mainland United States to the open-ocean and foreign coastlines.

233 On October 16, 1957 Revelle realized that the expedition had not been formally advertised and set out to inform as many people as possible to spread the word. He wrote several letters toward this aim: letter to Mr. Hugh Odishaw, Executive Director, U. S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year, National Academy of Sciences; letter to Dr. Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology; letter to UC San Diego President Gordon Sproul. On October 21, 1957, the day Horizon and Baird set out for the expedition, Revelle sent letters with identical text to Mr. M. Yoshida, Natural Sciences Department United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Paris, France; and Miss Brenda Bishop, Secretary of the Pacific Science Council in Honolulu, Hawaii. SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 23, Folder 10 Expedition Downwind. 234 For details of this alliance, including the divergences between military and scientific goals, see Hamblin, “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit of Science: Undersea warfare, the Limits of Internationalism, and the Utility of Basic Research, 1945-1956,” Isis 93 (2002): 1-27. There is some attention to the role of ships in Elena Aronova, Karen S. Baker, and Naomi Oreskes, “Big Science and Big Data in Biology,” Historical Studies in the Natural Science 40, no. 2 (2010); Naomi Oreskes, “A Context of Motivation,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (2003); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit of Science,” Isis 93 (2002).

151 Horizon and Baird emerged as two of the most frequently used vessels. Scripps acquired them from the US Navy, which expelled its surplus of ships no longer needed after World War II.235

Horizon first came to science in 1948, when the Navy struck tug ATA-180 from the military register and sold the ship to Scripps, which chose a new name. Horizon was the first of many ships handed over from the Navy and modified by Scripps for ocean research.236 The Levingston Shipbuilding

Company, in Orange, Texas, built Horizon with steel and a diesel engine that maxed out at about twelve knots. One scientist who traveled and worked aboard Horizon described the ship as “a pile of rust covered with some paint.”237 Another felt differently: reflecting on his time as a sea-going scientist, marine geologist Henry Menard wrote openly about what Horizon meant to those who went to sea with her:

Horizon was this century's equivalent of Endeavour or Beagle, or even Golden Hind or Santa Maria. Like them she was small and not above reproach. Like them she deserves some measure of fame. I am writing this footnote to history lest Horizon and what happened aboard her be forgotten as well as unheralded. Someone surely should do so, and I sailed on her off and on for seventeen years and owe her something. She had an unusual characteristic for a mere fabrication of metal. People liked Horizon and she was always, as far as I know, a happy ship.238

No matter if in love or hate throughout Horizon’s tenure at Scripps, oceanographers and others enlisted in the scientific community continually spoke, wrote, and recorded information about life onboard. Four seafloor geophysical structures were named after her, including

235 Henry W. Menard, Ocean of Truth, pp. 39, “The Oceanographic fleets grew; the Navy was contracting and happy to give ships away.” 236 In his oral history, Gordon Lill put this in colorful words: “Well, the sky was the limit. We were very adventuresome. Lots of stuff, equipment, was available as left over from Word War II. You could get trucks, you could get jeeps, you could get airplanes, and you could get ships. Almost anything you wanted, there was some surplus store of it somewhere.” David K. van Keuren, “An Interview with Dr. Gordon Lill,” March 20, 1995, SIO online archive accessed April 11, 2013. 237 Because the ship was kept at sea so often, the rust could not be controlled. The metal hull and upper structure rusted extensively, and the best solution was to keep applying more paint over the rust or to flake off big chunks in order to apply new paint under that. This paint is clearly visible in the film “Downwind Expedition” because in 1957 the paint was bright yellow. Edward S. Barr, “Midpac – The First Big Step: From the 1950 Diary of Edward S. Barr Aboard the Research Vessel, Horizon,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6 1890-1981, Box 19, Folder 7 Expeditions Reunion Midpac and Capricorn, pg. 2. 238 Henry Menard, “The Research Ship Horizon [electronic resource]” (1974), accessed February 2013, University of California.

152 Horizon Guyot, which held some of the oldest oceanic rocks, and Horizon Depth, the second deepest spot in the ocean known at the time of naming.239 These ships were “things that talk,” to use Daston’s language, because they could not speak for themselves, but they invited

“representation by those who [could] speak and to whom the objects [mattered].”240

Horizon’s sister ship, Baird, was Army Transport Ship LT-581. The Navy transferred ownership of Baird to the Maritime Commission after the war, which then loaned the ship to Scripps for 14 years. Thus Scripps never actually owned Baird, but beginning in 1951 the Institution claimed sole possession and used the ship to foster the expansion of high seas exploration. Members of the

Scripps community often referred to them as sister ships because of their almost identical construction and the tradition of sending the two of them on the same expeditions.

Image 24: Research Vessel Horizon, 1957. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

239 Ibid. 240 Lorraine Daston, “The Glass Flowers,” in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk (2004): 228. Brackets indicate where I changed quote from present to past tense for the purpose of applying it to this history.

153

Image 25: Reserach Vessel Baird, 1952. Photo Creator: Scripps Institution of Oceanography. SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. SIO Public Information Office Slides, 1950-1979. Copyright UC Regents

Image 26: Exchanging goods between Horizon and Baird on Downwind. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Levingston Co. built both for slow speed and short trips and not long expeditions that Scripps used them for. When they travelled far out to sea, they exhibited a tendency to roll heavily with the ocean waves. Each held about 20 Navy crewmembers and 10 scientific party members, such as Scripps oceanographers, guest scientists, graduate students, and medical doctors. Oceanographers conducted most of their work from the low and broad sterns, which they also called the fantail. Scripps installed A-frame towers that reached high above the deck of the ships from which steel wire was

154 used to lower and raise instruments into the ocean. These two ships became the most used and most expensive ships at Scripps over the course of the 1950s. Horizon served the Institution for 20 years and Baird for 14 years.241

By 1961 Scripps began acquiring ships specifically designed and built for scientific purposes.242 Before that, however, the ships had been built for other uses. Surplus military tugboats took oceanographers to sea on a large scale under the specific conditions provided by the ships’ layout, material structure, functioning, and social implications of military vessels that required Navy personnel to navigate the ocean environment. These years were only the beginning in the growth of funding. From the war until 1958, the Navy, National Science Foundation, and State of California increasingly offered larger amounts of money in support of oceanographic ships, laboratories, facilities, and equipment. But after 1958 and the International Geophysical Year, support skyrocketed. In 1965, total funding amounted to 100 times what it was in 1941. The years from 1945 to 1958 were a time of intense growth in financial support of oceanography, but compared to the

1960s, the period must be set apart as a beginning, a time of comparatively slower growth.243

241 SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Records, 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 21 Horizon 1957-1963, “UCSD-1924, 26 September, 1966, Proposal to National Science Foundation,” RE: construction of new oceanographic ships, page 13, Table 1. “Historical List of SIO Ships.” There were five core ships during the 1950s at Scripps: Horizon, Baird, Crest, E. W. Scripps, and Palolina-T. In 1956 E. W. Scripps was sold and replaced with Army ship M/V T-441 while Crest was returned to the Navy and replaced with Stranger. “Preface to Ship Tables and Charts,” in “1956-1957 Tentative Budget, La Jolla Campus: General Campus Activities, Comparative Summary of Expenditures,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 9, Folder 15: Budget: La Jolla Campus Budget Request, 1956-1957. 242 Perhaps the most famous of these is FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform). The ship was designed to partially flood, which causes it to point upwards in the water. Scripps used Office of Naval Research funding to create the ship. It was launched in 1962. For a look at the later period, consult the work of Joanna Radin who has framed oceanographic field experiences of human actors via their interactions with the vessel, Alpha Helix – a ship designed by physiologist and commissioned in 1965 by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Radin shows how the Alpha Helix, built for the purpose of collecting bodily samples from Pacific peoples and storing them in freezers, was seen as a freezer not a laboratory. It enabled scientists to speed the job of collecting stock samples while slowing the decay of these samples. But they did not conduct analyses onboard. Joanna Radin, Chapter Four, “Into the Field: Fathoming the Primitive Via the Alpha Helix,” in Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: Frozen Blood and Biological Variation in a Genomic Age, 1950-2010,” Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 2012, pp. 186-222. 243 This periodization has been described by Henry Menard in his memoir of the 1950s, The Ocean of Truth, 38, as well as by historians; for example see Ronald Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on the Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (2003). While Menard’s periodization points to the tripling of military funding given to oceanographic institutions after 1958, Doel’s points to oceanographic

155 Nevertheless, just after WWII and throughout the 1950s, open ocean oceanography grew unprecedentedly through the acquisition of ex-Navy ships and their almost constant expeditions throughout the world’s oceans.244

Translation

In his memoir of oceanography, prominent Scripps marine geologist Henry W. Menard described Director Roger Revelle’s strategy for divvying up money that had come to the institution from the Navy and the National Science Foundation in the 1950s: “Roger created a small group who identified the best scientists and the most promising problems and gave money in large bundles where it would do the most good.”245 Menard meant to evoke a more literal imagery of a hand-held bundle of money, but in practice he might as well have been referring to the ships. During this period, the ships were among the largest bundles of money that came to Scripps; they also consumed most of the literal bundles of money that came to the institution.

The financial budget for Scripps ships centered on operating the fleet of five ocean going vessels: Horizon, Spencer F. Baird, Crest, E. W. Scripps, and Paolina T. Consistently throughout the

1950s, Horizon and Baird utilized the highest proportion of the budget. The ships actually cost so much to operate that using them tended to tap out real money (as opposed to other forms of support like measuring instruments and TNT) offered by the Navy for research on any one project.

institutions growing rapidly over the 1950s but being well established and deeply inserted into federal agendas during the 1960s. Also by 1960, Scripps began organizing more expeditions such that only one Scripps ship set out from San Diego and “local ships” wherever the expedition travelled were rented. This allowed the institution to cut some of the costs of research vessel operation. SIO Russell Raitt Papers 1922-1996, Box 11, Folder 14, “Monsoon Expedition, 1960-62,” “Letter from Dr. Menard to Dr. Lewis G. Weeks.” The Coast Survey did conduct hydrographic surveys and coastal oceanography from ships specifically designed for their purposed as early as the end of the 19th century, but this work was limited to coastal areas of US territorial waters and differs greatly from that of Scripps after WWII. 244 For an outline of change over time in research vessel acquisition, use, and design see George Shor, Jr., “The Development of Research Vessel Design,” in Philip F. Rehbock and Keith Rodney Benson, eds., Oceanographic History: The Pacific and Beyond, La Jolla: The International Congress on the History of Oceanography (1993): 45-52. 245 Henry W. Menard, Ocean of Truth, 37. See T. K. Treadwell, D. S. Gorsline, and R. West, “History of the U.S. Academic Oceanographic Research Fleet and the Sources of Research Ships,” http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist_oceanogr/treadwell-vm453t84_1988.pdf accessed Oct. 23, 2013, pg. 5.

156 Once a ship was inducted into the fleet and assigned to a particular expedition, oceanographers continually looked for creative ways to obtain the other supplies they needed for their research, including pushing the Navy for further supplies typically possessed by the military. The official application to the IGY program in oceanography for Downwind demonstrates that real money went primarily to securing ship time, while other research supplies could be obtained for free:

The work will be done on the research vessels HORIZON and SPENCER F. BAIRD of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The ship transportation, the principal cost of exploration of this remote area, is provided as part of an oceanographic-geophysical exploration of the region and will not be charged to the seismic project. The explosives, another large item, amounting to the order of $50,000, are expected to be supplied by the Navy at no cost to the project.246

Ships became vital to oceanography. Over the course of the 1950s, the entire Scripps

Institution budget leaned heavily toward the ships. The cost to Scripps to run and maintain the entire fleet of five in 1956-1957, the year prior to Downwind, was $233,000 and exceeded only by the cost of personnel salaries, $502,358. All other budget categories amounted to only fractions of these two: General Assistance, $17,316; Supplies and Expense, $41,626; Equipment and Facilities,

$27,570; Library Books, $8,180; Back Periodicals, $2,700; Binding, $2,800; Contribution Series,

$3,250, and Provision for Contingencies, $4,200.247 Once ships came to Scripps, oceanographers kept them moving throughout the oceans almost regardless of the cost.

Along with a monetary investment, the ships required intense labor. Before the ships provided what scientists needed, they had to undergo an expensive and time-consuming process of conversion from military to research vessel. Once Scripps acquired the ships, the marine facilities maintenance force inspected them, and the Marine Superintendent made a work schedule. Soon after, conversion began.

246 SIO Russell Watson Raitt Paper, 1922-1956, Box1, Folder “Correspondence n.d. Jan 1956,” “Application for Research Project for the U. S. International Geophysical Year Program: Section B.” 247 “1956-1957 La Jolla Campus Budget Request,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Records, 1890-1981, Box 9, Folder 15.

157 The process involved changing each ship’s physical form in order to reorganize and alter its functionality. The translation from Navy tug to scientific vessel included a redesign of the layout and instrumentation, which significantly changed the ship’s internal structure and instrumentation, but left behind many remnants of the original.248 Robert Kohler has used the language of “translation” to describe the process of biologists taking scientific instruments from physics and physiology labs into the field. The move, he argues, was not as simple as transporting instruments from one place to another. Rather, the instruments had to be redesigned fundamentally to work in completely different environments. I draw on Kohler’s attention to similar issues regarding design as the fundamental problem with making these sorts of material and instrumental shifts within the context of scientific practice. I also utilize his discussion of the translation of the automobile from a personal mode of transportation to an instrument of fieldwork to understand how instruments created in one context for specific purposes are then situated in another context and translated in various ways for a new set of purposes. Oceanography acquired Navy ships and altered them into research vessels, but because it was a modification of a second-hand artifact created by and for the Navy during wartime into a scientific tool, the science was forced to take the military along out to sea. During their entire lives at Scripps, Horizon and Baird, in fact, existed as Naval and scientific composites. Eventually,

Scripps administrators and oceanographers came to desire different tools. But in the early years, oceanographers spent a lot of energy trying to completely transform the ships into pure instruments of science.

The process of physically altering Baird took just over six months.249 Scripps personnel and

Navy staff combined efforts toward making the transformation. They brought the ship from

248 Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology, Chicago: Chicago University Press (2002): 11-134. 249 SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 66, Folder 17 “Baird 1951-1952, “Spencer F. Baird Progress Report, 5 December 1951.”

158 Olympia, Washington, where the Maritime Commission kept her, to the U. S. Naval Station in San

Diego. From there, the Scripps Marine Superintendent, James Lawrence Faughn, planned the modifications and set up a work schedule based on what needed to be done and personnel availability. Faughn organized the entire transformation of both Horizon and Baird and continued throughout his tenure at the Institution as the lead scout in search of new ships to transform into research vessels. He also came to know the ships in practice because he planned and captained many of Scripps’ expeditions. But more importantly for their translation, he served as the technical administrator primarily responsible for re-designing the ships so that they could function as floating scientific laboratories on the open ocean.250

Once Faughn completed the plan, he assigned a combination of men to work on the ship.

These men came both from Scripps itself and from the U.S. Naval Station in San Diego. There is no extant list of workers responsible for the labor, and in the 1951 Progress Report to Director Revelle,

Faughn even admitted that there was no way to mention all of the individuals and groups responsible for carrying out the project.251 Where he found able and willing hands, Faughn assigned them work for whatever task was at hand, and the entire project functioned generally from his plan.

Adjustments were made to the schedule as needed.

To get started, enlisted Navy crew workers252 transported the ship to the sandblasting berth.

Next, they cleared off the deck and removed all equipment, including a large bait tank. The men

250 Elizabeth N. Shor, “James Lawrence Faughn Biography,” January, 1986, Scripps Institution of Oceanography online biography archive: http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/2011-49Shor-Faughn.pdf, accessed September 30, 2013. 251 James L. Faughn to Director’s Office, 5 December, 1951, “Spencer F. Baird Progress Report,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 66, Folder 17, Baird 1951-52, 54-59, page 4. 252 It is incredibly difficult to track down exactly who these men were. We know they were enlisted Navy sailors working at the U. S. Naval Station in San Diego. Periodically there are one or two whose names turn up in multiple documents within the Scripps archive. For example, D. E. Derringer traveled aboard Baird during the Downwind expedition as listed in the Personnel list of the “Preliminary Report on Downwind.” In 1956 Mr. D. E. Derringer, 2nd Assistant Engineer enrolled in the Crawford Nautical School in San Pedro, California in preparation for a merchant marine license. An administrator at the school, Lorcan F. Crawford, wrote to Admiral Wheelock at Scripps stating that Derringer qualified for the license based on “more than three years sea duty, U.S. Navy with left-arm rate to be evaluated under Section 10.02-13 Paragraph 10.02-13(a) PLUS Service in M.V. “Spencer F. Baird.” Mr. Derringer should qualify

159 sealed all of the doors, windows, and openings and sandblasted the entire exterior of the ship, the hull and all exterior decks above the waterline, to bare metal. They painted the ship with a priming coat of paint and then returned Baird to the regular dock, where they unsealed the doors and all other openings.

For the next two weeks, the Navy crew re-organized many aspects of the ship’s physical space. The engine room underwent major transformations: they cleared the gratings (used as flooring that offered much needed traction on a moving ship), made an opening going to the upper deck, removed all of the main motors, generators, pumps and auxiliaries, and sent the compressors to local shops for repairs. They removed the refrigerator and bait tank that sat on the open deck, including all of the bait tank piping. The men then installed a hatch and a walkway to allow greater access between the engine-room and the laboratory. They also replaced the generators to accommodate greater power requirements under scientific use.

These shifts redefined space on the ship such that areas previously dedicated to Naval work at sea transformed into spaces for scientific practice. The Navy crew cleared starboard work compartments in order to turn them into a laboratory. They removed two bulkheads, upright partitioning walls, in order to extend space for the laboratory in two directions and allow for a passageway into the laboratory area. They got rid of all shelving, lockers, sinks, and benches from the previous life of the ship and constructed a new bulkhead that effectively closed in the laboratory, including its new scientific instruments. In some cases, they re-designed the scientific equipment so that it would fit on the ship. For example, workers had to re-construct the Nansen bottle rack (a shelving unit for holding cylindrical tubes that collect ocean water at depth) for proper fitting and display. For some tasks, the re-design plan did not lead to action. The winches (used to lower and for minimum Third Assistant Engineer Motor Vessels unlimited horsepower.” Lorcan F. Crawford 17 January, 1956, “Letter to Admiral Wheelock (U.S.N. Ret) Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 66, Folder 17, Baird 1951-52, 54-59,” page 2.

160 raise instruments deep into the ocean) needed replacement, but they needed more time than that available before the first planned expedition for sufficient re-design and equipment manufacturing.

Scripps scientists wanted the freezer (for biological samples) to be extended from a small unit to a large walk-in compartment, but the change came with a high price tag. It also was not clear during the conversion whether that space would be more useful with a different purpose. Faughn did not resolve every problem in this first translation under the pressing time limit before Baird embarked on her first expedition at sea.

Outside of scientific equipment, workers reorganized Naval technology and personal space.

Faughn’s re-design centered on the goal of shrinking space allocated for Navy personnel and instruments as much as possible to make room for scientists and oceanographic equipment. Faughn extended the radio room by removing bunks, lockers, and other equipment from the old radio room on the main deck and in the Captain’s cabin on the bridge deck. The Navy crew then removed the bulkhead between these rooms, which extended the space available for the new radio equipment.

They also installed a new bulkhead further forward and created a smaller Captain’s cabin. The enlarged space for radio equipment now also accommodated the chart desk, and electronic navigating equipment, such as loran, radar, sonar, radio direction finder, and wind equipment. These architectural translations foreshadowed how the ship would be operated under scientific rather than military operations. The scientists literally took control of these vessels.

Faughn translated many other types of equipment on the ship into things that could accommodate research at sea. He worked with the Naval Station to secure a smaller boat carried onboard Baird. The Navy gave Faughn a 26 foot motor whale boat from its boat stock, one he had his eye on because it was appropriate for small boat work in the open sea even though its small size made it difficult to retrieve in rough weather. The Navy also allocated the replacement of two skiffs, small fishing boats, and two life rafts. Scripps administrators, probably Director Revelle, made

161 provisions with Baird’s open ocean classification so that she could carry up to 10 tons of explosives for seismic research and other scientific purposes. Thus, Faughn instructed the workers to install a hatch in the main deck for access to the new explosive compartment, which was the old sound room. Faughn added two fathometers, echo-sounding units (for detecting water depth), including transducers (device that receives the acoustic signal), QJB Sonar (military searchlight sonar) transducers, and hydrophones (microphone for recording sound underwater) to round out Baird’s technological transformation.

From the outside the ship structure looked more or less the same as a scientific vessel as it did a Navy tug. The ships did need new paint a few times a year due to the rough environment of being at sea, and once they were research vessels, that need continued. The major difference to outward appearance came in 1957, when Scripps began painting the hulls black and the upward deck yellow to mask the rust that was starkly visible against the original white paint. Some of the fundamental functionalities did not change in size, shape, or location, such as the bridge, galley, and head. Further, because the Navy remained involved in maintenance, the expensive practice (in money as well as labor) of taking the ship out of water, i.e. dry docking, once a year for a complete overhaul continued at the Point Loma military port by Navy personnel. A 1956 memo within the

Scripps Institution explained:

Each vessel at SIO is sent to the shipyard at least once a year. It is hauled out of the water, cleaned, painted, and refurbished. Any rust which forms between annual haulouts does not impair the safety of the Hull. When any plate shows deterioration of 30% by actual measurement, it is replaced. This is normal procedure as practiced by the Bureau of Ships of the U.S. Navy. Most commercial vessels (other than passenger ships) delay hauling a vessel out as long as possible because of the high cost; they sometimes wait until marine growth on the hull retards the speed and requires more fuel per hour to operate.253

253 James H. Corley, May 29, 1956, Memo “Re: research vessels,” SIO Subject Files AC6, Records, 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon, 1952-1956.”

162 In practice, much of Horizon and Baird’s life at Scripps continued under military procedures. But the ships came to Scripps for science, and a constant tension emerged between these ships as objects of science and objects under military scrutiny and protocol. When the ships first arrived, Revelle acknowledged the Navy’s influence, but he also hinted at a sense of insecurity that began to fester over the years of their lives at Scripps. Eventually his statements about Scripps’ sole ownership of the ships intensified, but in the beginning of their lives as scientific vessels, Revelle tended to acknowledge openly the Navy’s influence:

It is of the utmost importance that this well found and capable vessel be so fitted out that her potentialities for ocean exploration and research can be fully realized. Her assignment to this Institution is in earnest of the confidence which the Navy Department and other agencies of the federal government have in the abilities of our staff to carry out difficult scientific enterprises effectively and economically, despite the perils of the sea and the perversity of nature. I share this confidence and believe that the combined experience and abilities of our staff, together with our close associations with the Navy and with other oceanographic laboratories, are such that we should be able to develop in this ship the best oceanographic research vessel now afloat.254

Translating these ships into research vessels did not actually remove the Navy from them. Rather, it left remnants of the original form and occupants while merely attempting to reposition the Navy on the sidelines.255

Although Revelle spoke about “fitting” the ships for “ocean exploration,” the process, because of the depth that the Navy provided funding and labor, did as much to bring the military into oceanography as it did to bring oceanography to the open ocean. Navy personnel conducted

254 Roger Revelle, “6 September, 1951 – Memorandum: to Staff, Subject: Acquisition and commissioning of the research vessel, Spencer F. Baird,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6 Box 66, Folder 17, Baird 1951-52, 54-59. 255 Separate from scientific activities, Scripps also operated them as part of six Weapons Test Operations in collaboration with the Atomic Energy Commission in the Pacific from the end of World War II until 1956: Operation Crossroads, Bikini, Ivy, Castle, Wigwam, and Redwing. These official military activities were part of Scripps fulfilling an obligation to conduct Navy work at sea. But by 1956 Revelle admitted in a private letter to the University Vice President of Business Affairs: “We have been attempting to withdraw from this work because it is becoming more engineering in character with less research interest, but the national interests require our participation. They have stated that we have proved to be the only agency qualified to produce essential results concerning the distribution of fall out and radioactivity from the explosions. We have, therefore, reluctantly continued our participation.” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 19 Ships Horizon 1952-1956, page 2.

163 the work at the U.S. Naval Station in San Diego. But Revelle supervised their actions, mostly through Marine Superintendent Faughn. And both U. S. Navy and Scripps personnel carried out the physical labor. Faughn basically took advantage of any available hands he could find because he was working on such a tight time schedule. Once converted, only a small portion of the operating costs for the ships were paid by the University of California or the Scripps Institution.256 Most costs were covered by Office of Naval Research contracts, a trend that continued in operating the ships throughout their lives at Scripps. Those contracts provided certain military supplies, such as dynamite, direct service on ships performed by military personnel, and dock space, but rarely paid for scientific equipment outside of the ship itself. Therefore, when direct money was not exchanged, the Navy further supported ship operations but expected Scripps to keep the research facility and laboratory in good-working order.257 In all aspects of their lives as scientific vessels, surplus military tugs pushed scientists and Navy personnel together.

The military continued to influence naming, upgrades, and other maintenance procedures.

Also, oceanographers lacked the knowledge to operate the ships. Navy personnel, not scientists, put the ships to sea, placed them in specific locations for oceanographic sampling, and maintained them while out on expeditions. Navy ship captains and ship crews sailed throughout the entirety of oceanographic expeditions at sea, and they made up the largest number of men who saw expeditions from beginning to end. Only a handful of junior or non-academic members of the scientific party, such as graduate students, technicians, or oceanographic engineers, travelled on the whole expeditions. On Downwind in particular, all of the senior scientists, including the two expedition leaders, made at most half of the journey and more typically only travelled for a week or two. Thus,

256 Scripps was founded in 1903 and became part of the University of California, San Diego in 1912. 257 It must be noted that the process of acquiring these supplies was rarely straightforward. Often only partial orders arrived from military stocks, and oceanographers repeatedly sent letters again requesting what was ordered the first time. Sometimes major pieces of equipment Scripps requested for installation on ships was denied by the ONR. SIO Russell Watson Raitt Papers 1922-1996, Box 6. See for example Folder 6 “CUSP Expedition Jun-Dec 1954.”

164 Navy personnel operated what oceanographers referred to as their “floating laboratories” in their most fundamental function of going to sea.

Navy involvement in the new lives of these ships also continued because the process of translation was never quite complete. The ships always needed improvements and maintenance, and after their initial translation, they underwent multiple subsequent conversions over their lives with the Scripps Institution.258 The perpetual need for maintenance and reconfiguration wore heavily on the men who worked and lived on these ships. Malfunction caused Scripps to desire a new source of funding the ships as their most valuable asset. The ships, then, were a material point around which the scientific-military bond at first developed, but over the course of the 1950s disintegrated.

Articulation

Historians have explained post-World War II growth in oceanography by paying attention to the existence of that bond between Scripps and the Navy due to the “fountain of money” and related support that came to Scripps from military patronage. Ronald Rainger has demonstrated the primary role of Director Roger Revelle in negotiating a continual flow of Navy money to the

Institution, which came with certain expectations about what kind of work would be done at sea.

Rainger has shown how patronage actually fed the needs of both oceanographers and the Navy such that even when dissatisfactions arose, a separation was not possible because oceanographers needed the Navy to grow as much as the Navy needed oceanographers to validate its place in the changing cold war geopolitical climate. Jacob Darwin Hamblin pushed further in this vein by examining the situation between the Navy and oceanographers in the 1950s as a “partnership” that grew into an

258 John A. Knauss, “Memorandum To: Members of the Marine Operations Committee (Frautschy, Haxo, Colbeth, Isaacs, Marr, Short, Wooster) 12 January, 1956,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19 “Ships Horizon, 1952- 1956.”

165 intense “bond” seeped in “mutual advantage.” Hamblin certainly acknowledged tensions, but again emphasized how both parties met the needs of the other.

On the one hand, I have described a similar trajectory. Before Horizon and Baird, Scripps did not have access to ships of that size that could travel so far with so many people aboard. Their acquisition and prolific use literally launched Scripps into a new era of scientific practice capable of investigating deep-water phenomena across vast expanses of ocean, but expansion only happened through an intensification of the relationship that developed around the ships between oceanographers and the Navy. Initially, the acquisition of Navy ships and collaboration between science and military was by and large positive.

On the other hand, as the years wore on oceanographers began to see research vessels as liabilities rather than assets. They began looking for new ships to convert or preferably, but more expensively, the means to privately design and build vessels specifically for oceanography. Once the extent of Horizon and Baird’s malfunctioning became apparent, oceanographers pursued separation between their greatest asset – their floating laboratories – and their greatest patron that made those ships available in the first place – the Navy. By the late 1950s the partnership transitioned from one of mutual benefit to one in which scientists had a distaste for military assistance.

By the end of the 1950s, Scripps was in a transition period where the desire for new ships existed yet the means to get them did not. During that time, the Institution continued to go to sea on Horizon and Baird with the hope of characterizing the unknown and mysterious ocean world. The

Downwind expedition under the International Geophysical Year was one such expedition. As

Rainger concluded, many oceanographers wanted out of their ties to the military-oceanography situation, but both sides realized they needed one another.259 I agree that the relationship between the Navy and oceanography during this period was, as Hamblin phrases, a “partnership.” However,

259 Ronald Rainger, “Patronage and Science,” 23.

166 when we look at the physical and social structure and properties of these ships it becomes clear that those conditions set profound limitations on oceanographic practice and shaped the possibility, depth, and trajectory of what scientists were doing at sea. Horizon and Baird took oceanographers out to sea. Perhaps their most primary function was as a vehicle that carried scientists to distant locations. Their engines provided the propulsion needed to move through the Pacific Ocean, navigate specific coordinates corresponding to particular places on the ocean bottom, and to land in foreign ports where fuel and food could be replenished. Yet as vehicles of science and oceanographic laboratories their potential for opening possibility came with constant malfunction.

Through their letters and memos to the Scripps administration it is clear that men who travelled on these ships wanted less breakdown. They hoped for fewer instances where technological malfunctions stopped scientific work. The scientists asked for modifications that would improve shipboard life in general, re-allocate space for more comfort, and especially, they requested repairs that would end all danger of electrocution. The ships never fit quite right and were already getting old when they arrived at Scripps. Despite constant attention they continually impeded life and work at sea. Hamblin’s work has emphasized a mutual reliance at work between Scripps and the Navy, but by the late 1950s, there was also a mutual distaste revolving around the ships.

In the days leading up to the launch of the Downwind Expedition, Navy crew checked the ships’ engines and major instruments from their mooring berths in San Diego Harbor. On

Thursday, October 17, 1957 Baird was moored at berth B on her port side. By 8:30am, the ship’s crew began shakedown operations, the testing of all of the operational equipment. They detached the ship from the dock and travelled on various courses at different speeds. They used one of the two engines at first, and by 8:48am they were in the waters in front of Point Loma. The ship continued to travel out of San Diego Harbor, and at 9:24am stopped in 40 fathoms of water to test

167 the hydrophones.260 The work took just under an hour and a half to complete, at which time crewmembers put the ship underway to test the high line.261 On the way back to the harbor, the port engine blew out in an explosion. Crewmembers turned the engine off, did the required repairs, and reported in the ship log that both engines now functioned properly. Once the ships started moving again, there was another engine malfunction, but within fifteen minutes, crewmembers had it figured out and both engines functioned properly again. After that, there was a second complete break down, and the ships returned to the dock for a short rest and then headed to the Shell Oil docks, taking several different courses and speeds so that the ships did not hit anything in the channel.

After fueling, the ships returned to the B dock, secured the engines, and shifted to shore power.262

Inspections of the compass, chronometer, and radar continued over the next three days.263

On October 21st at 8:50am, Horizon headed to the ammunition barge, loaded dynamite, and was underway, which officially commenced Downwind by 2:30pm. Baird loaded ammunition at

9:30am and departed on Downwind at 3:35pm.264 Later that day both ships left San Diego and began the expedition. The vessels steamed on separately in slight seas and swells through the next two weeks with the intention of studying the ocean floor beneath them more thoroughly. But despite all the preparations and pre-expedition troubleshooting, these vehicles of science broke. On

Wednesday, October 23 the crew of Horizon held a fire and boat drill. The general alarm was not functioning, and the #2 fire hose had a leak. Crew stopped the ship in order to fix the problems as

260 A hydrophone is an underwater microphone used to listen to ocean sounds. 261 A highline is a lightweight cable or rope that can be propelled to another ship or helicopter to transfer goods or people. Typically they are used in rescue situations. 262 Spencer F. Baird (Ship) Deck Log Book, November - December 1957, GC 3 U3 S745 NO. 53, S.I.O., Entry on Thursday Oct. 17, 1957 – at San Diego, California, “0800 to 1200” to “2000 to 2400.” 263 Similar routine inspections were carried out on Horizon. 264 This difference in departure time of the two ships is consistent with the information provided in the film, Expedition Downwind: Horizon left San Diego Harbor before Baird. Yet the sequence of events in the film leads the audience to believe that Baird’s explosives were loaded after Horizon left the harbor. Considering the times given in the ships’ log, both ships were loaded with explosives within an hour of one another in the morning, and both ships left the harbor within an hour of one another in the afternoon.

168 well as demonstrate the line-throwing rocket.265 Once the ship steamed on, the scientists spent the next seven days beginning their work profiling deep hydrographic casts using a gravity corer to sample the seafloor. Ten days into the expedition on October 31 the crew on Baird found a leak in the fuel line and had to stop the ship mid-ocean in order to repair it. November 1st the ship officially broke down for a few hours from 3:30am to about 6am due to a burned out resistor and a burned out receiver in the main engine. By 6:05am the ships were underway again at a speed of 11 knots.

On November 4th from 4:00 to 4:22pm the crewmembers held another fire and boat drill, this time finding all equipment in order, but by 5:40pm the steering gear went out. The problem was fixed in about five minutes and the ship continued on sometimes for scientific work at seismic stations and other times to deal with mechanical malfunctions.

Once they were at sea, oceanographers conducted their scientific work of sampling the ocean environment and creatures, recording as much data as possible, and beginning to interpret what they found into new understandings of the vast Pacific Basin. As scientific platforms, Horizon and Baird offered space to hold and use oceanographic sampling and recording equipment. On

November 5, Baird started exhibiting malfunctions with the scientific equipment. The heavy cable and dredging winch required multiple attempts to splice and re-spool the cable.266 And if equipment did not break randomly or because of age, the ocean did its share. On December 1 bad weather and rocky seas led to the loss of Horizon’s gravity corer and 6,000 meters of hydrographic wire. At that point the echo sounder developed a leak and was totally inoperative by the next day. By December

12 most of the equipment had been repaired on both ships. But being at sea using heavy metal

265 This activity was filmed in “Expedition Downwind” as described in Chapter 1 of this dissertation. 266 Preliminary Report on Downwind, 4.

169 equipment to take samples of the seafloor lying thousands of feet below meant constant breakdowns, troubleshooting, diagnosis, and repairs.267

This dual reality of offering previously unknown possibility but a potential steeped in extreme malfunction verging on danger extended to the ships as laboratories as well. 268 Especially in this regard, their function as official “laboratories” of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, scientists felt the ships were “adapted but scarcely reconverted to use as oceanographic ship[s].”269

The electrical load of each ship caused serious concern. Some loads, i.e. certain lighting, winches, and compressor pumps, ran off of 120-volt direct-current generators driven by independent auxiliary diesel engines on the ship. The remainder of loads, however – i.e. the rest of the ship’s lighting system, fans, radio transmitters, radar, steering servos and motors, winches, pumps, and the entirety of the scientific laboratory ran off of the three independently operating motor-alternators. Because the systems were not in sync, the power sources for these components often ran out of phase with one another, and if one power source became overloaded there was no way to draw power from the other sources. The system also often created background noise in seismic data of the seafloor to the extent that sometimes the data became useless.270 Further, the laboratories were not watertight.

Equipment often flooded with seawater that washed into the laboratory room. Some days all work

267 These mechanical malfunctions and breakdowns happened continually throughout the expedition. Horizon was actually delayed from leaving Callao, Peru until January 21 because they were waiting for a replacement EDO head. SIO, “Horizon Scientific Log,” embedded in “Ship Log Horizon, 1957,” SIO Ship Logs. 268 Examples of studies of laboratories include: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994; Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992; and Karen Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. According to Karin Knorr Cetina, the study of laboratories in fact opened the possibility in historical literature to consider “the full spectrum of activities involved in the production of knowledge,” Karin Knorr Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory Science,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 115. 269 John A. Knauss, “19 June, 1958: Comments to Admiral Wheelock, Jeff Frautschy, and Peter G. Trapani of Scripps’ Marine Facilities – Electrical and mechanical systems on the “Horizon,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 21 Horizon 1957-1963, page 1. 270 Ibid., one page 2 Knauss describes background noise in Pepin’s (Robert O. Pepin) reflection shot recordings.

170 stopped completely on experimental equipment because of excessive water dripping. The scientists rigged up tents over some of the equipment using plastic sheets they borrowed from leftover packing supplies to prevent excessive dripping, but that did nothing for the floor of the laboratory, which was continually “sloshing” back and forth with seawater. Oceanographers felt that working in these laboratories was more dangerous than working on deck with the explosives, and they suggested to Scripps administrators that anyone working in the laboratory should be covered by

“extra-hazardous duty insurance.”271

These ships were clearly complex spaces, but it would be a misrepresentation to stop this description with official scientific affairs. Horizon and Baird were also deeply personal spaces.

Oceanographers and Navy crew lived together aboard these ships, which offered a home for however many days each person travelled onboard. Each man kept his personal effects located where he laid his head to rest. Sleep tended to be scarce on these expeditions. The ships were also a space of persistent personal discomfort in part brought on by exhaustion. The men ate the same meals prepared by one Navy cook. When mishaps with culinary hygiene occurred, the entire ship took sick. Other times, illness came from a prior condition. On Downwind, seafloor biologist Bill

Reidel suffered from a worsening of his pre-existing duodenal ulcer, which prompted the expedition leader to stop all scientific work on the expedition so that the ship could rush him to the nearest hospital, which was a several day trip to Valparaíso, Chile. The men worked together, they got sick together, and at times they all came together in aid of their fellow travellers. In the background of all of the activity was seasickness. Almost all men experienced it to some degree at some times because the ships tended to roll heavily in the open ocean waves. The question was whether one was prone to chronic seasickness or whether the feeling subsided after a day or two. Another cause of sickness

271 Victor Vacquier, Research Geophysicist, “6 October, 1959, to Mr. J. D. Frautschy, Assistant Director, SIO, cc. Ship Operations Committee – Suggestions for improving the Spencer F. Baird,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 66, Folder 17 Baird: 1951-52, 54-59.

171 was excessive alcohol consumption, which occurred both at sea and in ports. Generally, as long as drinking did not affect work the Captain accepted it. Periodically, and typically only with the Navy crew and not the scientists, overindulgence resulted in immediate termination or the ship Captain temporarily banning any and all alcohol from his ship.

Ships offered a space upon which people gathered for different purposes. In their free time, men on the expedition used the fantail – the flat open area of deck at the back of the ship where they took many of the oceanographic samples and measurements – for social gatherings. Sometimes they simply sat to watch the sunset or sunrise. Formal gatherings included parties to host diplomats or scientific personnel at ports of call. During Downwind an earthquake shook off the coast of

Chile, and oceanographers held a press conference on Baird while in Valparaíso where they explained the quake based on what they knew of the nearby fault. Horizon and Baird also gathered the expedition community in spectacle. When the ships crossed the equator the men partook in the crossing of the line ceremony in which seasoned sailors taunted first-time crossers through humiliation and a good toss (while naked) overboard. The ships then were also spaces marked by the rite of passage into seafaring tradition. For the oceanographers the act of going to sea equated with having personal adventures. While away they encountered the exotic at every turn whether, in the process of taking oceanographic measurements at sea, – cumbersome at best, extremely dangerous at worst but inherently exciting – living on the open ocean, or encountering foreign people and lands. Horizon and Baird offered themselves to oceanography as composites: spaces defined simultaneously by the military, scientific, and personal.

Specific aspects of their material and social makeup determined how oceanographers organized the expedition community, and because expeditions were the bread and butter of the science in this period, these effects manifested more broadly as parameters of the entire field. From their original construction, Horizon and Baird offered a physical space created to hold enlisted Navy

172 personnel. The ships were not built and organized to carry some 20 crewmembers as background operators standing by while an additional 10-15 scientists worked around the clock sampling the ocean environment. Their translation to research vessel, though extensive, could not alter the bulk of space allocations and partitioning. As workspaces, the ships had trouble accommodating two groups of this size engaged in very different activities, especially since the scientific party used large and heavy measuring equipment. The available space at sea was less than ideal for scientific investigations. The original metal and rubber construction allowed seawater in virtually every inch of the ships. Water made it difficult to store equipment that would have been better dry, especially the sensitive electronic equipment in the scientific laboratory. Because electronic equipment was exposed to copious amounts of seawater, scientists faced real danger of electrocution. Further, the space did not adequately accommodate civilian scientists’ expectations of living conditions.

Comfortable sleep space was limited, yet scientists held expectations that their accommodations should include cabin space, 272 not just an open bunk next to Navy oilers and mess cooks.

Image 27: Berthing compartment on Baird, 1952. Top: Alan Jones, Center: Ned Barr, Lower: John Macfall. Photo Creator: Edward Sheldon Barr. SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents

272 Image 27: SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. Edward Sheldon Barr Papers, 1950-1975. Copyright UC Regents. Photographer: Edward Sheldon Barr. Alan Jones, top. Ned Barr, center. John Macfall, lower.

173 Their design also worked to thwart ocean navigation. The US military designed, built, and categorized ocean-going vessels for highly specific purposes. Horizon was an “auxiliary tug” under the category ATA, while Baird was of the LT, “Large Tug,” design.273 These ships were built to operate on the open ocean as auxiliary tugs in support of bigger tugs that operated within combat zones. In the military, Horizon and Baird sat on the edge of combat zones and waited for larger tugs outfitted with more weapons to bring them inoperative vessels, which they then towed further away from the combat zone for repairs. The Navy equipped them to travel long distances at sea to reach the combat zones, but their primary function was not to travel long distances repeatedly. Rather, they were support vehicles used to move other ships in and out of combat. Oceanographers needed the ships to travel long distances across the Pacific and then respond to intricate maneuvering over very specific spots on the ocean floor.

In practice, their original mechanical design could not meet sufficiently the scientific needs of repeated long-distance travel and very technical positioning without breaking down or causing uncomfortable social interactions. The realities of the aging engine components, sub-par electrical system, water permeable internal laboratory compartments, and problematically small personal spaces profoundly hindered oceanographic work and life. The architecture and mechanics of Horizon and Baird provided motility and a space for oceanographers to conduct their work at sea, but while

273 Levingston Shipbuilding in Orange, Texas completed building LT-581 on 30 June, 1944. Scripps used the ship under the name Spencer F. Baird from 1951 to 1963. Baird went back to the Maritime Commission until 1965 when she was sold to Vietnam and operated as Tien Sa, shipbuildinghistory.com compiles this information, accessed October 8, 2013. The Navy classified these tugs as “Ocean Tugs,” describing their intended use as: “They are well suited for use in reserve areas just outside combat zones where they will be in a position to relieve any ATF that may be engaged in towing a disabled vessel to a repair base or in performing any other similar task, thereby permitting the Fleet tug to return to the zone of combat. They should be used for major towing operations not in combat zones. Their armament is somewhat less than ATF’s and they have about one half the ATF horsepower.” ATF’s were a class higher and considered large seagoing tugs intended for long range, powerful, open ocean operations including in combat zones, Commodore W. A. Sullivan, U.S. Navy, Chief of Navy Salvage, “Confidential publication: Navy Seagoing Tugs and Related Craft General Characteristics, 21 June, 1944.” National Archives & Records Administration, Seattle Branch Record Group 181, Commandant's Office Central Subject Files 1944 Transcribed by RESEARCHER @ LARGE. Formatting & Comments Copyright R@L. Accessed at www.researchatlarge.com/Ships/Misc/1944TugCharacteristics.html.

174 partially enabling the science, the break down of architecture and mechanics of these ships tended to add fuel to what was already a heated social relationship between the Navy and oceanography.

Living and working on the ships put Navy crew and scientists into very close contact.

Conflicts arose over shipboard division of space, interpersonal discrepancies, and alcohol-induced banter, and researchers sometimes argued with ship captains over the positioning of ships. Ship malfunctions accentuated emotions around each of these struggles because they ensured negotiations took place in dangerous conditions where something always broke. Initially, ex-military tugs functioned as vehicles on which oceanographers went to sea at a scale not possible without

Navy patronage. The ships brought science and the Navy together toward the goal of more fully understanding the ocean environment. By the end of the 1950s, however, scientists came to realize the difficulties of using military equipment for science and expressed great dissatisfaction with the effects ships had on their work. A vibrant and contentious discourse emerged that involved a wide variety of people, from high-level university administrators to inexperienced graduate students. In these conversations and debates, the ships came to exhibit their own kind of agency through malfunction.

Agency in Malfunction

In 1956, two of the Regents of the University of California visited Horizon while on location in the Pacific. They both reported back to Robert G. Sproul, President of the University of

California. One said that he was “shocked to see the poor condition in which Horizon is maintained.”

Another called Horizon an “eyesore,” and both commented that the University should not have and operate ships if the maintenance costs exceeded the available budget. Sproul wrote a confidential memo alerting Revelle of the comments and asking for a rebuttal that could be made in defense of

175 the ship’s condition.274 Within one week Revelle assessed the situation by having the ships inspected.

He also wrote a response to Sproul that included a copy sent to the complaining Regents:

At the time (16 May) my memorandum was written, our opinion was that what the Regents referred to as the poor “condition” of the ship was in fact the poor appearance of the hull paint, brought about by rust from the steel deck being carried by sea water through the scuppers with consequent staining of the sides…Horizon had been thoroughly overhauled immediately before leaving on this expedition and was in the best possible condition when she left port…In addition to the normal expense of operating the Horizon, approximately, $60,000 was spent in the last fiscal year to prepare for this expedition and to meet Coast Guard requirements…Based on the reports I have received of the excellent scientific work of our party in the forward area, I believe that instead of being criticized for a relatively minor matter, they should be commended for work well done under trying conditions.275

Revelle emphasized in this memo the danger of oceanographic work at sea in order to proclaim that if at times minor issues such as hull paint were overlooked, it was because those operating the ships spent their limited time on the more serious issues of safety, responsibility, and competency on the open ocean. His response contradicted shipboard realities because in fact, Horizon was not in “the best possible condition when she left port,” and Revelle knew that.

274 Robert G. Sproul, “Confidential Memo to Director Revelle, July 5, 1956,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon, 1952-1956. 275 Roger Revelle, “Memo to President Robert G. Sproul, 13 July, 1956,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon, 1952-1956.

176

Image 28: Research Vessel Horizon, 1953. Photographer: Alan Churchill Jones. SIO Archive. UC San Diego Library. Alan Churchill Jones Photographs, 1952-1972. Copyright UC Regents. Recall that Scripps acquired Horizon in 1948 and Baird in 1951. By 1954, Scripps oceanographers who worked on the ships began reporting to the Director’s Office fundamental breakdowns in the ships’ functionality. These early statements of malfunction conveyed hesitation to criticize and often started off by saying that the ships were generally “very good.” Even so, the men who travelled on the ships became increasingly concerned over many aspects of these research vessels. In the 1954 report of ship performance on Scripps’ Trans-Pac expedition to Japan, oceanographer Warren Wooster – who had just received his PhD from Scripps in 1953 but would go on to become one of the most internationally successful oceanographers of his generation – stated:

In 1949 we were very optimistic about the maneuverability and control of the diesel- electric sea-going tug. However, my experience on HORIZON during SHELLBACK and on BAIRD during TRANS-PAC indicates that these ships are often not very successful at maneuvering to reduce wire angle during oceanographic stations. This was particularly evident during work in strong currents…as well as in the strong winds and heavy swells of the North Pacific…Although speed control of [the ships] is very good, the high bow and large sail forward makes it necessary to carry a larger number of turns than would otherwise be necessary…The most obvious solution to this problem is a ship and power plant of different design…It is commonly believed that both [ships] have a cruising range of about 15,000 miles…An estimation of the Baird Arrival Reports

177 show quite a different picture…Even under the ideal conditions [Baird has] an apparent limiting range of about 9500 miles.

Wooster continued to flesh out the details of things that didn’t work on the ship or that didn’t quite fit the needs of oceanographers, including how the ships limited travel distance because it was determined by the inability to transfer fuel on any one ship from one tank to another; limited fresh water storage capacity; the “appalling conditions” of living quarters onboard; poor ventilation; poor design of the mess hall; inadequate space for processing scientific data; shortage of recreational space; inadequate noise barriers between compartments; lack of office space; lack of traffic space such that several key areas continually had men bumping into one another; a leaking laboratory door such that copious amounts of water got into the compartment where men tried to operate electronic equipment; unsuitable storage space for supplies and equipment; useless wet stowage space under the fantail; dampness verging on soaking wet conditions of all other storage rooms; continual flow of water through the packing of the transducer; corrosion of stored supplies; limited electrical outlets; unsatisfactory small fishing boat onboard; leaky deck under dredging winch; rain exposed electrical panels; unreliable generator; winches missing wind-device; worn out deck stand fair-leader for winch; and improperly functioning winch.276 This list is extensive, but I detail it here primarily for two reasons. First, it helps illuminate the fact that the problems on the ships involved a wide variety of onboard components that continually malfunctioned. Being onboard was almost a perpetual exercise in troubleshooting. The men had to attempt to maneuver around the weather, water, oddly placed equipment, broken equipment, and all the other issues Wooster described. Bennett explains that vibrant matter, or the actant in an assemblage, “makes the difference, makes things happen,

276 Warren Wooster, “Memorandum to The Director, University of California, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California. Subject: Trans-Pacific Expedition, performance of equipment, 11 January, 1954,” SIO Subject Files, Box 22, Folder 1 Expedition Praus-Pac 1953 Baird. (This letter regarding Trans-Pac expedition does seem to be filed mistakenly with the Praus-Pac expedition materials.)

178 becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.”277 The acquisition of ships after WWII for oceanography is typically described as a technological advancement or the availability of technology that helped launch ocean science into the world of postwar Big Science.278 But if we look at lived experience on these ships at sea, it becomes obvious that in some major ways they functioned in a state of severe dilapidation, which made the men using them turn their attention away from research work and toward mechanical repair. Second, these malfunctions pushed oceanographers and Navy crew into negative exchanges at the administrative and planning level. Scripps leaders communicated with the Naval station commanders about what work was needed and the extent it would be allowed. For each of the complaints that made it back to the Director’s Office or Marine Operations

Division there were dozens of others that required immediate attention for fear of danger or missed opportunity to gather data at sea.

The seemingly excessive list of malfunctions provided by Wooster is vital to our understanding of Horizon and Baird and their place in ocean science. The ships were problematic from the day they came to Scripps. Scripps heralded them as wonderful advancements to ocean science. But in practice at sea, they existed literally as broken equipment. Some things functioned sometimes. But a lot of components broke down most of the time. Or if something did work properly, there was a high chance that it would become broken in the harsh oceanic environment.

The ships created tension within the Scripps community itself: between intense desire and disheartening disappointment. Scientists desired the ships for the possibility that they gave to secure

277 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 9. 278 As early as 1902, the Carnegie Institution of Washington certainly began funding a series of American expeditions, and this continued up until World War II. In this period, the federal government, individual philanthropists interested in marine science, universities and museums also funded scientific expeditions to sea. But before the war there were only three official oceanographic institutions that formally centralized expedition science, and they had a meager combined budget of less than $250,000. In 1948, the Navy gave some $600,000 to these three oceanographic laboratories and over the next decade spent a total of $46 million on academic oceanography. Expeditions occurred before the war, but after the war the scale was astronomically different. Menard, The Ocean of Truth, 38. Ronald E. Doel, “Expeditions and the CIW: Comments and Contentions,” The Earth, the Heavens, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, History of Geophysics, Volume 5, Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union, 1994: 79-87.

179 a spot for oceanography on the world stage in Cold War Big Science and to study the mysterious but yet completely unknown depths of the sea. The very instrument that took oceanography to sea, however, could lead to scientific failure when research vessels just did not work right.

The year before Downwind left port in San Diego, a negative review in a routine inspection put Horizon and Baird under the U. S. Coast Guard’s microscope.279 In March of 1956, just 19 months before Downwind left port in San Diego, the US Coast Guard deemed Baird unfit for ocean travel and restricted her to lakes, bays, and streams.280 The Marine Inspector, Commander Lloyd

Stoltz at the US Coast Guard, called into question the stability of Baird due to poor ballast conditions. The ballast tank (a tank at the lowest point of the ship’s hull used to hold water which offsets the upward weight of the ship to prevent capsizing) was short by 50 tons of water in a tank that required 80 tons to maintain stability in an open ocean environment. Because it was a very similar vessel, Stoltz also questioned Horizon’s stability and called for appropriate testing. The Coast

Guard did not end up restricting Horizon, and it offered two options for repairing Baird: 1) adding all liquid to make up for the deficient ballast or 2) adding part liquid and part solid ballast. While Navy personnel made the repairs quickly and Baird went on six major open ocean expeditions throughout

1956, the extent of continual malfunction regularly thwarted and sometimes seriously endangered the possibility of doing research at sea.

Increasingly by 1956, the same year Revelle defended Horizon against criticism from the

Regents of the University of California, Scripps oceanographers who actually traveled on Horizon and Baird also called their form, function, and stability as scientific instruments into question. PhD student John Knauss – who alternated his time as a graduate student and as an enlisted Navy sailor,

279 Like all ex-military vessels turned to civilian use, Horizon and Baird continued to be under the inspection and licensing jurisdiction of the US Coast Guard. 280 19 March, 1956 (S3/V-22-SD), Lloyd L. Stoltz, Commander, U.S. Coast Guard, Acting Officer in Charge, Marine Inspection, letter to C. W. Colbeth, Marine Supt., Naval Electronics Laboratory, San Diego, 6, California. SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 66, Folder 17 Baird: 1951-52, 54-59.

180 and who would go on to become Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, a member of the Stratton Commission under President Lyndon Johnson, founder of NOAA’s Sea Grant Program, and Administrator of NOAA under the first Bush Administration – alerted the administrative members of Scripps’ Marine Operations Committee of Horizon’s insufficient personal and scientific conditions. Knauss was not alone in expressing these problematic experiences onboard Horizon and Baird. By 1956 and into 1957, complaints streamed in to Marine

Operations administrators and to the Director’s Office.281

Revelle’s response in turn changed. He reversed his earlier assertions that the US Navy was vital to oceanography. He began to underplay the military presence and accentuate scientific ownership over the ships: “In spite of occasional humorous ribbing to the contrary, Scripps

Institution’s ships are neither Naval vessels nor yachts, but working boats with one and only one mission: To carry out as effectively as possible scientific work at sea.”282 Tied to those comments,

Revelle always defended the conditions of Horizon and Baird. With the political charisma he was known for, Revelle situated Horizon and Baird as icons of science without which oceanography on the open sea would not be possible. Thus, when he said that the ships were in their “best” condition, as in his response to the University Regent’s criticism, he really meant: their “best” condition considering available options, time, and money, which by no means indicated whether or not the ships actually worked the way that oceanographers expected them to work – because in many ways they did not.

281 Many examples are easily located in the SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19 “Ships Horizon 1952-1956 and Folder 21 Horizon 1957-63. 282 Roger Revelle, “16 May 1956 Letter to Mr. James H. Corley, Vice President, Business Affairs,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon 1952-1956. And as footnote 45 above conveys: by 1956 Revelle admitted in a private letter to the University Vice President of Business Affairs: “We have been attempting to withdraw from this work because it is becoming more engineering in character with less research interest, but the national interests require our participation. They have stated that we have proved to be the only agency qualified to produce essential results concerning the distribution of fall out and radioactivity from the explosions. We have, therefore, reluctantly continued our participation.” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, 1890-1981, Box 62, Folder 19 Ships Horizon 1952-1956, page 2.

181 But at the same time, Revelle went to great lengths, alongside the Marine Operations

Superintendents and administrators at the Naval Electronics Laboratory, where time and money would allow, to improve the ships’ safety and functionality. In the summer of 1957, the new Marine

Superintendent, Peter G. Trapani, notified ship captains that worked within the Scripps fleet that new safety procedures would need to be followed, such as requiring safety hats, life jackets, and safety belts while working with scientific equipment on the main decks of Horizon and Baird.283 Two and a half months later, Scripps began taking bids from local private shipyards for major repair work and further re-design on Horizon and Baird. The proposed changes were on par with the scope of the original conversions of both vessels, including dry docking, underwater cleaning and painting, sandblasting, new dredging winch, replacement of much of the major scientific instrumentation on the main deck, new oil storage compartment, new vent blower, and overhaul of vapor evaporators.

However, due to the dissatisfaction with the functionality of the ex-military ships, this time Scripps sought non-military labor. Plans were made to further transform Horizon and Baird into scientific things and remove all hints of their military beginnings. The new translations would be designed by

Scripps engineers and constructed with private funding by a non-military shipbuilder.

Oceanographers had formulated a strong institutional identity at Scripps, and they began thinking about their research as an endeavor of ocean science that did not need to, and perhaps no longer should, rely upon the U.S. military.

A growing dissatisfaction with military ships caused a desire for a new source of patronage, but Scripps engineers and administrators were cautious about making such a heavy financial and operational transition. The bidding companies became suspicious that there were reasons beyond

283 Peter G. Trapani, “Memorandum to Captain, M/V. Baird, Subject: Personnel safety equipment, 8 July, 1957,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 62, Folder 19: Ships Horizon 1952-1956.

182 economics and budget for the rejection because all bids were declined.284 In October of 1957, F. H.

Watts of Southwest Iron and Steel Corporation called Revelle to complain about the fact that

Scripps rejected all bids for work on Horizon and Baird.285 While no transcript of this call exists, letters and memos state two reasons for the rejection. Scripps’ Business Manager, John C. Kirby, told the companies that the bids contained errors, which released Scripps from any legal obligation of continuing with the work.286 These errors varied quite a bit: an incorrect bid form was used; additional work items were added by addendum but time for bidding was not extended, which violated University of California and State codes; one company was eliminated entirely because oral communications led to confusion about what items were up for repair; another company contested the bid of another that was deemed too low; and a third company bid twice for the same work; finally, typos generated incorrect subtotals and pricing.287 Kirby told Revelle, however, that after seeing bids from two companies, the Marine Superintendant changed his mind and decided that the ships did not need dry-docking and thus Scripps could just complete the work itself.288

The extent to which seeking these bids was sincere or a chance for the Superintendent to determine what it would really cost to switch from military patronage of ships to University funding and labor from a local private shipyard is unclear. In 1956-1957, Scripps oceanographers began asking the University to cover more of the costs related to ships so that the Institution could begin operating without military procedures, requirements, and research goals. Scripps leaders felt that enough time had passed since the incorporation of the oceanographic institution into the greater

University of California system. They appreciated Naval support that got oceanography to sea

284 See correspondence between Scripps Business Manager John C. Kirby and the following companies that submitted bids: Campbell Machine, Inc., National Steel and Shipbuilding Corp., San Diego Marine Construction Co., and Southwest Iron and Steel Corp., SIO Subject Files, Box 55, Folder 7: Ships 56-59. 285 Ibid. Memorandum: W. M. Burgeson to Roger Revelle, October 4, 1957. 286 Ibid., John C. Kirby October 3, 1957 letter to the shipbuilding companies. 287 Ibid., John C. Kirby, “Report of the Rejection of Bids LJ 30431-0, 30434-0, 30431-1, and 30434-1.” 288 Ibid., John C. Kirby October 4, 1957 memo to Roger Revelle.

183 immediately after WWII but pointed to sufficient evidence that open ocean research was valuable beyond military needs. In reference to scientific hopes of severing basic research goals from Naval agendas, the budget request literally asked for university funds in order to “free research at sea.”289

The incident signaled a shift within Scripps’ administrative practices from active pursuit and heralding of Naval contracts to dissatisfaction and hopes to cut the ties between the U. S. military and Scripps science at sea. Oceanographers now desired a separation between the lifeblood of their institution, their ships, and the US Navy.

Instead of undergoing complete overhauls, Horizon and Baird left port in San Diego on the

21st of October, 1957 on the Downwind expedition, under the International Geophysical Year.290

Their physical and functional conditions at the time mirrored those of years prior. In the years after

Downwind, complaints to the administrators of Scripps did not slow. Comments and concerns steadily flowed in and became more and more ripe with strong opinions about what could be done to operate these aging and in many ways dilapidated ocean vessels more effectively. The discourse also became much more heated. People who took the time to write in often expressed extreme frustration that Scripps allowed the operation of these ships under these conditions. A research geologist expressed what many were thinking:

The lack of proper maintenance is imputed to excessive use of the ships and lack of money. Perhaps one solution is to operate only as many ships as one can afford. Also, if we did not expect maintenance work from ship personnel but had maintenance men to

289 SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 9, Folder 15 “Budge: La Jolla Campus Budget Request, 1956-957,” “1956-1957 Tentative Budget, La Jolla Campus.” 290 In the midst of a growing desire for separation of ship operations from the Navy, Scripps participated in the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958. The details of planning this program in relation to oceanography, including attention to the ideal of cooperation, focus on synoptic data collection, the use of ships for studying oceanic circulation, IGY as a way to boost the field of oceanography, cooperation with the Navy and related data sharing, and some attention to activities on the Downwind expedition, see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Chapter 3 The International Geophysical Year,” in Oceanographers and the Cold War, 59-98. In that chapter, Hamblin argues that, “the most significant legacy of the IGY was not cooperation but, rather, renewed competition with Soviet science,” 96. He mentions the growing tensions between Scripps and the Navy, especially around data sharing.

184 work on the ships while the crew is on leave, we could keep them at sea even longer than we do now, and have them in better shape.291

The Scripps community that used Horizon and Baird at sea came to see them as “dangerous” ships that in many areas lacked basic scientific functionality.

Bennett explains that the vitality of things must be shared with the recognition of human participation. She explains, “We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way.”292 The dialogues regarding ship malfunctions often included reference to dissatisfactions oceanographers harbored toward the Naval crew and their place, in physical space and labor, on the ships. Horizon and Baird, as military tugs turned malfunctioning research vessels, catalyzed some of the drama and tensions that arose between Scripps and the Navy. Historians have debated whether it was oceanographers or the Navy that drove intellectual questions and practices during this period of strong military patronage. In addition to such institutional factors, Horizon and

Baird themselves exercised a causal force in shaping scientific relations with the Navy. The malfunctioning of these ships pushed Navy Captains and crew into particularly heated interactions with oceanographers while on the open ocean when everyone’s lives were at risk and quick and competent troubleshooting of any and all problems became incredibly pertinent in the face of danger. The persistent breakdowns often called into question who was responsible for what, brought about arguments, and by the second half of the 1950s, left Scripps oceanographers deeply unsatisfied with the fact that their livelihood at sea depended upon Navy support.

Scripps administrators put Marine Facilities staff to work investigating what it would take to

“get better ships into oceanographic research work.”293 By 1963, Scripps stopped using Horizon for

291 Victor Vacquier, “6 October, 1959, Memorandum to J. D. Frautschy, Assistant Director, SIO, Subject: Suggestions for improving the Spencer F. Baird,” SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 66, Folder 17 “Baird 1951-52, 54-59,” page 2. 292 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 14. 293 Allyn C. Vine, “January 16, 1958 Report Logical Vessels for Conversion to Research Ships,” to NRC, ONR, BuShips, SIO, Lamont, Hudson, SIO Subject Files, AC 6, Box 37, Folder 6 Ship Operations 1955-1958, page 2.

185 active oceanographic research and converted the ship to a towboat for FLIP: the Floating

Instrument Platform specifically designed and built for oceanographic work. In 1965 Scripps turned

Baird back over to her actual owner, the Maritime Commission, and Scripps re-sold Horizon in

1968.294 As scientific research vessels, ex-military tugboats had a life in which malfunction manifested as a form of resistance to oceanographic work. In Bennett’s sense, these ships possessed

“thing-power” through animated malfunction that allowed them to act, in many cases, in opposition to scientific research goals and produce a formative rift in the relationship between Scripps and the

Navy.

Conclusion

Within oceanography, funding changes were not instigated just by oceanographers. The

Navy’s interest in supporting fleet operations also changed because by this time the basics of underwater acoustics were very well understood. Near surface temperature had been mapped for areas of prime military interest. ONR funding for ship operations in particular declined markedly after 1960, and oceanographers shifted their search for patronage to other sources, primarily NSF.295

No doubt, the bond between the US Navy and Scripps grew, intensified, and strengthened in many ways beginning after WWII and throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. However, the relationship had many layers, and in regards to ships and their operations, the failure of the WWII tug boats to perform as centers of ocean research left oceanographers to work in dangerous and dysfunctional conditions. Oceanographers sailed onto the cold war stage of Big Science from broken down, dilapidated, and dangerous research vessels that barely offered the functionalities they needed.

294 Remember from earlier in the chapter, Scripps possessed these two ships under different terms. They actually purchased Horizon outright, but Baird was only on loan from the Maritime Commission. 295 Ibid.

186 Interactions involving the ships after WWII developed not in a linear progression of mutual benefit, but under a complicated series of highs and lows that by the 1960s resulted in mutual dissatisfaction and both parties looking to end that layer of their partnership. At the center of these tensions and the eventual shift that led Scripps into the arms of the NSF were the ships themselves.

This sort of interpretation begs the question: is it really appropriate to afford agency to Horizon and

Baird as inanimate things capable of causing change within a human scientific community? As they appear in much of the history of oceanography, Horizon and Baird seem more or less unremarkable: salty platforms for research; floating laboratories; scientific tools marked by rust and Naval tradition; symbols of a cold war era of ocean science at sea. Human beings dominate as the designers and instigators of oceanographic planning, politics, and research work. The ships sit motionless until manipulated by human hands.

We could discard them there in the realm of inanimate machines: metallic things covered in engine grease and virtually drowning in salt water; heaps of junk that, albeit problematically, did get oceanographers out to sea to conduct deep ocean research. Although they were machines in every sense of the word, Horizon and Baird defied mechanics. In design and malfunction, these inanimate artifacts caused animate effects. While every corner of their physical structure and every turn of their engines required human hands for construction and mechanical operation, once translated from military combat support vessels into research ships, they operated on their own to gather people in new ways and crystallize a new form of oceanographic practice.

On expeditions, oceanographers, Navy personnel, and various other participants worked to complete a set of scientific tasks. Horizon and Baird forced that community into a cult of work wedded to heavy labor. The ships obliged people to care for them, and in doing so formulated a tradition of oceanographic practice that enveloped extensive ship maintenance and troubleshooting into scientific practice. Virtually everyone that travelled on these ships during Scripps expeditions

187 became enlisted in the care of them in one form or another because doing anything required attention to their malfunctioning nature. As this chapter has discussed, that work continued outside of expeditions – painting in port and extensive repairs and multiple re-designs in dry dock.

Over the decade of the 1950s, oceanographers saw no other choice but to mitigate this situation as best they could. They engaged in continuous care of Horizon and Baird, and both ships underwent several major overhauls geared toward perfecting the vessels for scientific research. Of course, the ships went to sea dozens of times each year almost no matter their condition. While living and working through the realities of malfunction, Scripps grew its identity as a world-class oceanographic institution defined by work at sea. But something unexpected also happened.

Oceanographers came to take pride in the fact that they worked in the difficult and dangerous conditions provided by these ships.

Horizon and Baird emerged from the 1950s not merely as research vessels or laboratories, but as vital entities that defined the Scripps way of life. Oceanographers developed pride in the growth of their discipline and their ability to assist in national security goals and historically profound projects such as atomic bomb tests from the decks of their ships. At the intersection of great frustration over malfunctioning ships and intense pride of unprecedented exploration of the world’s oceans, work at sea was an adventure. Oceanographers passionately owned their duties at sea, and

Horizon and Baird not only centralized a community of laborers around them, but multiplied and intensified that labor. As objects toward which oceanographers directed a lot of physical care and around which they invested a lot of emotion, Horizon and Baird gave rise to an astonishing amount of talk, including their own personification. As they continued to age and dilapidate, oceanographers continued to care for the ships. Their constitution caused a breaking point, as I described, when oceanographers sought ships designed for science. However, for more than a decade both Horizon

188 and Baird gathered a community of supporters who took the ships to sea, labored for them in trying conditions, and dedicated incredibly large amounts of money to them.

The message of this chapter is not merely that Horizon and Baird operated poorly in different moments as machines, vehicles, laboratories,296 personal spaces, spaces of spectacle, and deep- research platforms. They certainly were all of those things, and they malfunctioned at every turn.297

We might even liken Horizon and Baird to another research vessel from an earlier period. A scientist that worked aboard the primary ship in the 1930s and 1940s at the Woods Hole Oceanographic

Institute once described research vessel Atlantis as “the tail that wagged the entire dog.”298 At

Scripps, a new scale of oceanographic practice focused on the deep sea came mired with a reality of profound malfunction. When oceanographers brought the ships to their institution, they did not anticipate the extent to which malfunctions would impact their work, their community, and their

296 In part, Horizon and Baird certainly were laboratories. First, the scientists considered them so and had special space set aside as the “laboratory,” which held scientific instruments and from where oceanographers analyzed data, wrote reports, and created charts of the characteristics of the ocean. This space was where they did much of their scientific work. However we can also see these ships as spaces that altered the ocean as an object of scientific inquiry, a fundamental and defining characteristic of laboratories. These ships made it so oceanographers did not have to engage with their object of study “as it is”, “where it is”, or “when it happened.” They never saw the deep sea floor, deep-water currents, nor the carbon dioxide in the surface waters. They brought those things onboard the ships in samples that altered their form and location or as numerical representations. With these samples and related data, oceanographers came to understand the long history of the prehistoric formation of the ocean; they were not required to view the structures or processes first hand. See Karin Knorr Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory Science,” in Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 117. 297 Horizon and Baird are not “boundary objects” as conceived by Susan Star and James Griesemer in the most often used sense of an object with interpretive flexibility or representations of objects of scientific inquiry (i.e. collections or lists of taxa) that inhabit multiple social worlds (i.e. museum collectors and ecological theorists). The ships themselves are not objects of scientific inquiry. While they do inhabit multiple social worlds, the concept of “boundary object” developed by Star and Griesemer describes objects that adapt to the different scientific worlds they flow between. What I have described instead are two ships that caused a social world to adapt to them. As Star and Griesemer intended the concept, a boundary object is defined by its use: objects that form boundaries between groups by meeting the informational and work needs of those groups. Their intent is not to attend to the “thing”-ness of things but to describe how some objects are things that people act toward and with, for instance a theory rather than a car. Now, a car could be a boundary object, but only when used between groups in the particular way that the authors describe for boundary objects. For the ships, I am interested in the “thing”-ness insofar as it relates to their malfunction, thus the concept of boundary object does not apply in this chapter. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology: ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907- 39,” Social Studies of Science 19, issue 3 (Aug. 1989): 387-420. Also see, Susan Leigh Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 5 (September 2010): 601-617. 298 Eric Mills, Biological Oceanography, pp. 274.

189 relationship with the patron that provided the ships in first place. On these ships and in discourse regarding them, it was hazy where the military ended and science began; where the personal mind and body ended and the scientific self arose; where function emerged out of perpetual dysfunctions; where mutual benefit melded into mutual distaste; and where artifact became identifiable persona. If we take their malfunctions seriously, it becomes clear that the social world of oceanography

(specifically the scientific-Navy relationship) was, in part, determined by the material conditions in which science on the sea operated.

190 Prologue to Chapter 4 Maxwell Silverman’s Cartoon

Image 29: Maxwell Silverman's Downwind cartoon. Photo Creator: Denzil Ford. SIO Archives. Document Collection: SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 9, “Expedition Downwind October 1957-Feb 1958.” Copyright UC Regents.

191 Chapter 4 Boundary Objects: Scripps’ Hidden Shipboard Ecology

Introduction

Maxwell Silverman’s 1958 cartoon tells several stories about expedition life. The image illustrates the bodily experience of contracting amoebic dysentery and encounters with indigenous

Pacific Island fishing boats, women, and ancient relics. The drawing, however, primarily visualizes expedition work: seismic profiles, winch line repair, deep-sea coring probe, mitigation of animal encounters, and the deep-sea research vessels themselves. Silverman paired words with this work with the phrase, “Probing the depths with fingers of steel whilst pushing aside the iron curtain of the sea is fun!” By illustrating himself, an engineer, and Horizon’s Navy ship Captain, he hinted at the ways in which science was a social activity formed by a highly heterogeneous amalgamation of extremely diverse individuals, groups of co-workers, and the material world. When I encountered this document in the archive, it occurred to me that not much has been written about these men who endured all of the troubles and difficulties of conducting science at sea, and have received very little credit for their input. Who were the oceanographic assistants working on ships, and what were their contributions to the process of knowledge production on expeditions?

This chapter mobilizes the concept of “boundary objects” as conceived by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer in order to illuminate the voices of a foreign scientist and Navy crew that have remained silent in the historiography and shine a new light on shipboard social interactions that were the foundation of ocean research. I present index maps and explosives as “boundary objects” that operated in different capacities to facilitate the collection of deep-sea ocean data. I focus precisely on what I consider to be the most fruitful product of Star and Griesemer’s method: illumination of silenced voices in the process of knowledge production. For the original authors, they were amateur scientists, trappers, and university administrators. In the context of the

192 Downwind expedition, these were foreign scientists and Navy crew. My examples explain, first, how one foreign scientist made suggestions that prompted Downwind’s expedition leader to completely alter the expedition’s trajectory, and second, the ways in which Navy crew provided Scripps scientists with vital technological knowledge. These contributions, however, are not easy to come by when studying extant archival documents. It is true, Scripps does possess oral and written records for a few military personnel that found employment at the Marine Physical Laboratory, and especially those who rose to senior positions. And Scripps’ oceanographers have referenced Navy crew in their own correspondence and oral histories. The voices, however, of junior Navy crew

(who in numbers were the majority group on expeditions) and international oceanographers (who worked at sea with Scripps scientists) have been all but erased from the historical record and can only be uncovered in any significant detail through attention to the material objects that centralized shipboard scientific exchanges. Turning our attention to the ways in which each of these two groups interacted with oceanographers through objects during the process of knowledge production demonstrates something that the historiography thus far has almost completely overlooked: foreign scientists and Navy crew were, at times, significant players in the ecology of shipboard science.

Star and Griesemer posed the concept of “boundary objects” in “Institutional Ecology,

“Translations,” and Boundary Objects” as a method toward understanding how people with varied agendas have collaborated during the scientific process despite differences in prior experience and goals.299 The authors used the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California,

Berkeley as a particular case study to develop their concept.300 Their essay is complex and it was

299 Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professional in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39,” in Mario Biagioli, ed., The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge (1999): 505-524. Also see, S. L. Star, “The structure of ill-structured solutions: Boundary objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving, in Readings in distributed artificial intelligence, M. Huhns and L. Gasser, eds., Menlo Park, CA: Kaufman (1988); and G. Bowker and S. L. Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Cambridge: MIT Press (1999). 300 Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1907-1939.

193 meant to open conversations: the authors premised that their “discussion is suggestive rather than conclusive,”301 and intended their propositions for application to many different case studies across complex institutional settings where diverse groups of people work to construct representations of nature. The Museum functioned because several categories of non-scientists participated in the process of creating knowledge about the landscape of California. At its core, that process involved objects, “boundary objects” such as maps, notebook lists, and specimens, that facilitated the translation of data, information, and interpretations between non-scientists and scientists. Star and

Griesemer developed an analytical framework that allows us to see the hidden workers at the

Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. As their title indicates, they sought to understand scientific institutions as ecologies in which knowledge moved between different people through the objects at the boundaries of social divisions.

Many boundary objects moved through the museum, but the umbrella boundary object was the museum itself.302 According to Star, boundary objects can emerge in particular circumstances, yet not every thing in the material world should be considered one.303 In their situation of choice, scientific work was conducted by “extremely diverse groups of actors”304 and those actors were required to create common understandings and procedures in order to gather information reliably.

The people who participated in collecting information and creating knowledge for the Museum literally turned seemingly typical things, such as a map of California or a list of specimens, into boundary objects by treating them as a common ground upon which collective goals could be reached. In the museum, amateur biologists, trappers, and scientists collected specimens and

301 Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology,” p. 505. 302 Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 612. The authors intended to use this institution as just one case in order to suggest a way forward void “of normative statements about the true and proper meaning and use of boundary objects.” 303 Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 5 (2010): 612-613. 304 Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects,” p. 505.

194 gathered data separately, but under standardized protocols. Boundary objects were the things that allowed information to flow between these groups and provided scientists with reliable information from which they constructed representations of the natural world.

Boundary objects provide a mechanism for seeing a particular kind of collaborative process involving one group that is an obvious contributor – the participant we all assume to know about on some level – and another (or multiple other) group(s) – whose contributions and extent of participation is much less obvious. Star and Griesemer’s subtitle calls out “Amateurs” (the unknown group) and “Professionals” (the familiar group). I intuit that the entire boundary object concept as originally built was meant to give voice to silenced historical actors. The museum was an umbrella boundary object that gathered people because it was a central facility that professional scientists, amateur naturalists, patrons, hired hands, and administrators physically shared. Lower-level boundary objects worked differently. Maps and specimen lists, for example, gathered the intellectual efforts of these people, and for Star and Griesemer, offered explanatory power in that they uncovered how behind-the-scenes people came to work together successfully with scientists despite the fact that they did not collaborate based on consensus in agenda, prior experience, or expertise.

Each group maintained a wide variety of individual agendas and intellectual commitments.

The Director of the Museum, Joseph Grinnell, was a zoologist who wanted to collect and analyze specimens in order to develop a theory in which the environment was the driving force behind

Darwinian evolution. Grinnell’s research required the assistance of many others because he alone could not survey the entire landscape of California.305 Amateur collectors wanted to help with the museum’s agenda because they shared the ideal that the natural landscape should be preserved and available for the public to use. Amateurs participated in collecting expeditions to get out and enjoy

305 Star & Griesemer list several other groups while admitting that they cannot attend fully to all of their efforts in such a short article. These groups include, university administrators, professors, research scientists, curators, amateur collectors, private sponsors and patrons, field hands, government officials, and members of scientific clubs.

195 nature, but also to experience the excitement of acting as a collector of animals. Trappers were not interested in conservation or science, but exchanged rare specimens and scientifically viable information for money. University administrators accommodated the museum as long as its shipping and sugar fortune heiress and creator, Annie Montague Alexander, continued to fund it, because doing so assisted the University of California in its quest to become a nationally renowned institution.

All of the groups in Star and Griesemer’s museum example participated in museum work for different reasons, but they all agreed to follow pre-determined protocols for collecting flora and fauna. Collectors from all groups froze animal limbs in standardized positions, took color photographs of pelage and scales before they changed color after death, collected from particular geographical locations, wrote field notes, and created maps. In essence, even though each group came to the work for varied reasons, they all worked toward a shared goal of conservation under which each group’s individual desires became satisfied.

The museum, then, was the quintessential boundary object made to bring diverse people who held alternating motivations together toward the goal of conserving the California landscape. Under that umbrella boundary object, many others operated to gather people in collaboration. Maps, for instance, were a crucial tool for reporting field work. But each group drew up different information in its maps. Amateur collectors emphasized campsites, trails, and fruitful collecting locations.

Professional biologists, however, focused on recording “life zones” as shaded areas.306 Both forms worked with California as the defining ecological boundary. Star and Griesemer explain, “Then the environmental factors can be superimposed on the maps of ecological units, and the strongest concordances used to rank environmental factors as delimiters of species distributions.”307 The

306 Star & Griesemer do not offer further clarification of how these life zones were recorded as shaded areas. 307 Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology…,” p. 516.

196 authors did not state explicitly what methods or which actors brought these maps together. They did not recount an instance in which someone literally put two specific maps together, thereby fusing this divergent data into a tangible collaboration. Rather, their preliminary and suggestive account postulated that under the aegis of the Museum, the varied data (originating from different sources with slightly alternative views on which information was most important) came together in maps. In effect, people worked separately to generate representations of nature. Those maps and lists contained varied information that acted as boundary objects because each represented a shared desire to conserve the natural landscape. As a boundary object, the Museum itself made joint endeavors possible because the people who worked within its walls and towards its goals used it as a

“bridge” between scientists who collected specimens and data and the amateur naturalists who helped. The Museum created a space for amateur naturalists to turn hobbies, such as birding, into legitimate participation in the scientific process. Both parties valued and used the museum outside of these collaborations, but once it became a shared workspace, scientists and amateurs used the museum as a “common coin”308 with which to understand one another and work together.

Therefore, the concept of a “boundary object,” according to Star and Griesemer can be useful for understanding science as a social activity when the following basic points are true:

1. Extremely different groups find themselves sharing workspaces.

2. These groups work in collaboration, but that collaboration does not necessarily depend upon shared activities or consensus – that is, each group comes to its own work with a prior set of knowledge, agendas, and ways of seeing. These outside goals and perspectives are maintained throughout the collaboration.

3. Collaboration, however, depends upon a shared common goal (or set of common goals) for the duration of the interaction. Groups can, and often do, hold their own goals separately. Yet during the work together, there must be something everyone agrees to work towards.

4. Certain components of the material world, called “boundary objects,” act as bridges that allow the diverse groups to come to practical common understandings and working

308 Ibid., p. 520.

197 procedures long enough for collaborations to succeed. Maps, for example, presented California as the common ground upon which amateurs could work toward conservation without learning theoretical biology, and scientists could enlist information gathered by amateurs into their expert characterizations of the landscape.

As originally conceived, the concept of boundary objects offered a mechanism to explain how groups of knowledge makers come together in shared workspaces and successfully execute common goals.

Indeed, many scholars in different fields have taken up the concept and made adjustments in applications across a diverse set of case studies.309 Sketches and maps created on paper, a single word, a jointly executed action, specimens, people, organizations, technologies, and natural objects are just a handful of the kinds of things to which scholars have applied the boundary object framework. The method invites a level of analysis to the social and cultural production of science that explains collaboration as tightly tied to local circumstances, everyday activities, and material objects.

309 Some examples that offer a breadth of fields of inquiry include: Nick J. Fox, “Boundary Objects, Social Meanings, and the Success of New Technologies, Sociology 45 (2011): 70-85 (This essay extends – some might say counters – Star & Griesemer’s original conception by suggesting that some boundary objects fail to facilitate reaching a common goal. Instead of concluding that those objects are not boundary objects, Fox determines that because there are some objects that work like boundary objects even though they ultimately fail in executing translation, we should consider them “negative boundary objects”; L. D. Berg, “Gender Equity as “Boundary Object”…or the same old sex and power in geography all over again? Canadian Geographer 46, no. 3 (2002): 248-254; P. R. Carlile, “A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development,” Organization Science 13, no. 4 (2002): 442-455; L. Dirkinck-Holmfeld, “Designing for Collaboration and Mutual Negotiation of Meaning – Boundary Objects in Networked Learning,” in S. Banks, V. Hodgson, C. Jones, and B. Kemp, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Networked Learning, 2006: Symposium: Relations in Networks and Networked Learning, Lancaster: Lancaster University, accessed July 10, 2014 online at: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/03/04/PDF/DirckinckHolmfeld- 2006.pdf; D. H. Guston, “Stabilizing the Boundary between U.S. Politics and Science: The Role of the Office of Technology Transfer as a Boundary Organization, Social Studies of Science 29, no.1 (1999): 87-111; A. Walenstein, “Finding Boundary Objects in SE and HCI: An Approach through Engineering Oriented Design Theories, in Bridging the Gaps between Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction, International Conference on Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon (May 2003): 92-99, accessed online July 10, 2014 at http://web.cacs.louisiana.edu/~walenste/pubs/2003-ifip- sehci-walenstein.pdf.

198 In engineering, sketches of turbine engines organized workers and influenced the work process between design engineers and the builders who actually constructed these machines.310 In genetics, gene pathway maps, a set of boxes and arrows illustrated on paper, acted as a communication tool between “the wet scientists” who conducted genomic research in laboratories at workbenches and “the dry scientists” who analyzed data through computer-based analyses at desktops. These maps facilitated mutual understandings within genetics by weaving information about the genes themselves produced by wet scientists with knowledge of gene pathways created by dry scientists.311

One of the most abstract examples comes from the field of biotechnology where the single word “biotechnology” functioned as an “ideal type.” Star and Griesemer explained an ideal type as a vague and abstract object that acts as a “good enough” description of the natural world. The concept of a species, for instance, does not describe any one specimen in the world, but serves as a means to understanding and communicating general information about a group of animals, thus

“species” is an ideal type of boundary object. Likewise, biotechnology is a term that incorporates many instruments, practices, and people. Because these types are vague, however, they can adapt to many local sites and serve as a mediator of communication across those sites.312 As biotechnology developed over the 20th century, biologists and engineers across the globe defined its practice differently and debated about which methods belonged in the practice and which conclusions should be deemed most viable. Discord developed between biologists and engineers, scientists and journalists, and various institutions. In essence, and despite many disagreements, the word

“biotechnology” linked multiple global communities within a common workspace defined as a

310 Kathryn Henderson, “Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Databases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices, and Boundary Objects in Design Engineering,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 16, no. 4 (Autumn, 1991): 448-473. 311 Bart Penders, Klasien Horstman, Rein Vos, “Walking the Line between Lab and Computation: The “Moist” Zone,” BioScience 58, no. 8 (September 2008): 747-755. 312 Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology,” pp. 518.

199 “global village.” The link crystallized and a concept, rather than a material thing, acted as a boundary object because of one shared belief: biotechnology would be the way of the future.313

In addition to a concept, scholars have labeled events that occur in series as boundary objects. In medicine, the quest for a non-addicting analgesic drug in the 1920s and 1930s functioned similarly as a boundary object (a quest as a series of events cast as an object) across a diverse array of geographical locations and research groups that each held locally specific interests and different meanings behind that goal. Pharmaceutical companies, academic pharmacologists, and entrepreneurs worked in tandem to develop non-addictive analgesic drugs, but each group did so toward its own goals: to make money, to increase knowledge, and to create a marketable compound, respectively.314

Abstract boundary objects have also taken the form of change over time. In genetics, the change in status of the drosophila embryo in the 20th century from an underutilized specimen into an object of inquiry opened the door for it to facilitate interactions and collaborations between geneticists and embryologists who previously worked in disciplinarily segregated worlds.315 In the physical sciences, various technologies, from engines to deep-sea sampling tools, came from diverse backgrounds but emerged within shared work-spaces of scientists, engineers, and various assistants, where they facilitated collaboration by translating natural phenomena into numerical representations316 or by acting as platforms that literally held the sampling potential of two very different groups.317

313 Robert Bud, “Biotechnology in the Twentieth Century,” Social Studies of Science 21, no. 3 (Aug. 1991), 415-457. 314 Caroline Jean Acker, “Addiction and the Laboratory: The Work of the National Research Council’s Committee on Drug Addiction, 1928-1939,” Isis 86, no. 2 (June, 1995): 167-193. 315 Evelyn Fox Keller, “Drosophila Embryos as Transitional Objects: The Work of Donald Poulson and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 26, no. 2 (1996): 313-346. 316 Patrick Carroll-Burke, “Tools, Instruments and Engines: Getting a Handle on the Specificity of Engine Science,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 4 (Aug. 2001): 593-625. 317 Charles Goodwin, “Seeing in Depth,” Social Studies of Science 25, no. 2 (May 1995): 237-274. This paper also centers on sampling and measuring as done from the deck of a ship during an oceanographic research expedition. The expedition was the 1990 AmasSeds sediment analysis expedition at the mouth of the Amazon River. Goodwin is an anthropologist who uses the expedition to look at collaboration between ship crewmembers and scientists during the voyage and different scientists (physical oceanographers, geochemists, and biologists) after the expedition by examining a

200 Boundary objects have also been organizations, like Star and Griesemer’s museum, but in a different way.318 The case of the National Institute of Health Office of Technology Transfer as a boundary object offers a twist on the original concept in that the office acted to create stability in the collaboration between politics and science not through agreement and consent on shared goals, but through impositions, coercion, silencing, and fragmentation.319 This is a case where the original framework that explained gathering through shared goals around objects was transformed into collaboration under an organization seeped in conflict.

Viewed as a body of literature rather than a series of unrelated case studies, these examples add up to more than the sum of their parts. This literature answers a fundamental question within the history of science: How has science operated as a set of ecologies across diverse local circumstances? The “boundary object” framework explains how and why time and time again knowledge production relies upon the assistance of (silent) non-scientists even when social diversity leads to a lack of consensus. After all, Star originally “desire[ed] to analyze the nature of cooperative work in the absence of consensus.”320 Indeed, collaboration has been at the center of each and every one of the cases since Star’s original article. The value of negotiating toward common goals is simply that it works. It gets the multifarious jobs of science done. This body of scholarship, however, is not just about functionality. Taken together, these case studies reveal a somewhat novel way to understand the complexity of the social life of science. Technicians, amateurs, and politicians, for instance, participate in the production of knowledge, a point that has been well documented in the history of science and science studies, but their inputs are not merely assistive or separate from the

computerized grid of the ocean as a boundary object. He also mentions the ocean itself, the seafloor, and the CTD rosette as other boundary objects on the expedition. 318 Star and Griesemer pose the concept of boundary objects by calling a museum of natural history a boundary object. Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects,” (1999). 319 David H. Guston, “Stabilizing the Boundary between US Politics and Science: The Role of the Office of Technology Transfer as a Boundary Organization,” Social Studies of Science 29, no. 1 (Feb. 1999): 87-111. 320 Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 5 (Sept. 2010), 605.

201 labor of scientists. They succeed because of intricate moments of agreement to collaborate together on common goals. With interactive complexity established, these case studies demonstrate great power behind everyday experiences, practices, and realities to determine the development of processes, research agendas, objects of inquiry, institutional commitments, and ultimately the production and dissemination of knowledge. Seemingly banal activities at lab benches, on ships at sea, and in the field; supposedly insignificant or mildly significant representations of knowledge created with ink and paper or computers; and purportedly mundane pieces of technology offered value and shaped many branches of science, such as oceanography, biotechnology, medicine, genetics, and engineering.

It was not, however, merely the activities of people who caused these effects. The material world also played a crucial role. The boundary object framework is not an argument for the agency of things and objects, but it calls attention to how the social and the material inherently bind to one another. It asks us to ponder the break down of assumptions about who is responsible for the day- to-day production of science in very specific moments and how they execute their obligations. It draws our attention away from macro-historical events, such as the postwar world and subsequent development of Big Science, and toward points in time defined around events such as scientific expeditions, design projects, individual drug development, or the emergence of an object of inquiry.

While offering a wide range of individual situations and locally specific circumstances, this body of literature illuminates how and why science is a socially and culturally local and collaborative process built with the assistance of the material world.

In this chapter, I draw on this literature to analyze two boundary objects from the

Downwind expedition: index maps and trinitrotoluene (TNT) explosives. They were boundary objects for four reasons: First, these objects exhibited interpretive flexibility. Navy crew, international scientists, and oceanographers held a different meaning for these things outside of

202 oceanographic expeditions. Second, during expeditions the objects emerged at the center of shipboard working relationships. Third, the objects became enlisted within those relationships as common coin or bridges between worlds. And fourth, these practices led to successful translations of information that facilitated reaching the common goal of collecting viable data on the deep- ocean.

Before I examine the role of these things as boundary objects, I provide the background necessary to understand the particular sense of heterogeneity at stake on Downwind. I outline the revolving nature of the individuals who travelled on the expedition, describe who was on the ship and for how long, and lay out the specific kind of work different people performed. My deployment of the boundary object framework establishes at the start the particular nature of human heterogeneity at work onboard the ships Horizon and Baird as they acted as shared workspaces. In

Star and Griesemer’s language, the section of this chapter immediately following this introduction establishes the shipboard ecology in which an “extremely diverse group of actors” were responsible for work on the ships.321 The following two sections analyze index maps and explosives as boundary objects at the center of collaboration between Scripps oceanographers and foreign scientists and

Navy crewmembers, respectively. To the history of oceanography, this chapter deepens our understanding of the ship in this era as a workplace that functioned as an ecology in which many groups of people and things were involved in mediating the production of knowledge. To scholars interested in mobilization of the boundary object concept, I offer a case study in which two different boundary objects held a strong presence and facilitated relationships between Scripps and their

Peruvian guest scientist and the Navy. I present Downwind as a case in which textual and technological boundary objects worked simultaneously in the collaborative production of knowledge

321 Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology,” pp. 505.

203 between scientists and two groups that are otherwise almost completely silent in the historical record.

Heterogeneity

Fifty-one of the seventy-three men in total who sailed at sea on Downwind travelled the entire journey. They left San Diego on October 21, 1957 and returned February 28, 1958.322 None of these fifty-one were professional academic oceanographers. Thirty-eight were enlisted Navy crewmembers responsible for operating and maintaining the navigational functions of the ships, including two cooks who arranged and prepared all of the shipboard meals.323 Each ship employed a

Captain in charge of all ship functions, including travelling on the predetermined expedition track, navigating alterations to that track, and all matters of ship safety. Captains sometimes made the final call to carry out or abort scientific work due to weather and oceanic conditions. There were also six students at various levels of their education from early university through doctoral studies; a medical doctor; and four technical assistants. Scripps employed some of these assistants after they finished university while the Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego hired them when they left enlisted service after World War II. Thus, at any one point only 3 to 7 academic oceanographers travelled for a short period of time alongside these 51 men who completed the entire journey.

Each of these groups came to shipboard work with their own ideas about how work should be done and which aspects of that work held the most importance. Tensions arose between these alternative agendas, which is precisely the type of situation that Star and Griesemer said signals the

322 Personnel accounting: 18 Navy crew on Baird; 20 Navy crew on Horizon (1 left before expedition end); 2 ship captains; 6 students; 3 medical doctors; 1 filmmaker; 10 American oceanographers (from various institutions and organizations); 6 international oceanographers; 7 technical assistants (only 4 of those travelled the entire journey). Total = 73 personnel. 323 Eighteen sailed on Baird and twenty on Horizon. One of these crewmembers left the expedition on emergency leave on January 10, thus did not make it on the entire journey. Had he made the entire journey there would have been fifty- three people from San Diego and back. Preliminary Report on Downwind, 10.

204 possibility of boundary objects at work.324 Oceanographers needed to standardize how work on ships was conducted, but in several ways, all of the groups and individuals came with their own ideas about how ships should be positioned in the ocean, how oceanographic equipment should be launched into the ocean and brought back up, and which avenues of research held the most potential. Oceanographers sometimes conflicted with Navy ship captains over ship positioning because the captains were responsible for navigating the oceans and ultimately responsible for safety in moving through the ocean. Discord with junior Navy crew, however, typically occurred in moments where scientists enlisted military personnel in the process of operating sampling and measuring equipment. Nevertheless, the common goal of observing, measuring, and sampling the

Pacific succeeded. Boundary objects explain how those goals were met. In the shared space of an expedition these things became the material reality through which collaboration worked in practice.

Expeditions could not have been the sole product of work done by oceanographers, even if we define “oceanographer” broadly as Scripps professors, researchers, students and expedition visitors. As an oceanographic institution, Scripps had only been in possession of ex-military ships since just after World War II. The 1950s marked the first decade of a concerted effort to take science based at the La Jolla campus out to sea with the assistance of an almost unending amount of support provided by the US Navy.325 After the war, oceanography happened at a much larger scale.

Scientists learned about the ocean through scientific means and acquired a working knowledge of the oceans through time spent laboring on ships. While a handful of the oceanographers came from military and wartime service, most were not skilled at ship operations and open-ocean navigation.

324 Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, “Translations,” and Boundary Objects,” 505. 325 I emphasize here that my point is not that Scripps never went to sea before the war. Indeed, the institution used several kinds of ocean-going vessels throughout the early 20th century. Rather, my point is that after World War II the scope of travel to the farthest reaches of the open ocean and the number of ships available caused a great shift in oceanographic ability to study the ocean.

205 Oceanographers did not know how to operate the ships that took them to sea, especially considering the nature of the vessels at hand as described in Chapter 3. These arrangements were not specific to Scripps. Throughout a much longer maritime history and extending into cold war oceanography, a division of labor existed on ships at sea. Scientists focused on intellectual work, data collection, and labor that fit their level of training in operating scientific instrumentation while fundamentally relying upon a larger cast of individuals responsible for making these journeys practically possible.326 They boarded research vessels to observe, measure, and collect data, and they hired a variety of other specialists and laborers to conduct operational, navigational, maintenance, culinary, and other forms of work. Thus, a crucial layer to the heterogeneity during expedition work existed as a division of labor between oceanographers and the men they hired to assist them.

The core groups that repeatedly went to sea with Scripps were Navy personnel, marine technicians, engineers, and students. Different expeditions, however, also saw a variety of special visitors. Director Roger Revelle sent out these invitations. He asked Rachel Carson to travel on

Capricorn in 1953, but when she declined he enlisted oceanographer Russell Raitt’s wife, Helen

Raitt, instead. He also encouraged Helen to create “a worthy surrogate [book] for what Rachel

Carson might have written.”327 In 1961 John Steinbeck travelled aboard a Scripps ship during Project

Mohole off Guadalupe Island, Baja, California.328 Revelle sought any support that might increase

326 For a discussion of encounters between scientists and maritime culture on ships at sea during the 19th century see “Chapter 6 Small World,” in Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (2005): 177- 209. For a look at life and labor on ships in the 18th century see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1987). For the 17th century see O. H. K. Spate, “Seamen and Scientists: The Literature of the Pacific, 1697-1798,” in Roy MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, ed., Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (1988). 327 Roger Revelle, “Transcription of a tape made at the 25th reunion of people who participated in Midpac (1950) and Capricorn (1952) expeditions by Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” p. 4. SIO Online Archive, accessed May 20, 2014. 328 He used the experience to publish “High Drama of Bold Thrust Through Ocean Floor,” Life 50, no 15 (14 April 1961).

206 funding or political support for his institution, and he used these writers to bring oceanography’s message to a public audience.

Revelle also invited international scientists of different specialties to participate in scientific activities. From the beginning of his directorship, he attempted to facilitate scientific collaborations across national boundaries, and Revelle often incorporated successful cases of these exchanges into his positioning of Scripps on the world stage of science. When the South American oceanographers from Argentina, Chile, and Peru boarded Horizon and Baird on December 28, 1957 for the

Downwind expedition, they were split into separate groups. One scientist from each country travelled on Baird, three in all, and the remaining two set sail on Horizon. Alberto Casellas, Lieutenant in the Argentine Navy, Mateo Dragicevic, graduate student at the University of Chile, and Erwin

Schweigger, oceanographer at Peru’s Guano Administration Company, travelled on Baird hosted by expedition leader Bob Fisher, senior Scripps geological oceanographer, Russell Raitt, and four of

Scripps’ scientific technicians.329 A junior enlisted sailor from the Argentine Navy, Julio Cossettini, and Schweigger’s non-academic technical assistant, Romulo Jordán, rode on Horizon.

The division of personnel reveals some fascinating details about the social structure aboard this leg of the expedition. First, the staff changeovers in Valparaíso left Russell Raitt as the only senior oceanographer on Downwind, and he travelled onboard Baird. Expedition leader Bob Fisher had earned his PhD only months earlier, and the remaining members of the scientific party were non-academic technical assistants. Second, the staff changeovers left Horizon without a senior oceanographer. In fact, Edward Brinton was the only academic oceanographer onboard Horizon, and like Fisher, he had just defended his dissertation in 1957. The remaining members of Horizon’s scientific party were the technicians who had been travelling on the entire expedition. Third, Horizon

329 The technicians were Alan Jones, Maxwell Silverman, Robert O. Pepin, and Richard von Herzen. All of these men would go on to become prominent figures in Scripps expeditions throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

207 essentially explored the Peru-Chile trench in two capacities. First, when not paired with Baird,

Horizon used an EDO echo sounder (shown in Chapter 1: The Sea) to determine depth variation in the Trench. Second, when paired with Baird, Horizon acted as the “shooting ship,” meaning Horizon’s scientists detonated TNT in the ocean that created seismic reverberations that bounced off the sea floor so that Baird, the “receiving ship,” could detect and measure crustal thickness.330 On previous legs of the expedition Horizon participated in a much higher quantity and breadth of scientific work such as dredge hauls, plankton tows, water chemical testing, and biological surveys.

Horizon acted merely as a support vessel for those profiles because this leg of the expedition centered primarily on Russell Raitt’s seismic profiling.331 The South Americans were divided between two ships based on the Scripps scientist they would work next to on each.332 Senior oceanographers remained on Baird, whereas the support team of one freshly graduated (PhD) oceanographer, technicians, and students worked from Horizon. Cossettini and Jordan went to the support ship because out of the group of five South Americans, Scripps oceanographers viewed them as assistant technicians. Alberto Cassellas and Mateo Dragicevic occupied minor positions in Argentine and

Chilean oceanography at this time. Lieutenant Cassellas held the responsibility of reporting back to

Argentina’s Naval Hydrographic Service, and Dragicevic would do the same to the University of

Chile. Dragicevic also happened to study gravitational anomalies, a topic that related somewhat to oceanographic geophysics. These two junior personnel fit most comfortably on Baird with the senior oceanographers. Erwin Schweigger was a seventy year-old scientist who had been working for Peru’s

330 Preliminary Report on Downwind, pp. 8-11. 331 Aside from a few dredges and temperature probes of the sea floor taken aboard Baird, the only other work conducted was Horizon’s depth recording. Previous chapters demonstrated that prior to this, both ships oscilated between a much more complex set of scientific duties. 332 There is no archival document that discusses how and why oceanographers were assigned to certain ships at sea. This is especially true for the South Americans during Downwind. However, repeated analysis of the related records and simultaneous consideration of whom these men were, how old they were at the time of Downwind, and their related scientific experience indicates that there are some inferences to be made even without exact words indicating how the divisions came to be.

208 Guano Administration Company, La Compañía Administradora del Guano, for over twenty years. If we look at years of practice, Schweigger was actually the most senior oceanographer out of any of those who travelled on any portion of Downwind.333 On Baird, he shared a bunk with ocean geologist and UC Santa Barbara Assistant Professor Bob Norris, and he worked alongside the only geologist on Downwind whose experience, in terms of years and success, came close to his own,

Russell Raitt.

As an international scientist who specialized in fisheries management, Schweigger brought a unique area of expertise to Downwind’s group of geologists. He came from a scientific context mired in fisheries and economic problems. Big Oceanographic Science did not reach Peru until the late 1950s when Americans and Europeans offered financial resources.334 Even then, during the

1950s and 1960s Peru became the world’s leader in fish harvesting, and the nation’s rise as a South

American center of oceanographic research continued to revolve around fisheries research.335 The

American Tuna Boat Association started paying for the rights to fish within Peru’s Exclusive

Economic Zone336 in 1956. This agreement led to Scripps’ Warren Wooster becoming employed with CAG, the position he held when he welcomed Downwind scientists in a port of call in Lima.

However, this outside funding caused major reorganizations within the CAG. When Downwind visited Peru in 1958, these transitions were only starting to catalyze. In fact, between 1959 and 1961,

CAG ended its scientific program to focus solely on the industrial development of fish

333 Gregory Cushman, “The Lords of Guano: Science and the Management of Peru’s Marine Environment, 1800-1973,” diss., University of Texas Austin (May 2003), p. 386 discusses how his full last name, “Hirsch-Schweigger” likely indicates a Jewish ancestry. Also see Cushman for biographical details on Schweigger, including his German-Jewish heritage. 334 Part of this support also came from the International Geophysical Year. 335 Gregory Cushman, “Lords of Guano,” diss., p. 34. 336 The 200 miles of ocean off the entire coast of Peru. See Ibid., pp. 438-442 for more details of the development of this international policy.

209 populations.337 Schweigger’s approach to oceanography developed within a context of long-held concerns over the ways in which fish populations directly affected the economy of Peru. He and his colleagues in South America studied surface ocean temperatures and near-surface currents as indicators of the causes of and possible determinants of solutions for fisheries management problems. The ocean as a whole was a valuable object of inquiry inasmuch as understanding its processes could lead to information about tuna and related guano bird populations vital to the

Peruvian economy. When he stepped aboard Baird, however, Schweigger entered a very different world of intellectual commitments aimed at understanding the natural history of the seafloor and

Earth’s crust under the seafloor.338 Raitt sought to acquire geological data that would simultaneously satisfy his military patron and provide fuel for the development of his intellectual career regarding problems of plate tectonics, deep-sea geological formations, and crustal structure. While these two scientists saw the Pacific Ocean as a common object of inquiry, they came to Downwind from greatly divergent circumstances with almost unrelated needs, agendas, and methods.

Index Maps

The boundary object framework offers a methodology that we can use to address scholarly neglect of the role of international personnel exchanges on expeditions. Many foreign scientists

337 This caused Schweigger to leave after more than 20 years at the organization. In 1964 he secured a position as Dean of Aquaculture and Oceanography at Federico Villarreal National University in Lima. Cushman’s dissertation states that Schweigger became “director of a new fishery science program at the Universidad Nacional Federic Villareal” but does not specify exactly what date that position started or what year Schweigger left CAG between 1959-1961. Gregory Cushman, “Lords of Guano,” diss., p. 471. The only other information I can find on this portion of Schweigger’s career is Wikipedia’s page: “Universidad Nacional Federico Villarreal,” which states that along with several other specialized scientists, Schweigger became Dean of one of the primary faculties at this school on 24 May 1964 (accessed online 7 April 2014: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universidad_Nacional_Federico_Villarreal). However, a student blog recounting the history of this university claims that Schweigger had been at the schools since classess commenced on 1 April 1960 (accessed online 7 April 2014: http://mitutorfopca.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/). Note that this student blog post and Cushman’s dissertation (page 615) present a photo of Schweigger from August 1965 whose caption reads, “Illus. 35: The father of Peruvian Oceanography: Germany fishery biologist Erwin H. Schweigger (illustration: BCONAFER 3:8 [Aug. 1965]). The photo citation refers to its publication in the Boletín de la Corporación Nacional de Fertilizantes. 338 Scripps did employ biologists also interested in fish populations, but they were not on this leg of Downwind and even they approached population problems differently.

210 travelled on American ships, but the gaps in practice stemming from differences in financial backing, research agendas, and equipment availability, especially the use of deep-seagoing vessels, tended to be great enough to hinder meaningful collaboration. At least it seems so on the surface. The leg of

Downwind from Valparaíso, Chile to Callao, Peru, however, illustrates how the decks of ships functioned momentarily as internationally shared workspaces. Scientists onboard operated in an ecology where they shared the experience of time, scientific techniques, and data with one another.

Raitt studied the deep-sea floor, while Schweigger researched oceanic phenomena related to tuna and guano bird populations. Their scientific interests involved different problems, questions, and methods. But on Downwind, American and Peruvian scientists also shared a common interest in characterizing oceanic processes off the South American coast. In line with Star and Griesemer’s concept, diverse groups then came together in a shared workspace toward executing common goals.

For Schweigger, ocean surface temperatures were the most sought after form of data. Raitt on the other hand, compiled a much more variable set of data alongside the surface temperatures regarding deep currents, the ocean floor, sub-floor crustal structure. Yet despite these divergent interests and agendas, American and Peruvian oceanographers worked together toward one end: collecting data to characterize oceanic processes off the coast of Chile and Peru. The maps were a key means of communication that provided Schweigger and Raitt one crucial way to communicate with one another. Despite different research agendas and scientific foci, they conversed over ocean chart maps labeled “Index Maps” and “Charts.”339 This section demonstrates how index maps and ocean charts translated knowledge between American and Peruvian scientists and amalgamated two different ways of knowing the Pacific.

Differences between these two groups of scientists became obvious immediately onboard ship. First, the oceanographers did not speak fluent Spanish, and Schweigger only possessed modest

339 Preliminary Report on Downwind, “List of Illustrations,” pp. 57-58.

211 skills in spoken English.340 Second, Peru did not study ocean geology, yet the structure of the seafloor was the primary concern on this leg of the expedition. Oceanographers from Schweigger’s home institution focused on studying fishes and water conditions related to chemistry and temperature. Scripps oceanographers on this leg of the expedition, by contrast, planned to focus on the geology of the Peru-Chile Trench. Accordingly, their data charts differed as greatly as their research programs. Scripps’ charts included data collected from several other American sources and contained many points of data Peruvians would not become interested in until well into the 1960s, after they acquired ships from which to conduct research on deep-sea geology.

Nevertheless, the language barrier was not too severe, and Scripps oceanographers accepted information provided by Schweigger about the area. Likewise, Schweigger used his time on

Downwind to learn about the ways in which geologists, such as Russell Raitt, prioritized ocean geology in the deep-sea environment.341 When they left Valparaíso, Raitt and his crew took over the research program of Downwind in order to study the Peru-Chile Trench.342

Scientists within the Peruvian context during this time focused primarily on understanding possibilities and problems surrounding fishing and guano resources. What lay under the deepest depths of the ocean floor had not emerged as a primary concern amidst the immediate need to understand the loss of biological populations, especially fish, anchovies, and sea birds.343

340 Cushman, “Lords of Guano,” p. 391 describes Schweigger’s English skills as “modest.” Cushman refers to Schweigger’s skills in 1941 when he would have been 53 years old. It is possible that he improved over the next 16 years before Downwind began, but based on the records I have, that is not clear. Most of his work was primarily conducted in Spanish or German, and it is very possible that anything published in English was through a translator. 341 Raitt was notorious for claiming that his field of research was the most valuable field of oceanography. 342 For instance, reference the last paragraph of his story as presented at the opening of this chapter. 343 Even Warren Wooster, Scripps’ oceanographer on location in Peru, operated while working in the country under these disciplinary and national guidelines that called for strict attention to ocean temperature, currents, and species distribution. For example, see: Warren S. Wooster y Zacarias Popovici del Consejo de Investigaciones Hidrobiológicas, “Investigaciones Oceanográficas en el Norte del Perú: El Crucero del B.A.P. “Bondy” realizado del 24 de febrero al 9 de marzo de 1958,” Revista de Marina, 43, no. 2 (Volume No. 252) Callao, Perú: Informe Preliminar (Marzo y Abril 1958): 412-420. An English citation of this article sites the following, “Rev. Mar. Perú, Lima. 43 (3): 412-420. P/O-02-00372.” However the citation I list above is from a printed version of the article I photocopied at the Instituto de Estudios Históricos-Maítimos del Perú on June 13, 2012.

212 Schweigger’s primary interest concerned ocean surface temperature. Scripps oceanographers saw this data point as important enough to record regularly, but also tangential to the more high-profile work being conducted on Downwind involving deep ocean circulation, surface carbon dioxide concentrations, and deep sea geological structures.344 Where Scripps oceanographers saw surface temperature as a baseline, Schweigger used it as an urgent piece of data indicative of species health and distribution.

As they measured and sampled, oceanographers immediately mapped some of the data they collected. They moved throughout the region, discussed those experiences, and actively determined possible changes to the scientific goals. The expedition track was always up for modification in light of new information. The early legs of the expedition prior to stopping in Valparaíso, where

Schweigger came onboard, mapped the Peru current as well as ocean temperature at the surface and at 200 meters, and plankton concentrations on the open ocean hundreds of miles off the coast of

Chile and Peru:345

344 Prior to the port of call in Valparaíso, Chile, biological oceanographer William Reidel organized plankton tows and dredge hauls. He and the ship’s various workers also made sea-surface and island observations as they travelled the region. This work continued after he left the expedition (due to a health emergency) at Valparaíso. After he left, doctoral students Edward Brinton and Robert Pepin continued biological sampling, collecting, and observing. See “Preliminary Report on Downwind,” especially section titled “Biological Report,” which was written by Brinton and Pepin. 345 Preliminary Report on Downwind, Figures 13-16 and 19-20. Figure 15 is Downwind Surface Temperature. Image right shows the landmass of the Americas from southern Chile up to Baja, California. The data in this chart shows the Horizontal distribution of surface temperature over the region.

213

Image 30: Figure 15 from Preliminary Report on Downwind. Photo Creator: Denzil Ford, 2012. Document Location: SIO Archives, Subject Files. Copyright UC Regents. Discussions onboard about the progress of the expedition and successes and failures of data collection revolved around these preliminary maps and the background information for geologists that they contained.346

The maps were used as tools of understanding that explained Scripps goals and enlisted

Schweigger’s participation. They provided a discussion point around which to converse about the region’s geological and other features. As shipboard conversations progressed, Schweigger extended the conversation beyond temperature and plankton distribution, as characterized in the preliminary shipboard maps, in order to make suggestions on areas that could prove fruitful in locating and characterizing new geological structures. He did not study the structures himself, but his local familiarity with the area ensured that he knew of their existence. The maps gave Schweigger the information necessary to understand what Scripps oceanographers sought to know. Downwind completely redirected ten days of the original course plan to investigate the Nasca Ridge based on

Schweigger’s input.347 This leg of the expedition in which Schweigger participated only lasted

346 Nineteen maps were created during the course of Downwind alone, Ibid., 57-58. 347 Ibid., p. 21.

214 eighteen days. The shift that emerged from his suggestion represented a major change in the expedition’s direction and geological object of study.

Like the maps from Star and Griesemer’s Museum example, the simple index maps brought together the knowledge of two diverse groups, in this case scientists from different countries and different research communities. Scripps oceanographers knew of the existence of the Nasca Ridge before Downwind.348 But it was not until discussions ensued at sea with Schweigger that Scripps decided to spend ten days conducting extensive investigations of the deep-sea structure. The

Preliminary Report on Downwind confirms that Scripps’ investigation of the Nasca Ridge occurred

“…following Schweigger’s suggestion…”349 Beyond that, scientific publications attribute the production of knowledge of this geological feature only to Scripps oceanographers, and Schweigger seems to be one of many token international scientists that travelled with but did not contribute to

American expeditions under the IGY.

Gaps in the written record require a certain amount of speculation in order to begin understanding what lies underneath that statement in the Preliminary Report that Scripps followed

Schweigger’s recommendation. It was common practice to reference maps when discussing how to plan activities for work at sea in the coming days. The index maps created by Scripps scientists as

Downwind progressed would have provided Schweigger enough information so that he could call out relevant components of his own knowledge of the region toward suggesting the Nasca Ridge as a potentially prosperous object of expedition inquiry. The preliminary illustrations would have opened conversations between American oceanographers and their Peruvian guest scientist. The maps would have shown Schweigger information familiar to him, offered a kind of shared knowledge of the region, and thereby enlisted him in a collaboration that resulted in his knowledge

348 Preliminary Report on Downwind, p. 20. 349 They completed echo-sounding, seismic refraction lines, heat-flow measurements, rock dredging, and gravity and piston coring, Ibid.

215 creating a shift in the expedition track to the Nasca Ridge. Once employed in shipboard discussions, these maps would have restructured the relationship between Raitt and Schweigger from a situation in which one scientist saw the Pacific as a geological problem and the other saw the ocean as a fisheries problem. Even in Star and Griesemer’s example, the exact mechanism of information exchange remained fuzzy. At the Museum, amateur biologists created maps separately. The authors do not specify any instance in which a person took an amateur map and superimposed it on a scientific life-zone map, thereby physically crossing the boundary between non-scientist and scientist. The compelling point, however, is that the proximity of certain boundary objects to key actors within the institutional ecology of the Museum positioned those objects such that they would have been the most likely catalyst for the development of a common ground.

In certain cases, an exact mechanism of exchange and overlap is not necessary to extrapolate a highly likely relationship. On Downwind, for example, index maps would have functioned as a common coin that linked Scripps’ knowledge of the region with Schweigger’s understanding and fueled a change to the expedition research trajectory. The historical record does not explicitly describe Scripps oceanographers directly presenting their maps to Schweigger. The photographs from the expedition, however, show oceanographers making these maps onboard the ships. The

Preliminary Report discusses the production of these maps onboard, and the production of maps at sea also surfaces across many oral histories during this period. It is crystal clear that oceanographers created and used maps in the process of conducting expeditions. It would have been highly unlikely for Schweigger, a senior and thus respected expedition guest, to travel on Scripps ships and not engage with the maps that had been created and those in the process of being made.

216 After Schweigger left the expedition, oceanographers constructed a new map of the region centered on the Nasca Ridge data:350

Image 31: Figure 8 from Preliminary Report on Downwind. Photo Creator: Denzil Ford, 2012. Document Location: SIO Archives, Subject Files. Copyright UC Regents. Shipboard collaborations between Raitt and Schweigger were over. The decks of the ships no longer functioned as a shared workspace. Instead, this map became that place, a material location where the knowledge produced independently by two diverse groups of scientists converged with several other sources of data. Once produced, it amalgamated information collected by Scripps, Schweigger, the

U.S. Hydrographic Office, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the U.S. Navy. The data from

Downwind and these other sources meshed with Schweigger’s knowledge of the region in the form

350 See “Preliminary Report on Downwind,” Figure 8 and pp. 20-21. Image 31 shows index map and preliminary bathymetric chart of the Nasca Ridge. Isotherm streams corresponding to those on Schweigger’s map are seen just off the coast of Peru. Further out to sea this map plots deep-sea geography as understood through seismic refraction profiles, temperature probes, net tows, hydrographic casts, gravity cores, piston cores, and rock dredges. The map also includes data from the U.S. Hydrographic Office, Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the Navy.350

217 of points that represented seismic refraction profiles, temperature probes, net tows, hydrographic casts, piston cores, and rock dredges. The map was not merely a product of the Scripps Downwind expedition and the work of its oceanographers. It resulted from international collaboration between two different groups studying the Pacific, and the end product tangled together information from

Scripps’ Downwind expedition, Schweigger’s knowledge from Peruvian oceanography, Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institute, and the U.S. Hydrographic Office.

The map worked as a source of useable data on the Nasca Ridge for each of the groups whose data it included. As a document containing data from different sources it exemplifies how oceanographers compiled information that they did not collect themselves as part of their research program. As a boundary object, this map tells us that oceanographers valued Schweigger’s knowledge of the region alongside their appreciation of information from the U.S. Hydrographic

Office, the U.S. Navy, and Woods Hole. It symbolizes a momentary intersection between Peruvian and American oceanography around knowledge of the geological formations off the coast of South

America.

Schweigger also made his own map351 from the temperature data collected. In 1960, he published a journal article describing his time on Baird. That appeared in the University of Chile’s

Journal of Marine Biology, Revista de Biologia Marina, just two years after Downwind.352 Schweigger discussed the expedition and examined data from several other expeditions. Regarding Downwind, he wrote:

…In addition to the above trips, between late December 1957 and the 15th of January 1958 I enjoyed the pleasure of being invited on board the ship “Spencer F. Baird” by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla. Scripps was conducting

351 Photo permission granted by José Alarcón Oviedo, Editor de Texto, Revista de Marina de Chile, April 8, 2014. 352 This is my translation from Spanish to English of: Erwin Schweigger, “Fenómenos hidrográficos y biológicos en el sur del Perú y en el norte de Chile,” Revista Biologicos Marinos 10 (1-3): 51-68 – 1960. A full text original scanned copy of the original publication can be found by searching “Schweigger” http://www.revbiolmar.cl/, Chile’s Revista de Biología Marina y Oceanografía. Or, go to the website, click “Issues,” click “Publications 1948-1996,” and under 1960 click “1-3.” The second article is Schweigger’s. Both accessed April 2014.

218 the Downwind Expedition. The boat was making geophysical investigations of the southeast Pacific between Valparaíso and Callao, and collaborating with Baird was another ship, the “Horizon,” of the same North American institution. To the leader of the expedition, Dr. R. Fischer [sic], I thank you kindly for authorizing me to use the observations, regarding the sea surface temperature, made on both ships. The research program demanded that the ship I traveled on move away from the continent. We sailed up to Antofagasta near longitude 82° W for more than 700 nautical miles from the coast measuring corresponding parallels. The results of the observations are shown in the following map.

Image 32: Erwin Schweigger's map of ocean surface temperature. Photo Creator: Denzil Ford, 2012. Image from Revista Biologicas Marinos 10 (1-3): 51-68, 1960. Copyright Revista de Marina de Chile. Permission for use provided by José Alarcón Oviedo, 2014. He extracted the information that would be useful to him in his home context from the work he experienced and participated in on Downwind, and published it to share with his colleagues. For

Schweigger, a preliminary map provided a highly probable, but not completely certain, characterization of surface water temperature. The lines on the map represented likely isotherm streams – lines connecting points in the ocean where similar temperatures were measured – and were based not on actual measurements, but on interpolation of proven temperatures further south and north.

219 Downwind went further out to sea than most Peruvian expeditions at the time, and

Schweigger’s goal in acquiring Scripps’ data and creating the map was to use ocean surface temperatures in this section of the ocean further off the coasts of Chile and Peru than he generally travelled. His 1960 journal article incorporated the data gathered by Scripps scientists on Downwind.

His map acted as a boundary object that mediated two scientific worlds by transferring Scripps’ knowledge in the form of temperature data to the South American oceanographic community through Chile’s Revista de Marina and applying it to the scientific problems important to those scientists.

Expeditions in this era were messy events. Trips to sea did not unfold as a series of successful seismic profiles, positive deep-sea cores, accurate temperature readings, productive net- tows, and fruitful dredges that built a synoptic picture of the Pacific Ocean. Constant movement on ships required ongoing negotiation with the conditions of the Pacific Ocean, multiple foreign cultures and governments, and the revolving cast of men who travelled aboard the ships. Equipment often broke, and the ships operated in continual malfunction. Perhaps most difficult, the phenomena under investigation could only be accessed through the operation of large, cumbersome, and heavy oceanographic instruments and the indirect collection of data. Oceanographers managed to characterize the ocean because they were able to work despite all of these difficulties.

Collaborations onboard ships fundamentally made that work happen. Scientific workers overcame gaps in understanding between diverse groups by harnessing the power of boundary objects to translate, amalgamate, and facilitate. These maps facilitated the development of collaboration, an act that built collections of data.

Without the maps as boundary objects, Schweigger is almost completely absent from the historical record. He appeared in two photographs within Alan Jones’ collection where he sat in the galley eating. The Preliminary Report on Downwind listed his name as an expedition participant.

220 The Report also mentioned how oceanographers took his suggestion to study the Nasca Ridge seriously. Outside of these instances, however, there is no record of Schweigger’s contributions or any of the other foreign scientists on Downwind.353 The boundary object concept as applied to index maps allowed me to trace his scientific presence within the shipboard ecology of Downwind in the absence of everything else that typically proves as evidence for historians. The maps incorporate Schweigger’s data and reflect a momentary contribution. As boundary objects, the maps represent the exchange of information, and translation across international contexts, as Scripps oceanographers worked alongside Schweigger to represent the Nasca Ridge.

Explosives

Navy captains and crewmember contributions to oceanography are also difficult to extract from the historical record. This section examines boundary objects in order to illuminate the intricacies of their roles in the shipboard ecology. I explore how TNT explosive technology became more than simply a weapon and sounding device moved from a wartime context to scientific application for the purpose of taking seismic profiles. In conjunction with the Navy, scientists used

TNT as a heterogeneous tool, both military and scientific. The risk involved in using wartime surplus supplies, however, ensured that TNT’s power as a weapon never disappeared from scientific practice. While oceanographers did not use it to detect submarines, their research sought to expose features of the seafloor and Earth’s deeper crust. As a scientific tool, TNT held potential for danger.

Within the shared workspace of expeditions, however, TNT did partially transform from a weapon into a scientific instrument because oceanographers were not actively trying to blow up ships. In fact, as they struggled to learn the necessary operational skills, they needed to be careful not to blow up their own ships. To a certain extent, TNT also changed from a military detection device into a

353 Jatinder Nanda of India became quite a polemical guest on Downwind, but the records also do very little to explain the working interactions between Nanda and Scripps oceanographers.

221 scientific mapping tool. Oceanographers were not merely locating the seafloor as Navy ships located submarines: they pushed to map synoptically everything lying underneath all of the saltwater of the

Earth. Detection of underwater features through the use of TNT to create sound waves was one step in the process of scientifically knowing what oceanographers could not see with their own eyes.

The net effect enlisted the labor of military and scientific workers on expeditions, required both groups to mobilize and contribute their individual way of knowing the sea, and in so doing, defined seismic profiling as a momentary zone of military-scientific collaboration. Along with the research vessels (Chapter 3), TNT held a formative role in shaping the scientific-military relationship.

Since oceanographers could not see the deep sea floor directly, they observed its contours and structure by bouncing sound off of it. They exploded trinitrotoluene (TNT) in the water from one ship (the shooting ship) and then recorded the echoes that returned to a second ship (the receiving ship) on an electronic echo sounder. As doctoral student Dale Krause observed in an internal report on scientific instruments at Scripps completed just three months before Downwind began: “The floor of the deep sea is never seen directly. It is only observed through various physical means, the best of which is sound.”354 Indeed, much of the indirect measuring conducted on

Downwind aimed at understanding the structure and topography of the seafloor and underlying structure.355 Krause’s report evaluated the range limitations for Scripps’ echo sounding equipment.

Oceanographers used fathometers, instruments built to determine depth. This equipment, handed down to Scripps from the Navy, sent acoustical pulses vertically down from a transducer mounted to the hull of the ship. Those pulses were then reflected back up from the seafloor, and the device

354 Dale Krause, “The Width of the Sound Cone of the EDO Echo Sounder,” July 1957, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, SIO Russell Watson Raitt Papers 1922-1996, Box 6, Folder 16: Dale Krause. Krause received his PhD from Scripps in 1961. 355 The exception to the focus on the seafloor and underlying structure using indirect measurement was the GEK current measuring made every two hours between the Equator and 13 degrees N. on the last leg of the expedition. I am relinquishing this work to a footnote because it was not a major component of the expedition, which was essentially over by this time. The GEK measurements really were just a task to do while work was winding down and the ships returned to San Diego.

222 recorded the interval of time between transmission and return reception with an electrical stylus on sensitized paper. Oceanographers referred to the entire device as a “recorder,” but it also converted that time interval data into a measure of depth.356 Because the EDO Corporation built the particular model Scripps used, the scientists referred to the instrument as “the EDO.”357

Image 33: Sketch of depth-sounding sonar. Photo from: Chapter 8, “Sonar Equipment,” Bureau of Naval Personnel NAVPERS 10794-C, Shipboard Electronic Equipments, Washington: United States Government Printing Office (1969). Copyright Bureau of Naval Personnel. This equipment allowed oceanographers to see a representation of the bottom of the ocean by producing printouts that mapped the contours and topography of the Pacific basin. But it also required their active participation. The quality of the sound received back at the ship once it had bounced off the ocean bottom concerned scientists when analyzing a seafloor map from the EDO.

If the sound was weak or intercepted too many times, the return signal could be weak or just wrong.

356 Chapter 8, “Sonar Equipment,” Bureau of Naval Personnel NAVPERS 10794-C, Shipboard Electronic Equipments, Washington: United States Government Printing Office (1969). 357 Many of these instruments were equipped with supplementary devices designed to match the specific use of a particular device. The Navy called these “Sonar Accessories,” which for their purposes in detecting enemy submarines, typically were Azimuth-Range Indicators, Target Course Projectors, and Recorder-Reproducers. Scripps added a Mark V Precision Depth Recorder made by the Times Facsimile Corporation (PDR). See Ibid. Chapter 8, “Sonar Equipment,” and Dale Krause, “The Width of the Sound Cone of the EDO Echo Sounder,” p. 4. The sketch is on page 144, which was the exact model of depth-sounding sonar used on Scripps vessels, Navy Model: AN/UQN-1(C).

223 Oceanographers considered the quality of that sound as determined by five fundamental factors: the state of the sea, the speed of the ship, the background noise in the water immediately surrounding the transducer, the noise generated by the instrument itself, and the volume the operator chose to send out of the transducer to reach the seafloor.358 The electrical equipment that translated sound pulses into a map of the seafloor required the oceanographer to tune into the ocean around him for proper operation. He had to make adjustments for violent seas and excessive auxiliary noise. The instrument required the oceanographer to be aware of the speed at which the ship moved above the seafloor – and thus to be in constant contact with the ship’s captain. It also required that he be able to apply all of these factors and corresponding adjustments in determining the proper volume of sound pulse to send out of the transducer.

The US Navy used TNT from the decks of ships for two purposes. First, the military used it as a weapon detonated in the ocean in order to disable surface and submarine vessels. Second, the

Navy transmitted sound waves that would reflect back to Navy ships and sonar equipment after making contact with submarines. Although Navy ships did not use TNT to map the seafloor, many of the same detection problems experienced by the Navy also emerged within oceanographic research.359 Where the Navy relied on a range gate circuit360 to insure that only signals received from within the confines of the gated range showed up in the digital readout, Scripps began conducting its own tests of these instruments to determine exactly what kinds of errors were possible and to what extent during oceanographic use. The Navy considered limiting the range of detection under the

358 Dale Krause, “The Width of the Sound Cone of the EDO Echo Sounder,” July 1957, p. 21. 359 For information on the detonation of TNT as part of “active sonar,” where Navy ships sent signals out to detect submarines, see: Angela D’Amico and Richard Pittenger, “A Brief History of Active Sonar,” Aquatic Mammanls 35, no. 4 (2009): 426-434. For a brief history and use of TNT depth charges in the US Navy see: Fraser M. McKee, “An Explosive Story: The Rise and Fall of the Common Depth Charge,” The Northern Mariner III, no. 1 (January 1993): 45-58. 360 A range gate is a common mechanism built into radar and sonar circuits that black out all signals originating from an area outside of a narrowly defined window.

224 ship sufficient to prevent false bottom depth indication by echoes, plankton, or other anomalies. But

Scripps began looking much further into these issues.

Scripps expedition planners often called for track flexibility. That is, they built in the freedom to step outside of the predetermined plan of travel enough to follow the discovery of seafloor structures and oceanic processes that emerged during the course of the expeditions.361

Flexibility became important for expedition work at sea because the five fundamental factors that affected the use of the EDO also shifted what oceanographers focused on, how long they stayed in one area, and whether measuring a particular location was even possible at a particular moment. The state of the sea, weather, and background conditions became variables in seismic refraction profiles where explosives were used to generate the sound signal. An oceanographer ignited TNT live in his hand and manually threw it overboard or used an electronically detonated charge to set off a shock wave that would hit the Earth’s crust below the seafloor and reverberate a wave back up to the ship.

Image 34: Near surface TNT shot from Baird. Photo Creator, Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

361 Bob Fisher, second expedition leader on Downwind, was especially known for calling this requirement out in his expedition planning. See for example Robert L. Fisher, “Memo to SCORE Indian Ocean Program Working Group,” September 2, 1959, SIO Russell Watson Raitt Papers, 1922-1996, Box 11, Folder 13: Monsoon Expedition, pp. 3-4.

225 Winds and currents affected detonation location as the TNT362 was deployed into the ocean environment. That placement determined which area of sub-seafloor crust received seismic waves, and subsequently which section of the floor was measured and translated into crustal thickness.

While the Navy commonly used echo-sounding equipment during military work, on board

Scripps vessels military personnel did not actively operate, troubleshoot, or maintain the EDO recording instrument. The seismic profile explosives emerged at the center of the working relationship of Navy personnel, oceanographers, and technical assistants enlisted in the goal of bouncing sound off of the ocean floor and recording it on the EDO. In the naval context, TNT became a weapon and a tool of anti-submarine warfare. As oceanographers adopted this resource for seismic profiles, they translated it into a tool of science.

Just after the war, inexperienced oceanographers hired Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal

(EOD) experts to handle fuses and explosives. As part of their program in deep-sea geology, oceanographers adopted war-surplus TNT blocks in 50-pound cases as part of their echo-sounding technology.363 The charges from oceanographic ships ranged from ½ to 400 pounds, depending on the range oceanographers wished to measure.364 Scientists and technicians learned hands on by watching these experts and quickly determined how to handle charges independently. One technician who worked from ships often in this era claimed this uptake of practical knowledge was necessary because the Navy crew worked carelessly with explosives. He cited one example in which the crewmember was too old and not physically capable of throwing the live charge far enough away from the ship. His inability threatened to blow a hole in the side. He also recalled a separate incident in which a different crewmember improperly connected the detonation wires, thereby creating a

362 Image 34: Alan Jones personal collection. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. 363 Elizabeth N. Shor, ed., “Seeking Signals in the Sea: Recollections of the Marine Physical Laboratory,” La Jolla: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Marine Physical Laboratory, University of California, San Diego (1997): 29. 364 Arthur Raff Tapes, pp. 27-28.

226 dead short in the connection that could have malfunctioned disastrously.365 Nevertheless, not all

Navy personnel were as careless or naïve about operating explosives. Many taught scientists and their assistants the skills and techniques to handle TNT safely. And when they did not ignite the explosives directly, crewmembers continued to participate in the work by operating and positioning small boats in the proper locations for seismic measurements and coordinating communications between the shooting and receiving ships via radio. Throughout the decade oceanographic assistants worked alongside the Navy crew in detonating this equipment, and oceanographers continually negotiated with ship captains for optimal placement of the ship.

Coordinating an explosive charge detonation from the shooting ship with the arrival of the sound signal on the receiving ship was difficult. For the profiles, the ships typically started about 30 miles apart. After the explosive detonation, the shooting ship started moving toward the receiving ship. It continued to drop live charges at intervals of anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.366 If the moments when the detonations went off and when the receiving ship received the signal were not coordinated properly, the receiving ship would miss detecting the reverberation, and the TNT detonation would produce a wasted sound wave.367 Sometimes this process was so demanding and long-lasting that it kept the Navy radio workers, those in charge of coordinating detonation with reception across the ocean distance, from doing anything, including eating, from dawn until dusk.368

Crewmembers and ship captains did not ever learn the intricate details of deep-sea seismic geology. They did not become enlisted in discourse regarding plate tectonics, seafloor spreading, and crustal structure. Their role in seismic geology was mostly practical in that they provided manual labor and knowledge of explosive technology and ship positioning in the ocean. Nevertheless, their

365 Ibid., p. 29. 366 Ibid., p. 30. 367 This happened periodically if not often. Raff describes an instance in which a 400-pound TNT charge, one of the largest used in this era, went unrecorded because of failed coordination. Ibid., p. 45. 368 Ibid.

227 contributions made a significant mark on oceanographic work. Navy personnel operated and positioned small boats with outboard motors and Scripps’ larger ships, such as Horizon and Baird.

They participated in packaging explosive bundles. To ensure proper detonation timing, they facilitated radio communication. When dead charges hindered work these men assisted in troubleshooting while maintaining safety. Ship captains in particular discussed ship positioning for seismic profiles with senior oceanographers on a daily basis. Each of these tasks required Navy personnel to utilize their working knowledge of TNT on the ocean. Navy crew and captains possessed that knowledge ahead of time and brought their ideas about working with TNT to sea with them. The absence of such knowledge, with the occasional ineffective crewmember, was immediately and blaringly obvious, dangerous, and annoying to oceanographers and all men onboard. All participants, naval and scientific, agreed to work with the substance such that ship safety could be maintained and seismic profile data obtained. But this methodological and practical common ground between the Navy and the Scripps community came coupled with divergent viewpoints. Navy personnel maintained operational goals. They followed orders to get oceanographers out to sea, assist in gathering data, safely deploy TNT explosives, and return to port in San Diego. For the oceanographers, the stakes were higher. Failed profiles meant loss of data that might never be obtained because getting out to sea was so expensive and in this era ships rarely visited the same location twice. Also, the work with TNT was only the beginning of a long process of data compilation, data analysis, and theory making. Yet on expeditions at sea, despite these different perspectives and agendas, each group shared the goals of taking seismic profiles and compiling data about the seafloor.

Oceanographic detonation of TNT was not merely a case of a division of labor in which

Navy crew handled the explosives and scientists operated measuring instruments. TNT required oceanographers and Navy crew to reach agreements onboard ships about the ways in which to

228 handle the substance and obtain viable seismic profile data. Around this technology a set of protocols emerged in which each party understood its role in the measuring process. Navy personnel contributed skill and knowledge to the process of gathering oceanographic data. These workers offered what they knew of a wartime technology and in collaboration with scientists, translated that knowledge to oceanographic work. Oceanographers received the information and applied it in constructing their observational and measuring processes in order to continue refining the data gathering process.

Stated simply, a boundary object is a material thing that has been devised by people to facilitate communication between diverse groups during the process of making representations of nature.369 These objects can be many different things, but it is instructional to note that all of the objects are things that become boundary objects because people make them so. It is not the map in and of itself that is a boundary object – only when it is devised into a map that leads to information exchange does its translational, and thus boundary object, nature emerge. Another example from the

Museum example is the state of California. It is not actually California as a geopolitical entity that is the boundary object, even though Star and Griesemer’s language can seem to insinuate that if the article is read quickly. Rather, it is California when it forms an outward landscape barrier on a map that it becomes a boundary object. The key here is that these are not things that just exist: they are things that are made for the particular purpose of translating across groups that work together under the confines of complex institutional ecologies. TNT was the point of contact at which the Navy translated technological knowledge into operational procedures for scientists during seismic profiles,

369 The details of each are not vital to this chapter, but they are Repositories, Ideal type, Coincident boundaries, and Standardized forms, Star & Griesemer, “Institutional Ecologies,” pp. 518-519.

229 and in turn, it was an important node370 from which scientists converted their conception of the

Pacific into information the Navy could use to assist in oceanographic research.

Conclusion

For Star and Griesemer, “Boundary” actually refers to a point between divergent social worlds that work together at the center of science.371 The limit or edge referenced in the term is between diverse groups that work to make science happen. Studying the ways in which collaboration emerges from particularly organized working relationships with the boundary object concept calls attention to what I consider the belly of scientific function, not its edges. “Object” signifies a human-material relationship more than thing-ness in and of itself.372 Scholars that utilize this concept primarily seek interactions between people and their inanimate surroundings rather than the agency of an object’s material qualities. Additionally, some of the objects emerging from this scholarship acquire categorization as boundary object in an abstract sense. A word and an international quest have both been cast as boundary objects. Case studies that have emerged from Star and Griesemer’s concept offer a specific contribution to understanding the production of knowledge. They present highly localized attention to some of the most basic day-to-day social functions that have determined science. Basically, the goal is to understand the flow and influence of objects and concepts through a scientific network of individuals and social worlds. Comprehensively, this work illuminates a vital underbelly of material and social relationships that surprisingly lead to the effective functioning of scientific practice.

This chapter discovers that underbelly for oceanography on expeditions in the 1950s. It demonstrates how everyday practices at sea functioned as an ecology of different perspectives of the

370 But likely not the only. 371 Star discussed these troubles herself in, Susan Leigh Star, “This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35, no. 5 (September 2010): 602-603. 372 Star in fact defined “object” as “something people…act toward and with.” Ibid., p. 603.

230 Pacific. Oceanographers relied upon foreign scientists, Navy crew, and engineers to execute their work. Specifically, scientists enlisted a diverse group of assistants when they determined which geological phenomena to investigate, took samples, recorded permanent expedition records, and made effective and efficient links between the deepest depths of the ocean and the world of science.

The non-scientists onboard offered significant contributions to the collection of data from ships at sea. My use of the boundary object concept calls attention to the intricate details of working arrangements during the process of data collection. The boundary objects discussed here exemplify how scientific alliances emerged in the face of significant social, intellectual, and methodological diversity. These objects also explain how information was transferred from one group to another and made into new forms during the expedition. Index maps sparked knowledge sharing and brought different ways of knowing the Pacific into different contexts: American knowledge to Chile and Peru and Peruvian knowledge to America. TNT explosives intertwined the skills, knowledge, and working practices of Navy personnel and scientists.

The boundary object framework traditionally explains how science works despite great differences between participating social worlds. The focus is on how this diversity exists amongst human societies. Scholars rarely discuss how the application of this framework illuminates an incredible social diversity in the life of things as they work between heterogeneous human groups.

For example, multiple objects existed at the boundary between American and Peruvian scientists.

Preliminary maps and more complex data charts facilitated interactions between these two groups, and they did so differently in various moments. TNT created shared methods and textual workspaces between the Navy and oceanographers. The Downwind expedition is a case in which it was not merely one boundary object at work. Heterogeneity began with the social world of human expedition participants, but it extended to incorporate diversity from the material world as well.

231 Prologue to Chapter 5 Medical Doctor Robert Bingham’s Film Film rolls…

00:15 Opens with shot of SIO sign: University of California Scripps Institution of Oceanography. There is a man to the left of the sign in brown slacks and a brown suit coat with a camera pointed at the video camera. He is taking pictures of the campus. The video camera then pans what he is taking pictures of: the roads at Scripps are dirt and there is a lot of plant life, ground cover, short bushes, and trees that will be removed in the coming years for building construction. Towards the south mainland sits Old Town San Diego. The Pacific Ocean stretches out to the west as does the wooden pier. The shot changes and turns the audience’s attention to Scripps’ architectural structure. Now the camera offers a close up of the pier. Frame changes to highlight a sign for the Aquarium and then a pan of those buildings. Frame changes, and a white van sits parked in front of a white building labeled: “Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California.”

01:09 Black screen: “Presents” Red and black tribal art screen: “Expedition Downwind”

01:23 First view onboard a ship. The ship is at high sea and appears crooked in the frame, tilted to the left, while a huge wave crashes onto the fantail. The camera scans many of the parts of the ship and shows how it is mostly metal painted yellow. Scientific instruments sit onboard next to the dingy labeled RV Baird.

01:26 Orange screen: “For the IGY” New orange screen with a shell necklace making a circle around the words: Or the International Geophysical Year. The screen is offset and on the bottom and to the right it looks like some kind of plant as if the sign was held up in front of a bush. The frame changes and a slightly shifted vantage point reveals that the text actually says “For the International Geophysical Year.” New frame has new pointy shells on the necklace and says: “1957-1958.”

01:42 New frame shows the open ocean from the deck of the ship. The edge of the ship is in the shot. Waves roll. The sea looks rough. The splash created by the ship moving through the water is visible in the lower left of the frame.

01:50 New Frame. A map of the Pacific Ocean holds an orange card that says: “Roger Revelle Director, H.W. Menard, R. L. Fisher, Expedition Leaders.” The card is placed on the map such that it lays between the labels “North Pacific Ocean” and “South Pacific Ocean.”

New Frame: A new orange card says: “Robert Bingham, MEDICAL DIRECTOR & PHOTOGRAPHER.” [emphasis original, note lack of emphasis in previous description card naming the scientists and Scripps’ Director]

232

02:02 New Frame: A man [Dr. Robert Bingham] in a short sleeve button up shirt leans over a counter top inside the ship. He holds a glass specimen slide in his left hand and writes on a note card or paper in pencil with his right hand. A few instruments appear in the background. This includes some kind of pressurized tank and a portal window.

02:10 New Frame: Map of Pacific Ocean holds a black card that says: “Filmed aboard the Research Vessel Spencer F. Baird – Alan W. Phinney, Master.”

02:16 New Frame: A shot of the Spencer F. Baird in dock in San Diego Harbor from behind angled to demonstrate the ship’s name painted on the back. The ship is mostly painted a creamy yellow on top and the hull is black with the name in white letters. Men are onboard moving around. One climbs down a ladder. A seagull flies by. The wind ruffles the ship’s flags.

02:37 New Frame: A man inside the ship with papers tacked to the wall behind [this is expedition leader and Scripps Research Geologist Robert Fisher].

02:46 New Frame: Map with words: “Departure Day, Oct. 21, San Diego”

New Frame: View of dock with white car on it and ship behind. Clouds dominate the sky but blue skies break through.

New Frame: The ship appears close up. A woman in a skirt, heels, and coat walks off of the metal ramp onto the dock. In the foreground, gas pumps and a bunch of people stand. The people talk with one another and look at the ship. One woman holds the hand of a little boy about 3 years old. Everyone wears formal dress clothing.

New Frame: Brown background, white words say: “The Horizon is the first ship to get underway.”

New Frame: Close up of Horizon including the dingy; main, middle, and upper decks; spare dingy; and five men onboard. All men wear jacket and tie.

New Frame: The ship starts to move. Some men onboard just stand there while others move around doing tasks. Scripps Director Roger Revelle stands on the dock. He paces back and forth looking at the ship. A man with a video camera stands nearby. Horizon pulls out of the harbor. Seagulls fly around. The day is mostly overcast with storm clouds periodically passing over.

New Frame: Black background with brown card that says: “Friends and Family wave goodbye.”

New Frame: Cameraman is now onboard the ship. Twelve people stand on the dock. Seven stand out as women outfitted nicely in dresses, overcoats, and pretty hats.

233 New Frame: A white car on the dock provides a structure to lean on for a man in a military uniform. He looks at an elderly woman who wears a red hat with a pink flower and red shoes. She carries something in her hand and is looking at the cameraman on the ship. She then smiles and waves and the man does the same.

04:38 New Frame: The man in the military uniform and the woman in the red hat move toward the middle of the dock and they converse with another woman who has her head covered. A man holds a child’s hand and they walk by in the background.

New Frame: Another shot from the ship. The woman in the red hat is almost center, and 14 other people stand around waving at the ship.

New Frame: The ship has pulled away from the dock, which we can now see is labeled “B,” and the people have moved to the end of the dock and continue to wave. There appear to be 23 – 25 people at the dock seeing the ships off. Horizon pulls back from the dock. Baird sits still tied up.

05:19 Orange background: “Loading Explosives.” A group of men load boxes of TNT that come sliding off of a ramp from a corrugated metal shed.

New frame: Men onboard the ship look over the edge and walk around.

New frame: Cleveland Davis [First-mate to Captain Marvin Hopkins on Horizon] appears onboard the ship.

New frame: A shot of the shed from the ship. The shed is labeled but the letters are not completely legible: “YF-654 US Navy YFN-G??.” Two men stand in front of the letters.

New frame: the shed from further out.

06:02 Black background brown card: “Departing from San Diego Harbor” New Frame: Cleveland Davis and two other men stand at the bow of the ship. One man smokes a cigarette.

New frame: The ship moves through the ocean. San Diego’s hills loom in the background and house boats dot the scenery.

New frame: The weather tower of the ship reaches into the sky.

New frame: The ship’s flags wave in the wind.

New frame: San Diego sits behind the ocean upon which the ships travel.

06:47 The ship passes an aircraft carrier going into the harbor, a smaller military ship that is much lower to the surface of the water labeled 661, and a small fishing boat.

234 07:48 Map: Dates are superimposed on an ocean map corresponding to the ships’ location on that day.

New frame: The entire route of the Downwind expedition overlays a map of the Pacific Ocean.

08:17 Information card says: “Boat Drill” Various shots of the ship through water and men onboard talking or doing stuff show men wearing orange life jackets, [which is not common in other photos or video]. One man with a camera takes pictures.

Information card says: “Firing Rescue Line” A man holds a device up in his two hands, more or less as if he were holding a large gun, and fires. The firing is remarkably powerful and has a very strong kickback. A stream of smoke is shown flying up into the air. The men work on pulling in a line that is really far out into the ocean. This is a rocket-propelled line thrower used for launching a line in the water during rescues.

09:56 The video camera sits inside the hull and faces out one of the portal windows. A beautiful shot of the ocean covered with storm clouds but with beams of light breaking through rolls for a few seconds framed by the round portal window of the ship.

10:13 Information card says: “Securing the Ship’s dingy” Men move the dingy from the deck to a metal frame holder. They have bicycles on board.

11:21 Information card says: “Oct. 24 First gravity core”

Information card says: “Oct. 24 1. Plankton Haul”

New frame: Men operate coring instruments, talk in the background, and others haul in the plankton net.

12:39 Engineer Maxwell Silverman and another young man fiddle with something. Expedition leader and geologist Robert (Bob) Fisher overlooks things. Silverman smokes a pipe and Fisher a cigarette. Two other men stand by.

New frame: now three of the men have cigarettes.

13:07 Silverman, smoking his pipe, works with an instrument.

13:21 Biologist William Reidel sits on deck writing things down. There is a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Someone hands him something that he puts in that same pocket.

235 13:33 Fisher and another man stand on the balcony of ship and bend over looking into the ocean, where they have placed an instrument. The camera changes to now look just below the balcony to the main deck of the ship where two men examine the instrument coming out of the water. It is a plankton tow net. When Fisher grabs the net, one of the men on the main deck stands up and kind of smiles.

14:07 They bring up a gravity corer from the water. Silverman and another man are now on the balcony of the ship. They handle the corer.

14:25 A man [biologist Bill Reidel] holds a glass jar full of water that is mostly clear, but you can see brown speckles in the water [plankton].

14:32 Silverman, with a pipe in his mouth and a scowl on his face, operates the winch. Two men look on. Max is dressed in an old, beat up button up light blue shirt. The blonde man camera left wears a white button up shirt. The brunette man on camera right wears an argyle sweater. The winch lets out line with great speed.

14:50 The pulley lets the line out over the side of the boat. Men on the balcony bring up the corer.

More fiddling with corer and plankton net.

16:48 Camera moves to the main deck where a man gathers a core tube.

17:02 Two men talk about an instrument one is holding in his hand. They take it apart and look inside.

17:20 Two men stand on the deck, water washes over the bumpy metal that they walk on, one man slips as he repositions himself, and they adjust a coring tube.

17:36 Information card says: “High winds make rough seas.”

Shot of the boat and the sea behind it. Tall metal poles emerge from deck of ship. Map of Dredge station says: “Oct. 25.” Cameraman [Franco Romagnoli] on deck films men working over the fantail of the boat. He stumbles to get his footing because of rough seas.

Four men work with all their might to bring in the dredge. Wire lays everywhere on the deck. The men look at what they brought up. They hold rocks up in the air and inspect them. Their clothes are very worn and dirty. Information card says: “Oct 30 boat launching”

236 Several men maneuver a red dingy with an outboard engine. They push it and lift it with rope. Eight men pull the rope to lift the boat. They place it in the water. One man sees his back is in the shot and he moves out of the frame. The boat is in the water free, and two men are in it. Then they switch out, now three men. They drop black bags into the boat. They take a fishing pole. They motor off.

Information card says: “Transfering Franco to the Horizon” [Franco Romagnoli is a professional cameraman from the Lowell Institute – WGBH hired to make a movie of Downwind].

The small red boat is now next to another ship.

The men talk with one another while they work. They smile periodically.

The small boat leaves the big boat and they do a little spin in the water. The camera pans right and we see the other ship.

24:04 Close up of Baird rolling by. The camera changes position quite a lot. When really close, the ship obviously rolls excessively in the ocean. It looks difficult for the men working on the fantail. The ship rolls so much that the sides, starboard and port sides, almost come completely flat with the surface of the ocean.

24:56 Ocean map says: “Nov. 3 Piston Core”

Shot of the deck and men working. They handle a core tube. This tube is very long. They are pushing it over the fantail down into the water. They use hand signals to communicate with the man operating the winch. A man uses a wrench to tighten something. The core has a large bucket made of metal on it. It swings off the back of the deck. The men, somewhat frantically, grab and pull rope to get the swinging to stop or slow.

28:57 They bring the piston core back on deck. There are several ropes that are used to keep it elevated and drag it.

29:28 They work on the piston core using a large wrench to twist it. Water washes over the deck below their feet. One man wears flip-flops. They all wear shorts. There is a dilapidated wood plank structure [a pathway to prevent slipping on the wet metal deck] under their feet.

29:46 They get the core open and water pours out. The camera pans the length of the deck showing that the core extends almost its entire length.

A man smokes a cigarette while working, and holding what appears to be a core sample that is still held up by some kind of metal structure. They slowly pull a deep-sea mud core out of the center of the core tube. It looks bright white, somewhat squishy, and kind of fragile in some way. One man gets a knife and cuts the white goo.

237 31:20 Sign on map says: “Nov. 5 Temperature Probe”

A group of men load another coring instrument, lift it with the winch wire and ropes, lift it high above the ship deck, and gently and slowly lower it down to the ocean surface and drop it in.

The ship is underway. The camera pans the ship deck. There is another instrument [temperature probe] lying there. It is a red square metal frame and a man pumps the pump looking thing in the middle. This causes the gray metal pipe attached to the top to bend.

33:35 Map says: “Nov. 6 Bathythermograph” A man [Robert Bingham] opens a Horizontal tube attached to this ship’s deck and the instrument inside is seen. A man takes out the bathythermograph. He places it in the water and uses a winch to lower it.

35:25 Man lowers some small instrument overboard. He takes it back up and reads the dial.

35:52 Map says: “Nov 8 Seismic Station” A wire with floats attached is put overboard. A man works on a deck countertop built into the ship. He gets jars out of a box and opens them. He uses pliers to fasten a wire to one of the jars. He throws the jar overboard. It splashes in the water.

Next frame the ship is underway and we see the ocean rushing past. The camera is positioned so that the shot is framed by some portion of the ship. The camera looks through a kind of hole in the frame of the ship.

37:18 Map says: “Nov. 8 R. V. Horizon”

An unidentified man, back toward camera, works on the deck of Horizon (yellow paint with red trim). Baird lies in the background. We see Baird moving camera left across the frame. In the middle of the frame, dynamite explodes and the ocean water shoots up. We see this happen a second time from a slightly different angle.

A third explosion happens, and Baird is much closer as is the ship where the camera is.

38:20 Several shots of Baird rolling by.

38:37 Another, and much bigger, explosion. This time Baird is directly behind the water that shoots up – the camera was placed so that when the dynamite exploded, Baird could not be seen through the rising water column. Shot of the water rolling by.

238 38:55 Men on deck working. They bring in the wire with the floats on it that previously had been placed in the water. They keep pulling in wire. Finally they bring in a short metal tube. They keep pulling and bring in a longer metal tube.

40:10 A sign that says: “The ship’s workshop is it [sic] scientific laboratory” Inside the ship sits a set of instruments. One instrument prints out a seismic profile reading on a long sheet of paper. The camera pans to other instruments. A sign says: “General Alarm – When Bell Rings xxxx Your xxxx.” The text is illegible because it is covered by a very cumbersome instrument.

41:41 New instrument that says “Times Chart Recorder.” Men catch the paper coming out of this machine. The machine begins to spew out paper unwantedly.

42:33 Information sign says: “March 1, 1958 The Baird returns to San Diego” The camera sits on the hills of the mainland overlooking the harbor. Baird enters the port and San Diego sits in the background.

43:02 Baird arrived at the dock and now sits still. Men onboard are waving in the direction of the camera. Navy personnel walk by on the dock. A truck backs up to the Baird.

43:45 A marching band awaits their arrival. Three female drum majors in short skirts stand with the band behind them. The band marches forward and behind. Next the oceanographers’ wives walk up the dock toward the ship before more people come.

The drum majors dance and twirl their batons as the band plays behind them.

The men wait onboard. The camera shows the drum majors on the left visible, but most of the frame is taken up by the Baird and the men onboard. In some moments the camera cuts out the drum majors, even though they continue to perform, in order to capture the ship and the men waiting on it. The families wait and watch the girls dance with batons.

44:47 The women and small children start to board the ship. The process is slow and there are many people waiting on deck. The deck is crowded.

45:06 Two women stand behind a man who is seated with something over his lap. It looks like he is holding a baby. Black screen says: “Scripps Institution of Oceanography…of the…University of California.”

White screen fade to black.

239 Chapter 5 Photographs and Film: The Entire Pacific Basin as Scripps’ Domain Introduction

This chapter applies methodologies of image analysis to the history of oceanography in order to examine messages of power and ownership contained within Downwind’s visual archive. I examine photographs and a film that captured life and work at sea and discuss the content expedition participants documented. Upon a first glance of these images, research and life at sea appear to be arduous yet fun and exciting. These pictures (still and motion), however, were not merely casual representations of research and personal time on the ocean. Day-to-day activities transformed into adventure, and these exciting and formative experiences that men had at sea inspired them commemorate what they wanted to remember in photographs and film. I argue that if we take these images seriously, we can extract key elements of the process by which oceanographers built Scipps’ institutional identity as the driving force behind (and the owner of) ocean research in the Pacific.373

More than forty years ago Susan Sontag attested to this approach when she wrote, “…there is an aggression in every use of the camera.”374 Her statement was highly polemical, and other scholars since Sontag have rethought the active nature of photography and softened her commitment to visual representation as a form of violence. In the words of art curator Ariella

Azoulay, “Photography is much more than what is printed on paper.” It is constructed by several different participants: the camera, photographer, photographed subject, and spectator.”375 The methods I mobilize in this chapter to understand Downwind’s images direct this sort of multi- layered attention to photographs and film. On the one hand the photographs and the film offer a

373 The sub-title to this chapter was inspired by Elizabeth Shor’s language when she claimed that the entire Pacific Basin was Scripps’ domain in, Elizabeth Shor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: probing the oceans, 1936-1976, 378. 374 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, (1973). 375 Ariella Azoulay, The Civic Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books, (2008): pp. 14 and 23.

240 kind of innocent representation of expedition practices. They in fact did capture events that took place. Yet, by their very nature the imagery alone offers only a limited cross-section of reality. What

I try to highlight in this chapter is a visual record from expedition oceanography in the 1950s that sits untapped, shrouded by the assumption that it un-problematically recorded expedition activities and in a simple manner. This chapter asks two questions: What do the images from Downwind tell us about how oceanographers saw their world at sea, and what deeper meanings can be determined about expedition practices through the application of methodologies established by scholars tuned into image analysis?

Practitioners of this sort of work start from the viewpoint that the social nature of photographic representation stakes a claim on even the most prosaic image captured on film. At issue in any picture are underlying forces, politics, and complex layers of human consciousness.

Scholars who investigate the social nature of photography have committed themselves to dissecting what lies beneath photographs and looked beyond first glances. They do so in order to show how photographs are meaningful objects that help people negotiate their world. The scholars who inspired this sort of approach to the Downwind photographic collection built a body of literature that combines reading images as frozen on paper in ink with uncovering surrounding realities linked to deeper social realities. Through focused attention to diverse case studies scholars have shown how photographers have constructed the images they capture in certain ways and why they made those choices; how the people being photographed participated in the process of image creation; what photographs can tell us about how people interacted with each other outside of the moment of the still frame; how certain social groups have appeared and participated in the production of images about themselves; the extent to which photographs might be fictitious, mythical, or violent; and how photographs have acquired authority and been distributed and mobilized through various means.

241 At the heart of each and every one of the case studies from this literature, whether explicit or implicit, lies one simple question: What is a photograph? Each author who analyzes an image had to first determine what aspects of the medium and its production proved analytically useful. All agree that it was something more than what could be extracted from any one particular image itself. But the debate across these case studies has not been merely for the task of definition. It involved determining exactly what kind of outside information about a photograph helped answer questions about deeper social processes and how those social processes defined what it meant to print an image on paper with ink. Scholars have grappled with how far beyond an image they needed to take their analysis in order to determine its significance. At stake are questions such as the following: Can we determine the full meaning of a photograph from the visual image it contains? Can intricate details reveal enough to construct the development and shifts across social processes involving certain photographs? What roles do the people who produce and disseminate photographs play?

Essentially, scholars now interpret the photograph as an object that uniquely holds information about how people organize themselves; how they are organized by more powerful individuals, larger social structures, or momentous events; how people relate to one another; and what people think about themselves.

Rarely have scholars discussed photographic analysis as a body of literature without evoking the contribution of French literary theorist Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1988). This book investigated the use of photographs when people die. Barthes generated his arguments as he mourned the death of his own mother.376 In the book, he treated every photograph as a memorial in order to come up with a way to distinguish two characteristics of the photographic image, what he called stadium – the subject, meaning, and context – and punctum – specific details that hold the

376 The book is generally considered deeply personal because of the deep relationship Barthes had with his mother from a long history of living with her as she cared for him during difficult bouts of his own lifelong illness.

242 viewer’s gaze and invite further inquiry into hidden meaning. He claimed that the stadium is what

“interests” him while the punctum is what “pricks him.”377 In one photo, a girl’s high-heeled shoes acted as punctum. In another it was a child’s bad teeth. These sorts of details held what he referred to as “a power of expansion,” meaning a grain that required Barthes to add his own perception to the photograph. The explanatory power of his book came from his analysis of a series of photographs created with the same theme of memorial photograph. Barthes convinced his readers that the truly powerful component of any photograph was what the photographer put there unintentionally. The intentional to him was the insignificantly prosaic. The unintended provoked, and with that provocation, it explained what was underneath. With this intense focus on the unintentional, Barthes deemphasized the active role of the photographer, pushed to understand his or her unconscious contributions to photographic creation, highlighted the importance of accidental details, and illuminated a power in scholarly afterthought and interpretation of images. His end goal with this type of analysis was not mathematical. The word “Lucida” from the title promoted a sense of lucidity in which there were no clear answers when reading photographic images. Rather, Barthes sought an interpretive space between image, as what could be seen, and photograph, what was held still on paper with ink. He left a lot of room for reinterpretation of his own conclusions.

Since Camera Lucida’s publication, scholars have extended Barthes’ approach to other themes and contexts and modified his particular interpretive gaze. One of the primary departures has been a scholarly emphasis on the active role of the photographer when actually taking the photograph.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined the photograph as a cheap and technically simple object ruled by one question: What was photographable?378 The photographic image then socially functioned, according to Bourdieu, who specifically situated his analysis within the French context,

377 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (1981): 43. 378 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography a Middlebrow Art, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, (1990).

243 as a souvenir commemorative of intimate social events. Its deeper meaning emerged from the particular individual who took the photograph. Peasants, urban laborers, clerical workers, junior executives, and senior executives each created and utilized images differently. Bourdieu thought that attitudes toward photography directly coincided with social positioning and inter-class relationships.

Photographs in this context were objects through which photographers transmitted and reified social and cultural values. Art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau made a similar move when she examined the power of the female photographer379 and demonstrated how women held the power to stage femininity in the pictures they took. Literary scholar Marianne Hirsch defined the photographer around family. Members of a family took photographs and in so doing projected a mythical ideal of themselves. And a large and ever growing group of scholars have taken on the task of dissecting the role of photographs in Mexican culture. Art historian Esther Gabara linked the production of photographs to a modernist ethos surrounding Latin American social movements.380

Her primary contribution has been the illumination of forgotten photographs that she argued united photographs with post-revolutionary Mexican culture. Historian John Mraz demonstrated the role of photographs and film in constructing Mexican national identity from the 19th century to the present and more specifically showed how Mexican photographers shaped social images of the Mexican

Revolution.381 Each of these scholars built off of Barthes’ close reading method and extended their arguments to emphasize the power struggles that took place during the act of photographing.

379 Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. 380 Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil, Durham: NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 381 John Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009; John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012.

244 Historian of science Jennifer Tucker inserted the scientific context into this literature.382 She asked: How were photographic images debated; how did they acquire authority; how were they distributed; how did science become a part of negotiating photography; where did people see scientific photographs; and how were photographs mobilized as evidence? Her approach focused less than literary and sociology scholars on utilizing methods of close reading. Instead, she expanded beyond the photograph as a particular moment tied tightly to other moments close in time. Nature

Exposed offered the photograph as an object around which Victorian science, her chosen exemplary context, established scientific facts. Tucker’s work, while sympathetic to methods of close reading, contributed to photographic scholarship a complex entanglement of photos and people that simultaneously explained how and why images were produced, what technology was used, and by way of extending even further, what roles have been played by not just the photographer but also the photographed subject and the viewer of a photograph.

One of the most analytically inclusive theories on the implications of photographs in society comes from art curator Ariella Azoulay in The Civil Contract of Photography.383 Set around photographs of violence from the Israeli context, Azoulay developed a way of seeing photographs that required simultaneous attention to the camera, photographer, photographed subject, and viewer whom she calls the “spectator.” She preferred to think of image analysis not as reading photographs, but as

“watching” them:

Photography is much more than what is printed on photographic paper. The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb “to watch” is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and

382 Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 383 Ariella Azoulay, The Civic Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books, 2008. Thank you to Gabriela Aceves- Sepúlveda for alerting me to some of the popular scholarship on photographic analysis that I use in this section and especially for sending me to Azoulay’s work.

245 movement that need to be reinscribed [sic] in the interpretation of the still photographic image.384

When she analyzed a photograph, she tuned into the ways in which photographs indicated the will, authority, and subjugation of everyone involved in its production whether they appeared in the image or not. She analyzed, for example, a photograph of Napoleon III’s son getting his portrait taken. In the photo, Azoulay saw Napoleon standing on the side of the photo. There, he supervised his son and the absence of servants. Napoleon surprisingly did not allow servants to take the child to the portrait session for him. The photographer himself was physically not shown, but the photographer was present as indicated by the frame being panned back in order to show the whole studio scene, including backdrop equipment. From that viewpoint, the photographer took control of his own image away from Napoleon because he, not Napoleon, decided what would and would not be captured. Essentially, an unassuming photographic assistant stood in the wing while the child sat at the center of all of these men who had power over him. Regardless of that power, they placed him at the center of the event. From all of these components seen in this way, Azoulay determined:

The photograph, then, does not exclusively represent the photographer’s will and intention, those of Napoleon III, or those of the photographed boy. In fact, the photograph escapes the authority of anyone who might claim to be its author, refuting anyone’s claim to sovereignty. The photograph discloses the negotiations among the parties to the contract – photographer, photographed, camera, and spectator – as well as what the parties knowingly or unknowingly achieve, through force, seduction, or even theft.”385

Azoulay conducted photographic analysis from the intricate details contained within the image, in the style of Barthes, but drew a more complex theoretical framework in which the general context of any one photograph was required in order to understand how all images were produced by

“photography,” which is a thing always produced en masse. She wanted to illuminate this medium as

384 Ibid., p. 14. 385 Ibid., p. 112.

246 something “civic” that cannot ever actually be personal because its production fundamentally requires a “complex field of relations.”386 What was at stake in any one photograph, small group of photographs, or complete collection of photographs has “never” (emphasis original)387 been in a picture. The photograph is merely evidence of a larger photographic situation made possible by social relations, and to Azoulay, those social relations lie at the heart of scholarly investigation into the photo as a visual object.

This chapter draws on the scholarship from Barthes to Azoulay. I extract both details in the images themselves and the larger photographic situation in order to examine the visual record of the

Downwind expedition as recorded in a series of photographs and a silent motion picture film. I argue that the photographs and film from the expedition have two sides: they are innocent recordings of men who merely wished to document their journey at sea, and underneath that innocence they tell stories of power, which explain how an institution worked through individuals to ensure that knowledge production in the Pacific belonged to Scripps.

Image analysis literature has spent surprisingly little time discussing how and why scholars choose which photographs to analyze. Jennifer Tucker took on “thousands of photographs” from

British scientific and medical archives used as scientific evidence for scientific phenomena from

1839 to 1914. She only included in her book “a small sample selected from thousands of photographs and prints.”388 In total she published seventy-five.389 Tucker justified the choices she made to focus on photographs that were “deemed important in the 19th century” and “helped define the British public image of science.”390 The subject matter of the pictures, however, ranged across a wide array of plant and animal specimens, scientists themselves conducting work or attending

386 Ibid., p. 127. 387 Ibid. 388 Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, p. 11. 389 By my count of the images placed in her book. 390 Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, p. 11.

247 meetings, astronomical, meteorological, and oceanographic drawings, cityscapes, use of cameras, and microscopic images, to name a few. The thread she used to hold them all together is that each one was used as scientific evidence in Victorian Britain, but she offered little explanation for how she sifted through “thousands” of photos and decided on those in her book. At some point the reader just has to trust that she chose photographs representative of the whole. Photographic collections emerge from varied recordkeeping practices and thus by nature attention to them can seem awkward and perhaps incomplete. Across much of this work, however, thematic threads tend to prove sufficient in justifying analytical choices. They did for Barthes’ memorial photographs as well as for

Mraz’s Mexican Revolution pictures. Accounting for the content of every photograph has not been as important as deciphering a set of images that represent a thematic thread significant to whatever context is under examination. Beyond thematic choice, scholars generally accept research parameters that bring previously unknown photographs to light. The fact that scholarship has never addressed a collection often proves to be sufficient justification for whatever choices a scholar made in constructing an analysis.

Similar to Tucker, who encountered thousands of photographs from Victorian science and chose to utilize only seventy-five, I include only a handful of the hundreds of photographs I viewed from oceanography across the 1950s. First and foremost, the images and film analyzed in this chapter are from the Downwind expedition and come from the Scripps archive.391 Within that sub- set I made choices as well. I accessed six sources for photographs plus the film. The film is from the

Media collection and the photos come from the following: the Scripps Photographic Laboratory archive, Scripps archive Subject Files, personal collection of Downwind expedition leader (first half) and geologist Henry Menard, personal collection of engineer Alan Jones, personal collection of Baird

391 I acquired Alan Jones’ photographs and permission to use them directly from him, but the Scripps archive also now has a copy.

248 Navy Captain Alan Phinney, and personal collection of Downwind expedition leader (second half) and geologist Bob Fisher. As I worked with the images, it became clear that while the detailed subject matter does cover a wide array of specific moments, they repeat a small set of themes: the

Pacific Ocean and geography, scientific tourism, scientific work, everyday shipboard life, and research vessels. In total, the collection of Downwind photographs includes 479 images. The Scripps

Photographic Laboratory contains 1 (it shows Downwind equipment - unknown photographer); the

Scripps archive Subject Files has 1 (photograph of the map of the Downwind track, creator unknown); Henry Menard’s papers hold 15 (14 taken by Carl Shipek of the seafloor and 1 by

Menard of Fisher sitting on the deck of Baird); Alan Jones contributed 414 (with by far the broadest subject matter); Captain Alan Phinney’s papers include 22 (shipboard activities, touring Tahiti and

Easter Island); and Bob Fisher’s papers consist of 26 (shipboard activities, touring with South

Americans, and Easter Island). Robert Bingham’s film provides 45 minutes of silent motion picture images of the expedition.

Seemingly documentary, the photographs from expeditions present visual representations of the oceanic life and work conducted by Scripps yet were only published in a few particular places, which certainly did not include scientific journal articles. The few that have appeared publicly are mostly images only of the Scripps scientists, with very little if any representation of the myriad of people who assisted them at sea. Helen Raitt, wife of Scripps oceanographer Russell Raitt, was the first woman to go on a Scripps oceanographic expedition. She went on Capricorn in 1952-1953 and wrote a book about her adventures titled Exploring the Deep Pacific: A woman’s story of her adventures in the man’s world of an oceanographic expedition. In this text she included twenty-five images, two of which are photographs of “islanders.”392 Elizabeth Shor, wife of Scripps scientist George G. Shor, wrote a

392 Helen Raitt, Exploring the Deep Pacific: A woman’s story of her adventures in the man’s world of an oceanographic expedition, (New York: Norton, 1956.)

249 history of the institution titled Scripps Institution of Oceanography: probing the oceans, 1936-1976 in which she included fifty-five photographs. Only one showed someone not from Scripps, a Tongan woman wearing a grass skirt.393 The bulk of these snapshots have always been and remain private, especially those that include people not from Scripps, and this reclusion has helped cast into dark shadows an extremely rich part of the history of American science in the Pacific.

In this chapter, I analyze the photographs created by engineer Alan Jones (captions are his added within the last year, some sixty years after the expedition), Baird ship Captain Alan Phinney

(captions are mine), and geologist Bob Fisher (captions are mine).394 Bob Fisher, Alan Jones, and

Scripps archivist Peter Brueggeman independently confirmed that the images held in the personal collections correspond to the attributed photographer.395 I also examine the silent motion picture film created by medical doctor Robert Bingham. Thus, I do not examine the photographs with unknown creators/photographers. Since my attention is partially on the photographer, those without a clearly attributed photographer do not fit my analysis. My omissions, then, are as follows: the one image held in the Scripps Photographic Laboratory archive of Downwind equipment and the Downwind track map held in the Scripps Subject Files;396 Carl Shipek’s seafloor images, which I chose to organize as a different genre of photographs because they were used as scientific evidence

393 Elizabeth Shor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: probing the oceans, 1936-1976, (San Diego, CA: Tofua Press, 1978), p. 375. 394 Alan Jones recently compiled his images from the Downwind expedition to turn over to the Scripps Archive. By request of Bob Fisher he also sent them to me personally with permission for use. I accessed the Phinney and Fisher photographs through the Scripps Archive online Digitized Photo Collection. In many cases I have found that the captions to the images in this archive have errors, so I chose not to use them here. 395 Personal conversation with Bob Fisher, April 22, 2014. Email conversation with Alan Jones, November 30, 2013. And email conversation with Peter Brueggeman, August 11, 2014. 396 Even though there is only one photograph from Downwind in this collection, if there were more I would have likely omitted it in its entirely from this chapter anyway. The images from this collection were created as part of Scripps’ official photographic record and therefore are different than the private photographs shot by the men who travelled on Scripps expeditions. They emerged under a strict set of rules and institutional politics not true for the personal photos of expedition members. For instance, when Scripps engaged in top-secret military operations from the decks of their ships in collaboration with the U.S. Navy, John McFall, the photographer from Scripps’ Photographic Laboratory was allowed to continue taking pictures. All other personal cameras onboard, however, were literally locked up and restricted during secret military operations. Capricorn expedition’s participation in Operation Ivy provides an example. See Elizabeth N. Shor, ed., Seeking Signals in the Sea: Recollections of the Marine Physical Laboratory, San Diego: University of California, (1997): pp. 39-40.

250 and published in journal articles to demonstrate the character of the ocean floor; Phinney’s photographs from Tahiti (2 photos); and Menard’s photograph of Bob Fisher (1 photo).397

With these choices, I then organize the chapter around the photographer as a collection creator. From there, I engage in a layered approach to photographic and film analysis that considers the photographer, camera, subject, and spectator of these visual representations of the Downwind expedition. The first section, The Collections, outlines the content and production of the photos & film by presenting a set of photos produced by each photographer: Alan Jones, Alan Phinney,

Robert Fisher, and the film by Robert Bingham. This section provides a foundation upon which to continue further analysis of the images and explains how expedition participants saw their experiences. The second section, The Underside of Innocence, discusses what lies beneath the seemingly innocent act of taking these photographs as documentation of expedition experience with respect to the camera, photographer, photographed subject, and viewer. Here I construct my argument that the images were things that held reference to a power struggle in the Pacific over the production of knowledge. I conclude with a brief discussion of how these images that never received wide distribution nevertheless contain vital elements that can help us understand what motivated oceanographers to go to sea.

The Collections

Engineer Alan Jones

Alan Jones was an Assistant Engineer at Scripps who worked on multiple expeditions alongside oceanographers Bob Fisher and Henry Menard throughout the 1950s. Even though he joined Downwind halfway through, Jones was often one of the scientific assistants who travelled for the entirety of expeditions. As part of these journeys to sea, he created a large collection of

397 Both Phinney and Menard’s contain content similar to the other photographs in other collections that have more images to draw from.

251 photographs. By far, his images make up the bulk of those from Downwind currently in the Scripps archive. This numerical abundance also offers the widest range in subject matter. As a collection, these images show oceanographers traveling on airplanes, visiting islands, encountering local people, collaborating with South Americans, catching deep-sea fauna, networking with governmental officials, and much more. The detail Jones captured is not visible in textual accounts that overwhelmingly focus on the multiple tasks involved with taking measurements at sea. His collection offers the opportunity to get out into the world of expedition oceanography and see what Bob

Fisher and others meant when they referred to these excursions as “adventure.”

Part of the lure of oceanographic expeditions was the chance to encounter foreign places and people. If we looked at Jones’ photographs as the sole source of historical evidence, we might conclude that these expeditions were acts of tourism as much as they were scientific endeavors.

Jones took pictures of many subjects: Pacific land geology as seen from airplanes, sunsets, hotels, cityscapes, ancient ruins and technologies, cathedrals, rural farms, roads, buildings, local peoples, ornate architecture, rivers, villages, trains, houses, stonework, markets, airports, airplanes, lakes, government buildings, museums, naval monuments, agriculture, fishing vessels, harbors, bathing beaches, swimming pools, a vineyard, public transit systems, statues, schools, seawalls, Horizon and

Baird and work onboard, South America naval vessels, islands, gardens, a skyscraper, a factory, parks, a soccer stadium, seabirds, sand dunes, expedition participants, livestock, llamas, squid, a turtle, shipboard celebration of the expedition’s end, and many images of Bob Fisher. Fisher took the camera at times to capture Jones in his own photographs. Finally, Jones photographed the high school band that welcomed Downwind back to San Diego. On Downwind alone these images were shot in Guatemala, Mexico, Antigua, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru

(including the Amazon region), Chile (including Easter Island), out on the Pacific Ocean, and a couple back at home in port in San Diego.

252 A primary thread of these expedition adventures included the chance to see people living a completely foreign way of life.

Image 35: Fruit vendors, Callao. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

Image 36: Carreta with oxen. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

253

Image 37: RLF [Bob Fisher], small girl, Sacsayhauman [sic]. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

Image 38: Nubile Chilenas. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Expedition science was more than measuring the ocean from ships at sea. These photos demonstrate how it was an opportunity to visit foreign places, meet people of different cultures, and tour famous geological and anthropological artifacts. These photos were taken as part of tourist activities separated in time and location from sampling and measuring the Pacific. Yet, they were part of the journey as a whole. The word “expedition” referred to a complex series of events that took place on airplanes, islands, ships, and in ports of call. Because oceanographers went to sea to practice science, they found themselves in various foreign locations amidst unfamiliar places and

254 people. Official oceanographic work provided extensive opportunity for expedition participants to experience what was not available back at home. Adventure made the dangers and hassles worth it.

These men saw people, things, and places they would not have otherwise encountered. The journey brought oceanographers into contact with what they considered to be exotic. They met with foreign

Navy officials and toured the local areas while stationed in ports of call.

Image 39: Chilean Navy officers, Norris Rakestraw center. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. They acted out the maritime traditional ceremonies when crossing the equator.

Image 40: Equator initiation. Pablo Malag facing pollywog. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

255

Image 41: George Hohnhaus dunking pollywog. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

Image 42: Bob Norris being dunked. Bob Fisher on right. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. They fought voraciously to capture squid from the deep sea.

Image 43: Giant [sic actually jumbo] squid. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Expedition participants benefited from the chance to see rare ancient artifacts.

256

Image 44: Alan Jones for scale. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. Sometimes they even came into contact with famous people. While there are no photographs of the encounter, oceanographers spent some time on Easter Island talking with missionary Sebastian

Englert. They also toured the sites where he had worked to inventory the island’s Moai.

257

Image 45: Moai inventoried number 284 by Sebastian Englert. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones. And when the day was done, these men found moments to appreciate the beauty available so far from home out on the Pacific Ocean.

Image 46: Final Downwind sunset. Photo Creator: Alan Jones. Permission for use provided by Alan Jones.

258 As Roger Revelle stated in his Sea Search story:398 “Science at sea was not an endeavor that only involved work. It was also about how the adventure of being very far from home on the ocean combined with what would more traditionally be understood as scientific activities, such as sampling, observation, and measuring.” Alan Jones’ photographs fill in the space in the historical record between expeditions as work and expeditions as a particular kind of adventure akin to tourism. Expedition members came across new and exciting peoples who lived unfamiliar lives.

They saw women who sold fruit while sitting in the streets of Callao, Peru, men who collected market goods in carts pulled by oxen, and they witnessed how the ancient world intersected with contemporary Latin American life. On a different level, Downwind travellers encountered Chilean and Peruvian oceanography that operated almost solely under the direction of navies. Looking back on his time on these expeditions, Bob Fisher explained that in anticipation of a trip to sea he was often inspired to walk down the halls of the Scripps and yell, “Let’s go adventuring.” He also remembered that men were chosen to come along on the expeditions based on how much “fun

[they were] to have along.”399 Alan Jones’ photographs give visual life to the statements of Revelle and Fisher and demonstrate how expedition oceanography unfolded as a journey much more inclusive than the process of taking measurements. Expeditions involved tourism, play, and fun. The process of working on ships at sea and actually taking measurements brought moments of real danger, difficulty, and due to the repetitive nature of work, sometimes boredom. Those challenges were offset, however, by opportunity for adventures in foreign places that satisfied a common human need to experience the exotic.

398 See Prologue to Chapter 1. 399 Laura Harkewicz, “Oral History of Bob Fisher,” p. 47.

259 Captain Alan Phinney

When Horizon and Baird left San Diego on October 21, they separated in order to take a wider range of observations. The vessels remained apart until November 2 when they crossed the equator and began preparing for a seismic refraction profile. But before they commenced the profile on November 3, the scientists and crew of Downwind held what they called “equatorial ceremonies,” also known as “crossing the line.” This celebration was meant to commemorate first timers’ crossing of the equator. A long-held maritime tradition, the performance of summoning

King Neptune to become a member of his court held a central role in the expedition’s string of events. Alan Jones’ photographs of the ceremony above focus on the hazing portion of ritual, but

Alan Phinney’s photographs depict the men who played the roles of King Neptune and his court.

As they crossed the equator, expedition participants engaged in a kind of play where one man pretended to be king of the sea and the others acted as his subordinate court. This spectacle allowed expedition participants to try on new identities. They acted out a power relationship in which the king dictated the misery of those crossing the line for the first time. The ceremony they performed included a seasoned sailor dressing up as King Neptune, god of water and sea, another as

Neptune’s dignitary, Davy Jones, representing the bottom of the sea. Sailors who had not crossed the line before suited up as Pollywogs – a kind of larval stage of sailor. 400

400 Images 47-50: SIO Digitized Photo Archive. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents. Alan Phinney Papers, 1945-1994. Photographer: Alan Phinney.

260

Image 47: Crossing the line: King Neptune. SIO Archives. Photo Creator: Alan Phinney. Alan Phinney Papers, 1945-1994. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

Image 48: Crossing the line: men on deck. SIO Archives. Photo Creator: Alan Phinney. Alan Phinney Papers, 1945-1994. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

Image 49: Crossing the line: cheering. SIO Archives. Photo Creator: Alan Phinney. Alan Phinney Papers, 1945-1994. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

261

Image 50: Crossing the line: pollywog. SIO Archives. Photo Creator: Alan Phinney. Alan Phinney Papers, 1945-1994. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents. The festivities included interrogation by King Neptune in order for the Pollywogs to claim the status of Shellback,401 members of the king’s court. Before gaining membership to the court, sailors were required to perform a range of humiliating tasks in what was essentially a hazing. They laid on the deck of the ship while copious water was poured over their faces; pushed fruit, such as an orange, across the deck with their noses; drank strange, most likely alcoholic, concoctions; knelt on the deck while poked with King Neptune’s trident and sprayed with ship oil; and while blindfolded had their heads covered with food or soap.402

The equatorial line crossing ceremony dates back more than four hundred years.403 The first known reference to this ritual comes from a French religious ceremony held in 1529 in which the men prayed, ate fish, and threw silver coins overboard. The religious nature of the celebration secularized over the next two hundred years toward shaving, drenching with water, dunking men into the sea, and subjecting new recruits to violence. In modern times, organization of the ceremony

401 The 1952 expedition through the Panama Basin, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands was named Shellback. There are several other examples of the ceremonial and mythological influencing names of research expeditions at Scripps. 402 Based on evaluation of change recorded in images through this period, as more expeditions took place after the 1950s, the activities and costumes of these ceremonies became increasingly extravagant. The hazing intensified humiliation, and as women travelled more often on the ship, the ceremonies became overtly sexualized. 403 Keith P. Richardson, “Polliwogs and Shellbacks: An Analysis of the Equator Crossing Ritual,” Western Folklore 36, no. 2 (April 1977): 154-159.

262 follows strict military social division. The ship Captain, then, typically plays the role of King

Neptune; senior officers play Davy Jones and Aphrodite in the king’s court. The ship’s most senior enlisted men assume the part of the royal baby, dentist, and barber. Other senior members of the crew act as members of the shellback police force. All of the pollywogs, those being inducted into the King’s court by crossing the line for the first time, group together to plan retaliation against the taunting. On Navy ships, the ceremony spans the month prior to actually crossing the line, the moment of crossing, and then the following day when the sailors act out their ritual death and subsequent rebirth. In death, the polliwogs are covered in revolting substances, such as grease, mustard, and chili sauce. Mixtures of these are sprayed into their mouths, and sometimes chunks of hair are cut off. During rebirth, polliwogs crawl across the deck while being doused with water. The final portion of the ceremony consists of pollywogs being dunked backwards into a salt water-filled tub. During the dunking, he is asked what he is, and once he replies that he is a shellback, the ritual ceases, and the man is now considered a full member of King Neptune’s court as a shellback.

Everyone on the ship celebrates that evening with a feast of steak, baked potato, salad, and corn on the cob.

Oceanographers adopted and adapted the maritime and naval ritual of holding a ceremony for the first time a scientist or engineer crossed the equator. Captain Phinney further enlisted the

Scripps’ scientific community into naval tradition by recording the ceremonies as they took place on an oceanographic research vessel. His photographs capture these activities as they played out on

Downwind. The few photographs in this collection depict Navy crewmembers as King Neptune and his court, polliwogs acting out their subordination to the king (Images 47, 49, and 50), and bystanders who look on with great amusement: geologist Russell Raitt has his back to Phinney’s camera in Image 49 (he wears a hat but no shirt), and geologist Henry Menard smiles as he records something on paper in Image 48 (he wears a hat). On oceanographic ships, these ceremonies only

263 lasted one day as opposed to the one month duration on Navy ships. Recording the activities in photographs, however, became an important part of expedition life. Scripps issued an official certificate to anyone who crossed the line on one of its oceanographic research vessels. The online

Scripps Digital Image archive alone holds over seven hundred photographs of crossing the line ceremonies from Roger Revelle’s induction on Capricorn expedition in 1952 through the 1970s and

1980s. Phinney’s photographs signal the intermixture between oceanography and the Navy on

Downwind. Most if not everyone onboard took part in this ritual. It was another layer in which oceanography at sea became a source of fun and adventure. The practices certainly included a sense of hazing passed down from maritime and naval tradition, but oceanographers played this down a little. The entire ritual was much shorter. Men were dunked overboard, covered in grease, and subjected to eating unpalatable concoctions. Violence, however, was rare and the power struggle between king and subordinate had a much stronger sense of fun about it than on Navy ships where real tensions often played out. In the sense that his images capture the playfulness of these ceremonies on Downwind, Phinney’s photographs do represent the greater collection from the

1950s to the 1980s.

Acting out this Naval tradition was not and is not unique to Scripps. The line crossing ceremony is a maritime tradition that has been and continues to be carried out by navies across the world and in many non-military contexts, including for entertainment on passenger vessels.

Participation signaled scientists’ individual willingness to cooperate with long-held maritime tradition and sent the message that oceanographers, along with Navy sailors, were men of the sea. These, however, were Scripps’ ships. Accordingly, scientists participated only as much as lead oceanographers deemed fit. Shipboard camaraderie brought scientific and Navy men together for a fun day of crossing the line. Nevertheless, Scripps leaders, not the Navy, determined stricter parameters. In the Navy, the ceremony literally signaled the transition from an inexperienced sailor

264 into the well-established Naval culture. On Horizon and Baird, crossing the line was a form of entertainment. Any amalgamation because of this festivity was superficial, and after the day was over, each man went back to his post. Scientists, therefore, used the crossing the line ceremony not to create coherence between themselves and their Naval companions, but as a way to establish themselves as men of the sea.

Bob Fisher’s Photographs

Halfway through the expedition, on December 23, the ships reached Valparaiso, Chile where they spent the Christmas holiday. Here, scientists met with military leaders from el Servicio

Hidrográfico y Oceanográfico de la Armada de Chile – the department that represented Chile in the

International Geophysical Year. The staff of the Estación Costera de Investigaciones Marinas de la

Universidad de Chile visited the Scripps ships. Fisher’s images show adventure of a different sort than Jones and Phinney. These are shots that demonstrate engagement with foreign IGY officials,

Navy personnel, and scientists.404

Image 51: Launching temperature probe. Photo Creator: Unknown. SIO Archive. Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

404 Images 51-54: SIO Digitized Photo Archive. UC San Diego Library. Copyright: Unknown. Collection: Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers. Photographer: Unlisted.

265

Image 52: Bob Norris, Pasamay, Peru sand dunes. Photo Creator: Unknown. SIO Archive. Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

Image 53: Mataveri Airport, Easter Island Image. Photo Creator: Unknown. SIO Archive. Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

Image 54: Bob Fisher at Pasamayo, Peru sand dunes. Photo Creator: Unknown. SIO Archive. Robert Lloyd Fisher Papers. UC San Diego Library. Copyright UC Regents.

266 Also at this stop in the voyage, five South American scientists joined the expedition. 405 Image 51 is the only existing image I know of in which one of these scientists participated in expedition work on

Downwind and one of very few that show any foreign oceanographer working from a Scripps ship.

In the photo, Mateo Dragicevic of the University of Chile assists Bob Fisher to maneuver a temperature probe so that Maxwell Silverman and Richard Von Herzen can lower it over the side.

The other three images show Scripps oceanographers listening to Peruvian scientist Jorge Broggi

(Images 52 and 54) and Chilean Navy officials (Image 53 at Mataveri Airport on Easter Island).

These exchanges occurred as part of the IGY program, but the images show the intimate nature of what actually took place. Formal arrangements got Scripps oceanographers into contact with South American scientists and Navy personnel. Once acquaintances were made, Scripps oceanographers toured the coastal areas surrounding Lima, Peru and Easter Island with local officials. On these tours they learned about the land-based geography of the region. The interpersonal contacts were not maintained after the IGY ended.406 Scripps oceanographers, however, took the information they received back with them as they continued their work characterizing the ocean environment of this region. Fisher’s images are simple enough. They record how Downwind was a case of international exchange that centered on touring the local geological features near the expedition’s ports of call. Later in the chapter I will unpack these images in more detail to reveal much more complex underlying messages about Scripps scientists as the leaders of these exchanges and South Americans as contributors to that cause.

Dr. Robert Bingham’s Film

405 The five South American scientists were Erwin Schweigger, Peru – Comanía del Guano; Lt. Alberto Casellas, Argentina – Navy; Mateo Dragicevic, Universidad de Chile; Julio Cossettini, Argentina – Navy; Romulo Jordan, Peru Companía Administradora del Guano. Preliminary Report on Downwind, 9. 406 I have seen no record of continued engagement between Scripps personnel and the particular South Americans who also participated in the program after IGY ended. A few straggling thank-you letters were exchanged, but nothing more.

267 Medical doctors travelled aboard Scripps ships during all of the major expeditions throughout the 1950s as paid overseers of the physical and mental health and well being of all men working and living at sea. Dr. Robert Bingham recorded a 16mm film of his time on Downwind

(transcript readable in Prologue to Chapter 1). Bingham used 16mm Kodachrome, released by

Kodak in 1935, to documented the activities he experienced on Downwind.407 With increased frequency, many people in the middle of the 20th century began documenting human life. They filmed events during WWII, and after the war instructional and documentary films made for government, business, medicine, and industry grew exponentially. 16mm film became particularly prolific in television and news footage, and the home movie became commonplace after the war as well. Bingham’s film of Downwind falls under this genre of “direct cinema,” which claimed status as a form of film capable of documenting the raw truths of life while also using cinematic devices to provoke the audience or tell a particular narrative. In it, the sea, the ships, and the men onboard those ships come alive.

Between work and play men sometimes found silence at sea. In these moments they paused to appreciate the beauty of the open ocean. From inside the hull, expedition travellers looked out of port windows onto the ocean. The light outside appeared bright juxtaposed to the darkness inside the ship. Far in the distance sat the Horizon. At the end of each day the men gazed at the calm shadowy gold sunset and golden light illuminating a silhouette of falling rain. Diagonal sunbeams often connected the surface of the ocean with charcoal gray clouds.

407 Bingham’s official duties onboard centered on medicine. In that capacity, he assisted in caring for chemist Bill Reidel when his duodenal ulcer flared up. The situation was so severe that Baird ended up stopping all work to rush him to port in Valparaíso where he could be transferred to the hospital in Santiago, Chile. He also managed non-emergency issues involving ship-wide amoebic dysentery and certain cases of venereal disease. In oceanographic work, Bingham primarily took bathythermographic measurements, a task that many ships throughout the world’s oceans completed and that did not require scientific skill or training. Because of his experience with photography, he also assisted in developing photographs of the seafloor in the shipboard dark room.

268 These moments were rare, however, because a lot of work needed to be done. Bingham captured how the oceanographers hauled plankton in from the deep sea. They worked a rope and pulley system that dropped a net into the ocean and came back up with barely visible creatures. The littlest ones found new homes in glass jars. The oceanographers dropped heavy metal coring instruments to the deepest depths and brought up samples of the sea floor. All of the men struggled against the motion of the ship caused by the rolling waves. They turned over buckets to use as chairs to sit on while smoking cigarettes. They wrote down numbers with pencils in their notebooks. As they put their instruments down into the sea and brought them back up again, they shouted instructions in order to hear one another over the rumble of the ship’s diesel engine and grinding of the winch. While they worked, the wind rustled their shirts. The men continued dredging rocks from the sea floor. They launched small boats off of the bigger ships. They exercised caution in order to prevent serious injury to one another when the heavier instruments swung violently from the back of the ship, which often happened.

Then one day, one of the oceanographers opened a rusted metal box that had been welded on a shelf of the main deck. While he struggled to keep his footing as the ship bobbled back and forth, the scientist attached a wire to a small cylinder. He turned toward the ocean, put the cylinder and attached wire in his right hand, and threw it with all of the might he could muster away from the ship into the ocean. In the distance, the other ship rolled by, and the men were silent. Seconds stretched on and turned into moments that lingered as if they would never end until, BOOM! A column of water rose from the ocean surface between the two ships, spread out as it reached its maximum distance travelled, and fell back to the sea. These men set off explosives to create the very waves against which they measured the structure of the sea floor.

The oceanographers continued with their seismological profiles of the Pacific Basin. The

TNT explosions detonated in the ocean just off the ships became old hat, no more remarkable than

269 the oceanographer’s work inside the onboard laboratory. In there, metal instruments spewed out scrolls of white paper riddled with numbers, charts, and seismic wave profiles. All of this work continued on for four months as the ships travelled the Pacific to Tahiti, Chile, Easter Island, and

Peru.

On the occasion of their return to San Diego Harbor, the Director of Scripps invited a local high school marching band to play for Downwind’s homecoming. Three girls in short skirts stood in front of their twenty-piece band as drum majors. It is obvious in the film that they were nervous.

When they received their cue, the band played and the majors danced and twirled their batons in time. Upon the ships’ return home, oceanographers reunited with their families. Wives climbed a grated ramp in high heels to meet their sailors onboard the ships. Two women, perhaps a mother and daughter, brought a baby onboard. The baby had been born while their fella was away at sea.

The people chatted and smiled as they waited for their pictures to be taken. From start to finish,

Bingham’s film offers a glimpse into the world of measuring, sampling, and operating shipboard equipment. It was meant to show through visual imagery what oceanographers were literally doing when they were out on the ocean conducting science. Bingham created it in hopes that it would reach audiences unfamiliar with the great benefits science at sea had to offer society.

The Underside of Innocence

The title to this sub-section refers to the tension that exists within images between two points of view: on the one hand, photographers created documentary images with casual intentions to record events, activities, experiences, and people, and on the other hand, unconscious or unintentional ideas, messages, and affiliations found their way into even the most seemingly straightforward visual representations. Essentially, images can be both spontaneous and have unconscious, more powerful realities. I argue in this section that photographs from Scripps

270 expeditions in the 1950s laid claim to the institution as the owner and primary producer of knowledge of the Pacific Ocean.

Much of the scholarship that utilizes image analysis begins with the assumption that images can be interpreted as innocent representations. The same phrase appears as the subtitle to a book that examines the underside of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of

Innocence, by literary scholar Richard Halpern.408 In this study, Halpern argued that Rockwell’s idyllic paintings contain a darker side. In the midst of everyday innocence, little details in the paintings hint at a much more serious commentary, typically involving surprising or disturbing sexual elements.

While the book created the argument out of a combination of detailed readings, surrounding discourse, and biographical information, many readers dismissed it either because scholarly circles tend not to take Rockwell’s work seriously in the first place or because fans felt Halpern was defaming an iconic hero. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida received and continues to attract criticism as well, with the argument that these methods of image analysis involve too much individual interpretation that cannot be justified using hard evidence. I think it is fair to point out that close readings of images, like those by Halpern, Barthes, and many others, are open to multiple interpretations. If we are to take images seriously, however, close readings combined with analysis of surrounding circumstances and historical documentation offer a way forward that is not a case of one scholar reading his or her own subconscious mind into the images of another, something audiences accuse both Halpern and Barthes of. The act of close reading combined with examination of evidence surrounding an image’s production and dissemination constructs a methodology to execute what Arielle Azoulay described as studying the creation and cultural significance of camera, photographer, photographed, and observer as co-producers of any given image.

408 Richard Halpern, Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.

271 My particular application of the close reading methodology involves looking at the greater context of the Downwind visual record and considering it next to the thematic content of the images. Alongside expedition circumstances, I read the following types of intricate details: kinds of people shown; subject’s gaze; actions in progress (talking, physical gestures, scientific work, ceremonies); relationships between subjects; attire; physical positioning (of people and of the ocean in relation to photographic subjects); things, objects, and animals; and facial expressions. These photographs from oceanography are important not so much because of little clues left within them, but because of the way in which what they show unconsciously intersects with the circumstances surrounding their creation. While these images in photo and film got produced simply because an expedition participant took it upon himself to carry a camera with him on his journey and record the things of interest to him, in subtle ways they captured much more intentional beliefs and struggles.

Namely, part of the mission of going to sea was for Scripps to situate itself as the go-to institution for knowledge about the Pacific.

Ownership, as the intention of Scripps’ expeditions, surfaces in many textual accounts. In

1996, for example, two journalists from San Diego, Judith and Neil Morgan, wrote a biography of

Revelle in which they interpreted his sense of purpose as acting director of Scripps409 and catalyst of activities that would become a long series of oceanographic expeditions:

Roger’s desk as the acting director was immediately buried in paper as unrelenting curiosity and wanderlust led him to more active roles. Woods Hole had claimed and explored the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean; the Pacific belonged to Scripps. So Roger believed, and he was quick to stake his claim…In the fall of 1949, at the age of 40, Roger plotted and then helped organize Scripps’ first deep-sea expedition.410

409 Revelle became acting director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on September 24, 1950, and after a long political battle, he was appointed full director in July of 1951. 410 Judith and Neil Morgan, Roger: A Biography of Roger Revelle, (San Diego: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California Press, 1996), 27-28.

272 Part of the oceanographic agenda in this region was to develop Scripps as the central leader in ocean science on the west coast of the United States, which involved convincing the greater world of oceanography that the Institution not only operated out of San Diego, but it also produced the best and most reliable information about the region. Part of executing this goal required actually creating viable research. Another part of it, however, involved constructing and marketing an identity in which Scripps drove Pacific ocean science. Helen Raitt, wife of geologist Russell Raitt, wrote many histories of Scripps throughout her life.411 As a member of the Scripps community, she explained:

To a certain extent Scripps people feel that the entire Pacific basin – one-half the surface area of the world – is their domain. Sotto voce they sometimes mutter, “What are they doing in our ocean?” when they hear of an east-coast oceanographic vessel heading into the Pacific. When long-time Scrippsian Warren Wooster was departing to become director of the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences in 1973, he was presented with an ornate scroll that ended with the hope that he would find happiness in Miami, “in spite of being three thousand miles away from The Ocean.”412

The sense of belonging in this period was layered. On one hand, it too was innocent. Just as any professionally trained workers might claim a sense of ownership over the objects of their labor, so did oceanographers. A doctor says, “my patient,” a school teacher identifies his or her cohort and calls the class, “my students,” and a geneticist declares a group of Drosophila melanogaster “my flies.”

Science on the sea, however, occurred interwoven with several non-scientific cultures during the act of doing science. Profound power structures linked to much older seafaring practices in part shaped how oceanographers saw themselves and the subjects they captured. Underneath the documentary function of these pictures, the visual record from Downwind tells a story in which oceanographers acted out and recorded their role in the Pacific as the driving force of knowledge. These images then tell the story of scientists constructing their institutional identity.

411 For instance Helen Raitt and Beatrice Moulton, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: First Fifty Years, (Los Angeles: Ritchie Press, 1967). 412 Elizabeth Shor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography: probing the oceans, 1936-1976, 378.

273 As described earlier, the “Preliminary Report on Downwind,” an official report submitted to the IGY Committee, categorized Pacific “islanders” as primitive peoples and discussed them alongside biological species in the region. The “Biological Report” section of the document under

“Easter Island Fauna” discussed the “people of Easter Island.” The narrative described the native flora and fauna as sparse and divided into three zones: splash zone, high-tidal zone, and low-tide zone. After describing the discovery of over thirty species of mollusks along these shores by a monk, the report continued:

The pale blue water washing this island contributes little to the, nevertheless, abundant well-being of the “Pasquenses.” As a consequence, there is little interest in fishing among these islanders, compared with that shown by their Polynesian relations to the west. The people of Easter Island live on the land, whereas Tahitians and Rapans live on the sea. (One can sympathize with the obsession of the “Long Ears” with stone carving and the frustration of the “Short Ears” in this environment. It might be noted, however, that a fairly large school of tuna was observed in the vicinity of Sala y Gomez Island, two hundred miles east of Easter Island [sic].413

This Report told two things about oceanographic encounters with Pacific peoples. First, as expedition participants encountered different people throughout the Pacific, those people were enrolled into oceanographic interpretations of the region. Second, this interpretive gesture involved reifying colonial categorizations of human beings based on first-hand interactions with and observations of those peoples. When examined alone, these statements about Pacific peoples in

“The Preliminary Report on Downwind” seem odd. Most of the report, data, and analysis addressed

Downwind’s take on Pacific geology, water and air composition, and non-human flora and fauna.

Why include analysis about the material mode of living for people from Pacific islands but not for Chileans and Peruvians in general? Alongside the photographs, these statements start to make more sense. Expedition participants were not only interested in recording their encounters

413 Preliminary Report on Downwind, 48. When they write “Pasquenses,” they are referring to native Easter Islanders. “Long Ears” and “Short Ears” are reference to the ancient peoples of the islands who organized and built the Moai. The original quote does not have a closed parentheses.

274 with island peoples. They recorded interactions with many different people. Some were vendors, workers, men, middle-class women, peasant children, and Navy officers. Jones photographed the fruit vendors and a carter candidly as they conducted their business. The vendors do not look at the camera, and the only reason the carter looks straight into the camera is because he is also about to walk almost straight into it. As a photographer, Jones was removed from these people. He had not made their acquaintance and did not have their permission to take their photographs. He merely walked along a street and took the photographs as he pleased. Bob Fisher is captured in the image with the peasant child that is in traditional attire, which separates them as child from a time past and modern oceanographer. Fisher also looks down on the child in a gaze indicating both a distance from her and observational power he has over her. These images speak of distance between Jones and Fisher as expedition participants and the subjects of the photographs. Chilean and Peruvian

Navy officers and scientists do not occupy the same kind of removed social status as the previous images. While many of the images are also candid and not posed, military personnel and Downwind participants conducted business together. While only one other shows a scientist working from a ship, many others demonstrate how oceanographers listened to and likely learned from the information South American scientists shared with them. Everyday people turn up in Scripps’ photographs from Downwind as objects of observation while those associated with learning about the ocean emerge as contributors to oceanographic knowledge. The formula was simple: peasants, island peoples, women, and low-level workers were objects, while personnel from Chilean and

Peruvian navies and university institutions were contributors. Scripps oceanographers, as spectators of the region and its indigenous peoples, were the men primarily responsible for making sense of everything out there open to observation, measurement, and visualization. As methodological observers, oceanographers held the power to name, categorize, and define everything and everyone they saw.

275 The underlying reality is more complicated. Downwind scientists conversed with Pacific island peoples whenever possible, which made them contributors as well. At times, oceanographers actively probed the islanders for information about local geological conditions and structures.414 In addition, oceanographers learned about the ways in which Easter Island peoples assisted the Chilean military with installing oceanographic equipment,415 and they also probed Chileans for the knowledge of Island peoples. Sometimes South Americans offered valuable information to Scripps.

Erwin Schweigger, for example, contributed information that changed Downwind’s path of study for 10 days, as discussed in Chapter 4. Further, Señor Jorge Broggi explained the geology of the sand dunes north of Lima and how they related to oceanic geology off of the coast. Hence, South

Americans were not only contributors: sometimes their advice and knowledge highly influenced oceanographic activities. At other times, social engagements were mere formalities arranged by elite administrators. The posed photograph of Norris Rakestraw and Chilean naval officers is missing the names of those men. There is no record of interactions with them beyond these photographs.

Expeditions then saw a wide range of social interactions and information exchange.

The images of the scientists in Peru and Easter Island might be read as simple documentation of the adventures of a scientific expedition. Once in Latin America, these groups of scientists together visited sand dunes and a cave, and they convened at the Mataveri International

Airport on Easter Island. In Images 52 and 54, Jorge A. Broggi of Peru points as if he is informing the Scripps scientists of information about the sand dunes and the cave. In Image 53 a cluster of men circle around engaged in discussion. But the Scripps scientists saw this exchange as one more way to stake their claim over knowledge about their ocean and the lands around it. The exchange

414 “Preliminary Report on Downwind,” 6. This is an old theme in the history of imperial and scientific exploration. There are many examples, including: Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, and ; Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 415 Ibid., p. 13.

276 came about because of the directive of elite IGY officials who felt that getting oceanographers into contact with others studying the sea across national boundaries would help bolster oceanography’s value as a participating field under the program. Perhaps tellingly, they did not maintain contact with

Chileans and Peruvians after Downwind.416

Expedition images showing people occupy a complicated space within Scripps’ history.

While they came out of the personal desire to photograph the humans Downwind came across, they hint at a belief in hierarchy that determined how expedition participants encountered others on their journey. Scripps was positioned at the cutting edge of knowledge production in the region. South

Americans and everyday people perhaps had valuable information about the region, but their lack of identical instrumentation and methodologies set them apart. The practice of taking expeditions to sea was just as much about judging people as it was about reading oceanic processes for evidence of the natural history of the Pacific region. As much as they represented different ways of life to the curious oceanographer or expedition participant with a camera, people living throughout the Pacific could be forms of evidence and sources of valuable scientific information.

Expedition participants not only turned their cameras on others, they turned them on each other as well. Baird Captain Alan Phinney’s photographs of the crossing the line ceremony demonstrate how acting out this tradition was more than simply having fun at sea. These ceremonies acted out social dominance as they did within maritime and naval contexts, but for Scripps, they extended beyond power over subordinate sailors on the ships to represent how knowledge production in the Pacific belonged to Scripps. Oceanographers staged their proclamation that

Scripps led knowledge production in the region as they wore the attire of King Neptune and his court.

416 Arguably, they did not remain in contact after the expedition as a product of the IGY and its superficial engagement with international collaboration.

277 In image 47, we see a Scripps scientist as King Neptune and two others as his dignitaries.

For Scripps, the crossing the line ceremony formally incorporated the Scripps community of oceanographers and assistants of various sorts into the world of the Pacific. It officially inducted these men into a culture of maritime and naval tradition, but on their own terms such that the activities were watered-down versions from the Navy. Successfully completing the ceremony meant moving from a kind of novice at sea into a world of established authority on ocean travel. By tradition, King Neptune and his court were played by experienced seamen. The first photograph at

Scripps documenting this practice within oceanography is from the 1952 Capricorn expedition.

Even by the time of Downwind in 1957-1958, it was the Navy crew who still played the royal roles.

Oceanographers who had crossed the line before observed and enjoyed the festivities, but it was the

Navy personnel who ceremonially determined admission into Neptune’s court. Image 41 shows

George Hohnhaus, a Scripps marine technician with an extensive Navy background, throwing pollywogs overboard into the sea. Hohnhaus would have been a kind of intermediary fit for the task of throwing men overboard both because of his familiarity with the naval tradition and because he was the largest and strongest man on the ship. Image 47 shows King Neptune, Aphrodite, and the king’s baby being played by Navy crew. Image 48 has Scripps graduate students observing the ceremonies as geologist and expedition leader Henry Menard records something on paper. We can infer that Captain Phinney intended to document this ceremony and the men who acted out the roles of the king and his court. But his images also worked in tandem with scientists as they put themselves out there into the world of the Pacific and claimed an institutional identity in which knowledge-making there belonged to them.

At first it appears in images 47, 49, and 50 that the men might have been positioned on the ship such that most of the people onboard the cramped vessel had access to the ceremonies.

However, the men are sitting on the fantail of the ship, R/V Spencer F. Baird, which consists of a

278 large flat area of deck. This space only has one side where the background behind the two men sitting in their crown chairs would be anything except some other part of the ship. Of course, the background at sea beyond the ship itself is the ocean. They could have been placed anywhere on the flat part of the deck and the pollywogs and shellbacks could have gathered around, but they were not sitting just anywhere. They were positioned so that the ocean, which King Neptune rules, would be most visible in the photograph. Additionally, the men in the first image are positioned in the middle of the frame both horizontally and vertically. Their location allows the frame to not be overly filled with blank sky and to include the ship deck and scientific equipment, such as the tape recorder in the lower left hand corner. In Image 49, Phinney has moved to the upper deck, but again the ocean and scientific instruments are prominent. The large pipes above the men’s heads are the framing system installed on the ship to support the deep-sea sediment corer. The device hanging in the upper middle of the third image, seen larger in the upper right corner of the fourth image, is the wench used for dredge hauls. Spontaneity, then, was not their charge. The images show people arranged such that the object of their dominance, the sea, is most visible and the instruments used to facilitate their authority are in the forefront and overwhelming.

An expedition participant crossed the line and became part of seafaring tradition in the

Pacific. Underneath the fun was the fact that participating in these ceremonies intertwined the men and these ships with long traditions of maritime history. It made them part of the region and in turn justified their activities there. Inducted in this way, oceanographic ships did whatever needed to be done in order to create knowledge of the Pacific. They probed the depths, which included exploding coral heads, squid, whales, sharks, and fish. The ships dragged hundreds of pounds of metal instruments along the seafloor. The men caught squid and sharks, dismembered their beaks and fins, and threw them back in the water alive. They killed leatherback sea turtles by the dozen and laid them on the ship decks like trophies. Scientific instruments collected thousands of samples of

279 plankton and sea mud. The photographs from the expedition present an idealized view of science in the Pacific. On the surface, they speak of non-scientific activities that involved having great fun at sea on a scientific ship. The playfulness and joy expressed in some of the scientists’ faces must not be used to misinterpret these images as mere documentation of a historic tradition of crossing the equator nor as inventory of experiences, however, and these snapshots should not be separated from a deeper ceremonial effort to lay claim to a reality where the Scripps Institution was sole proprietor of what we know and how we came to know the Pacific and related global phenomena.

In addition to the photographs, the film from Downwind also possesses an underside to its innocence. At first glance Robert Bingham’s film is the story of an expedition from start to finish that focused heavily on acts of oceanographic sampling and measuring at sea. The visual experience, however, hints at a reality in which Bingham tried to insert himself, a medical doctor, into the

Scripps oceanographic community by creating a film that reiterated Scripps ownership of knowledge production in the Pacific. In his lectures Bingham showed the film to public audiences and harnessed a kind of power behind the film: the visual imagery cast oceanographers as dominators of the ocean environment.

Bingham not only created the film, he starred in it. The opening series of shots show the

Scripps land-based campus (corresponding to time interval 00:15-01:09) where Bingham stands on the Scripps campus and pans his camera over buildings and roads. Specifically, he stands on one of the highest hills to provide a view over the campus with the ocean in the background. As the frame pans, he offers a visual tour of how science physically took over this plot of land. The welcome sign,

Ritter Hall, and connecting roads replaced low-lying desert bushes, dirt, and lizards. Out at sea, waves crashed against the ship and white caps bobbled in the background, but Scripps persevered

(01:23). The ships sailed on.

280 In between action sequences, Bingham placed descriptive placards that visually abstract oceanography’s dominance over the Pacific. The cards were simple, hand-made, and he merely laid them down on a surface while he held a camera over top to film. But what the audience sees is a map of the Pacific overlain with details of Scripps’ activities in the region. These range from nameplates and dates of travel to the entire expedition track. The visual message is that Scripps’ activity fills this space on the map, deserves a domineering place over the map itself, and thus defines this region.

As the ships move out to sea, they pass Navy vessels coming back into port (06:47).

Bingham filmed these ships passing and created an associative power. One of the Navy vessels is a battle ship and the other is a support ship. The battle ship makes Scripps’ Baird seem small by comparison. Yet Bingham films from onboard Baird and provides the viewer a look at the Navy vessel, which creates the potential for the audience to make a link between these two seagoing vehicles. They come from the same place and go out onto the same ocean. Horizon and Baird had just come from the Navy loading dock where they loaded explosives. Military ships travel in pairs, as do the Scripps vessels. Bingham’s footage hints at the similarities and relationships between the U.S.

Navy, these oceanographic ships, and the work conducted onboard.

As Bingham filmed work onboard the ships, he created frames similar to the photographs such that the men and the ship sit front and center while the ocean is in the background (for example 01:42 and 09:56). All of the scenes showing the ocean in and of itself come framed by either something of the ship or a scientific instrument draped across the center of the shot. When the men launch the rescue line (08:17-09:56), the blast recoils a powerful jolt to the man holding the launcher, and the resultant cloud of smoke quickly expands and takes over the shot. Once it cleared, the man who fired the launcher turns and walks toward the camera with a smile that tells of his satisfaction with firing a small rocket gun out onto the ocean. With this action the man launches the

281 rescue line in an explosive blow that he controls. The rescue line is not just thrown overboard. It is shot a great distance from the ship with a small but powerful rocket.

From Bingham’s position as a cameraman, the men who operate these instruments tower over the ocean that they remove samples from. As the measuring process unfolds, the ship rocks back and forth, but the scientists persevere. Deep-sea mud cores, plankton samples, and rocks collected from the ocean come on deck. Oceanographers place the plankton in glass jars and hold them up just above eye level with the intent of inspection. Similarly, they hold up the rocks. The mud cores are more fragile and are carefully shimmied out of the coring tube. All of these organisms and pieces of the deep-sea floor now belong to Scripps. Bingham captured the process by which objects of inquiry came to be possessed and assessed on oceanographic ships.

Some moments in the film are especially striking. As oceanographers work with their heavy metal instruments the sea causes the boat to move. When this movement is rough, the ships roll heavily and the instruments swing violently from the back of the ship (24:56). The film does not explain that many times this problem stops sampling and measuring activities because the ship captain foresees potential accidents or the ship’s movement causes cores to fall out of the tubes before they could be brought aboard and loses samples from the dredge and plankton nets before they could be captured. Instead, the film demonstrates how the men onboard succeed in all that they attempt regardless of tumultuous seas. Individually, many men avoid being knocked over by the movement of the ocean and subsequent rolling of the ship because they find balance by standing with sea legs shoulder width apart. Although they struggle physically against ocean conditions, ultimately the scientists succeed in controlling their own bodies and operating their instruments.

They overcome the difficulties of moving and deploying heavy steel technologies from the deck of a moving ship. They bring samples onboard and enlist them into the oceanographic world as objects of inquiry.

282 Bingham also captured how one oceanographer can literally hold the power to explode the ocean in his bare hands (35:52). He filmed a junior member of the expedition assembling a small hand-held package of TNT. With the fuse lit, the man throws the explosive overboard with all his might. It lands in the water and then Bingham films a pause. For a series of seconds the frames in the film merely show the ship with the ocean in the background or Horizon steaming by in the background. The pause feels anti-climactic because someone just tossed a TNT fuse overboard. But then after a few seconds pass, the first explosion ignites and sends a gigantic column of water shooting up from the ocean’s surface (37:18-38:55). The audience does not see the marine organisms killed by these explosives, the social interactions emerging out of work with these explosives, or the reason for such explosions (seismic profiling). The scene of the man assembling the explosive sits juxtaposed to multiple scenes of detonation. The explosions visible to the audience, however, are the result of much larger TNT bundles than the one being held and thrown overboard by hand. The series of explosions appear to come literally from a simple assembly of a small hand-held object. In fact, they are the result of much larger bundles assembled by multiple skilled men and shoved with great force off the back of the ship. Bingham’s film provides the audience with a set of visual images that simplify seismic profile work in order to emphasize efficacy in the oceanographer’s method and dominance of the ocean itself as well as science at sea.

After the seismic work the film nears its end. When Horizon and Baird return to San Diego, formality and fanfare greet them (42:33-end). A high school marching band commemorates their arrival. Three young female drum majors lead the band in dancing unison. Navy crew members continue about their business on the dock while the oceanographers wait to disembark. The wives of the oceanographers walk together assembled ahead of the rest of the crowd so that they can be the first to meet the men returning from sea. The audience has no sense of the hours of waiting at the dock required to clear customs before the ships are made open for the families to come aboard. In

283 closing, this juxtaposition of celebration and families, music and fanfare, Navy and science casts the oceanographers in a heroic light.

Underneath what can be seen literally with the eyes the film has a deeper history. 417 This history begins with Bingham himself. For a brief time in his life, Robert Bingham was a medical doctor turned amateur oceanographer whose film reveals a few surprising things about expedition practice at sea. He captured intimate moments, difficulties of work, and onboard relationships only visible via film media. Even more, Bingham attempted to bring ocean science to university students and the medical community by mobilizing his film in public lectures back in his hometown of

Riverside.

Dr. Robert Bingham was not an oceanographer, but in practice, he was trying to be one in some capacity. As he acted out this personal desire to enlist himself into the oceanographic community he ended up recording a message similar to what oceanographers captured in their photographs: ownership of the Pacific. When Scripps rejected Bingham as a member of their community, he went forth anyway and continued to circulate the message of this institution’s ownership of the Pacific in small public audiences around southern California.

Revelle did not have the money (or merely the desire, perhaps both) to put toward his film, especially since Menard’s film had a secured spot in the official film archive of NAS for the IGY.

On April 7, 1959, however, Scripps received a copy of Bingham’s film in the mail. Staff sent a letter thanking Bingham and placed a copy in the archive. After the dust settled from the IGY, Scripps

417 The International Geophysical Year integrated both documentary and direct cinema into its surveying of the world’s geophysical structures, including space. The United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) produced many classroom materials about the IGY program in order to create a shared memory of this international endeavor and instill its value in the children of America. At the center of these classroom materials was a film series called “Planet Earth” meant for television and shown across the country in classrooms. Thirteen films emerged, each covering a major research theme of the IGY. The films are “Challenge of the Ocean,” “Cosmic Rays,” “Magnetic Force,” “Nearest Star,” “Radio Waves,” “Research by Rockets,” “Science in Space,” “Secrets of Ice,” “The Flaming Sky,” “The Force of Gravity,” “The Hidden Earth,” “The Inconstant Air,” and “The Shape of the Earth.” Available at http://lasp.colorado.edu/igy_nas/ accessed November 5, 2013. On Downwind, Bingham was not the only filmmaker. Three separate films were shot.

284 made no further use of the film. Bingham, however, began showing the film in various university settings. In the Spring 1958 edition of the University of Redlands Alumni Association Magazine,

Bingham published an extensive article to complement his public lectures and showing of the

Downwind film.418 In this article, Bingham represented himself as a central part of the oceanographic community as a photographer:

Part of my duty was in the area of photography…the color developers had to be kept within ½ degree of a 68° F. temperature by ice cubes from the galley for the first half of the trip and by hot water from the engine room during the second half of the voyage, so great were the variations in air temperatures.419

He also included himself as one of the scientists:

The scientist on duty, and this included the medical doctors who learned to take their turn on watch, kept a written log of the depth of the ocean at 3 or 6 minutes [sic] intervals, the date, time speed of the ship, course, and any pertinent data, such as schools of large fish, the depth of the deep scattering layer of plankton on which the fish feed, and any research activity then in progress…Raising the bathythermograph apparatus rapidly with the electric winch without jerking it out or breaking it off was an art which I mastered with practice. It is almost like boating an albacore without using a gaff.420

The front page includes a picture of Bingham taking a bathythermographic measurement from the deck of the ship. The article as a whole acts somewhat as a textual re-interpretation of the film.

While he highlighted what work oceanographers conducted, he placed himself as a parallel character in the scientific work at sea. He mentioned that he was the ship’s doctor, but only as an entry point to a greater description of his contribution as a photographer and research assistant scientist.

The energy, in time and real money, that he put into the film, public lectures, magazine publications, and work at sea suggest that while he came to Downwind as a doctor, Bingham sought some level of inclusion within a greater context of doctors traveling at sea with scientists. On expeditions at sea in the 1950s, the medical doctors became enlisted into the oceanographic

418 Robert Bingham, M.D., “Expedition Downwind,” University of Redlands Alumnus (Spring 1958): 3-7. 419 Ibid., p. 4. 420 Ibid., p. 5.

285 community. While they did not become oceanographers in the sense that they did not make meaningful intellectual contributions to understanding the oceans, these men did perform oceanographic labor in assistance of sampling and measuring. As members of the shipboard community, their labor proved important to the immediate success of mundane measuring activities and assisting with operating heavy oceanographic equipment. Robert Bingham’s goal to illuminate the adventure of oceanography to the southern California community was rare. But he did situate himself at the intersection of science and the public. In that position, he acted as an authority of oceanography in charge of gaining new proselytes. Director Roger Revelle supported and even suggested this role for Bingham. Scripps was still in the midst of an intense institutional growth.

Support for oceanography was accepted from any and all sources. His letters conveyed a sense that

Bingham’s publicity work probably would have no effect. However, as long as Scripps did not have to put money into Bingham’s project, Revelle wished him well. At the very least, Bingham’s lectures and film viewings couldn’t hurt.

Bingham used these lectures and the accompanying film that he created to cast himself in the public eye around southern California as someone who possessed first-hand knowledge of the process and value of science at sea. In his public engagements regarding oceanography, he thereby afforded himself a level of authority on science at sea based on his participation in Downwind and filmmaking initiative. Bingham claimed that before seeing the film, audiences came to his lectures with preconceived ideas about the science of oceanography. On April 7, 1958, Bingham wrote to

Revelle:

Everyone seems to think that the hard, dangerous and monotonous work of the oceanographer is glamourous [sic] and adventurous. In gently disillusioning them I try to stress the importance of scientific research in this field and the role of the University of California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in maintaining the leadership of the United States in this branch of science.421

421 Robert Bingham to Roger Revelle, April 7, 1958, SIO Subject Files, Box 23, Folder 12: Downwind.

286

Bingham saw himself as a mediator between the public and professional oceanography. His tool was his film, which offered a way for audiences to see what it was really like out there on an oceanographic ship and how that linked to the greater context of national science within the United

States at the time. The power behind his film, the authority Bingham himself harnessed in his lectures, was the extent to which the visual imagery cast oceanographers as dominators of the ocean environment. When addressing the public, he translated oceanographic domination of the Pacific as visualized in his film into oceanography’s participation in “the leadership of the United States in this branch of science.” The film emerged as an amalgamation between his hobby as a photographer and his keen interest in the ocean as expressed in his taking a leave from his medical practice to participate in Downwind. The doctor used the power of the silent motion picture to create a product and circulate a message congruent with Scripps oceanographers’ beliefs that they owned knowledge production on the Pacific.422

Conclusion

Scientists used photographs and film to think about and fashion an oceanographic self.

Photographs became multi-layered objects that relayed a narrative message about the history of travel and work at sea and at the same time told a secret story of the desire for power over knowledge in the Pacific. The photographers simply recorded everyday activities at sea in them.

Those activities and work, however, continued to be influenced by much older ways of travelling at sea involving maritime and naval culture. These photographs acted as objects that represented a positive sign of their conquest of knowledge about the Pacific. Navy crew played king and his court

422 Ultimately, however, the oceanographers that went to sea with Bingham, and also Scripps’ Director, Roger Revelle, made little of this cinematic contribution. Revelle sent him back to Riverside, free to show the film as he pleased, but uninterested in further collaboration or use of the film. Revelle essentially acted as a gatekeeper. He kept Bingham out of the Scripps community, but sent him on his way as a potential proselyte, if Bingham so wished to show his film to his local community.

287 in the crossing the line ceremony, and oceanographers acted out the ritual of becoming a part of that world. But they adapted their role to become the primary producers of knowledge in the region. In the mid-twentieth century, oceanographers saw these visual images as mere documentation of their trip to sea. While they were part of a clandestine family album of the Scripps Institution and received little distribution, the photographs and film became one component oceanographers used to develop an identity in which Scripps scientists in particular drove knowledge creation in the

Pacific.423 The images indicated judgments the Scripps scientists placed on anyone not associated with the institution, including everyday South American peoples, Pacific Island peoples, foreign scientists, and even one of their medical doctors, filmmaker Robert Bingham. The photos and film offer an example of a human-made thing that materialized into ink and paper or film and came to speak of human wishes and needs.

423 By referring to the group of photographs as a family album I am explicitly building on David Nye, “Workers: The Corporation as Community,” in Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985): 71-92, which describes the development of corporate identity including subdivisions between managers and regular work force through photographs. Nye further argues that within General Electric, photographs erased biological families and replaced them with a “pseudo-community of the corporation,” 85. See also Shawn Michelle Smith’s discussion of the relationship between institutional and personal albums in Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line, 12.

288 Conclusion

This dissertation has argued for multiple ways in which vibrant, literary, talkative, boundary, and visual things and objects caused Downwind expedition participants to act in certain ways or facilitated the construction of a community at sea. It was not any one of these things as individual entities that significantly affected oceanography. By looking at moments in which single things and objects cause effects, I am essentially questioning the nature of the expedition as an entity in and of itself. The sorts of fusions that occurred within oceanography resulted in the blurring of many divisions, edges, boundaries, and outlines. Stories brought together the scientific and the personal.

Airplanes and islands were not merely locations for tourism but became places from which and within which oceanographers surveyed the ocean. Ships congealed (and then separated) oceanographers from the Navy. Boundary objects built a surprising shipboard ecology. Photos and film crystallized a sense of belonging within an oceanographic institution. Scientific journeys to sea themselves were “things that talk.” Expeditions were not journeys that occurred outside of Cold

War realities, a point that this dissertation could be accused of making. Rather, they were events that gathered many different species: narrative stories; airplanes and islands; ships; maps and explosives; and photos and film. In their collective function, these events brought together literature and the quest to understand nature, oceanographers and ships, science and self. They also enmeshed the world of geopolitical, military, and elite administrative concerns with shipboard life because when expedition participants returned from their journeys, they brought their experiences, thoughts, opinions, things, and objects back with them. Expeditions were events that unfolded as chimeras: oceanographic journeys that tied together shipboard culture with postwar transformations in oceanography, competition, international collaboration, and geopolitics during the Cold War.

289 Science after World War II experienced major growth due to many kinds of tensions and struggles arising out of the Cold War.424 Oceanography offers one of the strongest examples of the ways in which geopolitical issues affected the enterprise of knowledge production because many of the field’s influential leaders applied experience at sea, professional ties to the military, and tendencies toward leadership directly from their work as enlisted Navy personnel during the war to their postwar civilian careers.425 Especially in the first two decades after the war, military support for oceanography grew fast in part because oceanographic administrators set up agreements under which scientists conducted work that would provide useful information for making war on other nations. The collaboration between oceanography and the Navy set off a long-lasting and difficult period of scientific struggles in navigating military patronage.426 Even in the midst of scientific claims that their work stemmed from intellectual questions and not military direction, it is impossible to deny that throughout the 1950s, expedition oceanography received financial and logistical support inasmuch as scientists made the case that their work was both pure science and a tool of war.427

Studies of the ocean emerged out of global opposition that turned into many more local forms of scientific competition.

Because of the tensions around an ideal of science as free to pursue its own interests and the need to convince the Navy that the same work had military applications, oceanography operated under a strong paradox in which scientists attempted to dilute the competitive nature of their

424 These competitions took many forms. Paul Forman identifies scientific internationalism prior to the Cold War as a place of competitions because scientists actually worked on the international stage to uphold national interests. Paul Forman, “Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists: The Ideology and Its Manipulation in Germany after World War I,” Isis 64, no. 2 (1973): 150-180. One of the most obvious seeds of competition during the Cold War grew between science and anticommunism, which caused scientists to protect their line of work from invasions of privacy. For treatment of this topic from the intersection of science and politics, see Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1999) and a recent essay by Patrick David Slaney, “Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Nature of the Scientific Internationalism in the Early Cold War,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42, no. 2 (April 2012): 114-112. 425 See Ronald Rainger, “Patronage and Science,” Earth Sciences History (2000). 426 See the work of Ronald Rainger and Jacob Darwin Hamblin for many details of these conflicts. 427 See, for example, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, xviii.

290 working social relationships by seeking international cooperation.428 Research agendas expanded knowledge of the ocean, often referred to by historical actors and historians as “pure science,” but not necessarily only for wartime applications. By creating a community of scientists at the international level, oceanographers set themselves apart from mere engineers and inserted themselves into a worldwide elite group of knowledge-makers. The distinction was important for oceanography as its practitioners worked under heavy military direction. The branch of science could easily be misunderstood as mere application of somewhat banal military technologies, like sonar and deep-sea thermometers, when other high-profile fields of science utilized sexier military technologies, such as high-energy physics’ development and use of high-energy particle accelerators.

In the context of physics, scientists gained authority by association with nuclear weapons, even if their research was in non-nuclear areas.429 Oceanographers considered the core of their research to be a form of pure science, but like their physicist counterparts, association with wartime application and military technology launched the discipline at a scale where it could participate in international cooperation.430

Scholars have questioned the success of internationalism in this era. For example, not all countries received attempts at cooperative work equally.431 Also, the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, one of the largest programs aimed at building bonds across national boundaries, operated administratively with heavy ties to geopolitics. Where relations between the U.S. and the

428 There were several instances of this on Downwind. In this dissertation I address the case of Erwin Schweigger coming aboard Downwind. See Chapter 1 “Narrating Oceanography” for Schweigger’s appearance in Bob Norris’ diary. Also see the section titled, “Temperature Illustrations” in Chapter 4 “Probing the Depths” for more on Schweigger. 429 In Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1993), Leslie explains how MIT and Stanford grew post-WWII science programs because they enlisted major defense contracts. He points out several ways in which these contracts were problematic for the development of viable research agendas because they brought in styles of management that stifled intellectual work. Specifically, Leslie discusses how leaders of cold war scientific projects often blurred the separation between basic and applied research in order to emphasize applied research yet claim false benefits to basic research. 430 Ibid., p. xxvi. 431 Jacob Darwin Hamblin demonstrates how Japan received US science much better than Latin American countries, in Chapter 1 “Beginnings of Postwar Marine Science and Cooperation,” in Oceanographers and the Cold War, 3-31.

291 Soviet Union were concerned, the program in oceanography did more to increase global tensions in science rather than decrease them.432 What cannot be denied, however, is that many men did go to sea and participated in expeditions conducted by foreign countries. These international personnel exchanges fostered cross-border conversations and chances to exchange information, ideas, and methods. Vast amounts of synoptic data emerged from this era. Scientists deposited data into World

Data Centers where professionals from any country had access to the information, although the use to which scientists actually used this information has been questioned.433 Military funding in many nations put an unprecedented number of ships to work where scientists from across the globe gained access to components of the ocean they could only dream of studying prior to the war.

Cooperative efforts did not fail, but they did, at times, meet opposition.

Oceanography during the Cold War, then, was a field of science born in and adoptive of competition. Scientists in this era worked to build the reputation of their specialty by centralizing scientific authority within oceanographic institutions. The ebb and flow between competition and collaboration also happened at the institutional level as several centers of ocean research emerged alongside one another. The leaders in this era were: Scripps, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Lamont Geophysical Laboratory. These sites watched each other expand and take on new projects, areas of research, and technologies after the war, which inspired a sense of competition among them.434 Individual scientists worked together across these institutional boundaries on the ocean and navigated a greater geopolitical milieu. The institutions themselves competed with one

432 Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Chapter 3 The International Geophysical Year, 1957-1958,” in Oceanographers and the Cold War, 59-98. 433 See Elena Aronova, Karen S. Baker, and Naomi Oreskes, “Big Science and Big Data in Biology: From the International Geophysical Year through the International Biological Program to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, 1957-Present,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 183-224. 434 For the competition between Scripps and Woods Hole during the IGY see Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, pp. 68-69.

292 another in making the case for institutionally specific allocation of the resources that came from that geopolitical context.

Scripps managed this set of tensions and emerging concerns by expending much effort to create an institutional identity that set it apart from other centers of oceanographic research. This identity was defined primarily by two parameters: research agenda and geographical object of study.

While Scripps actively pursued a patronage relationship with the U.S. Navy, it was not merely in order to conduct military contract work. As oceanographers saw it, especially under the influence of

Director Roger Revelle, military funding and logistical support provided opportunities and autonomy to conduct fundamental research spanning marine biology, geology, hydrography, and chemistry.435 Oceanography at Scripps was cast as an endeavor in “pure” ocean science.436 And

Scripps conducted that fundamental research by and large on the Pacific Ocean. Granted, Scripps conducted expeditions across the world over the 1950s, but it focused primarily on characterizing and understanding the Pacific, specifically, as its “domain” of knowledge creation.437

Historians such as Ronald Rainger and Jacob Darwin Hamblin are right that some of the major actors in expedition oceanography were leaders of national institutions who participated in international congresses, top-secret military meetings, and foreign policy briefings. These elite professionals, however, were not the only significant players, and their politics alone do not explain how expedition communities formed, functioned, and transformed science at sea. The social and cultural life of expeditions emerged in this era as it did because of a great diversity in expedition participants and motivations, an assemblage fundamentally built around material things and objects.

As much as policy, funding, and military ideology pushed and pulled the development of expedition

435 Ronald Rainger, “Patronage and Science,” Earth Sciences History (2000), 37-38. 436 Ibid., pp. 43-44. I am not commenting on whether this work actually was “pure” or “applied.” I am just stating that at the time historical actors claimed that much of their work was “pure.” 437 Roger Revelle calls the Pacific “the domain of the Scripps Institution Fleet” in his Sea Search Story. See Prologue to Chapter 1 “Narrating Oceanography.”

293 science, everyday material reality on ships determined community structure, relationships, and boundaries crucial to the process of knowledge production. In regards to the IGY, 1957-1958,

Hamblin refers to expeditions as the “bread and butter” of oceanographic research under that program. I agree, and I would extend that insight to include expeditions in the 1950s more generally, and highlight the formal meaning behind the colloquialism as quite literally “the means of living.”438

Within this context of transformation, competition, geopolitical tension, and international collaboration, the decks of ships were the foundation upon which oceanographers came to know the

Pacific Ocean. Out there, everyday life looked very different from how it appeared in the halls of

Washington or the seat in the Director’s chair at oceanographic institutions. The politics and interpersonal maneuvering required in order to execute the above postwar transformations, international collaborations, and institutional identity construction were replaced on ships by negotiations within shipboard culture. In my title and introduction, I quoted an anonymous author whose story solely attributed to human beings the ability to describe that culture: “We three [the sea, the ship, and I] have watched the wonders of the dawn, but of these wonders the other two are mute, and I alone am privileged to tell.” I assume that these words were a play on Melville’s Moby

Dick that drew on the book of Job in the Bible: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Within the context of oceanography in this era, the choice to use that phrase also signaled an awareness that the material environment at sea possessed something of an essence. In the historical record, things and objects are not mute. Narratives, airplanes, islands, ships, maps, TNT, photographs, and film also spoke of the special nature of life and work out where the trade winds blew.

438 Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War, 76. "bread and ˈbutter, n.". OED Online. June 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/22890?redirectedFrom=bread+and+butter (accessed July 28, 2014).

294 Epilogue: Imagining A Voice from the Deep

I am fascinated by ships and seawater, stories and ink, photos and film. I find the materiality of our world intriguing and mysterious. What surprised me most about writing this dissertation was how often scholarship claiming to be about things and objects is actually all about people. There are a few outliers who truly attempt to examine the material world void of human beings. But most of us look to things in order to really look at ourselves in a new way. As literary scholar Bill Brown, quoting art historian Simon Schama, reminds us: history looks markedly different when “…it begins in the street, with the smell ‘of frying oil, shag tobacco and unwashed beer glasses.’” The following

Epilogue is my first attempt to bring one particular thing from out there where the trade winds blow back into the street where I might strike a conversation with a popular audience. It was originally published as an online essay with the Object Lesson Series at The Atlantic, an essay and book series that ponders the hidden lives of ordinary things. As the authors of the series illuminate the daily life of a blanket, the functionality of the remote control, and the philosophical meaning behind the

McRib sandwich, the readers of the magazine walk on a bridge between popular journalism and academic analysis. Who would have thought a blanket could speak of how people live and die together, a remote control orders our behavior in our own homes, and a fast-food sandwich stands to reveal our obsession with fakery? In the spirit of these sorts of object lessons, I draw this dissertation to a close and invite you to consider the possibility that a dead squid might tell you something about yourself.

295 The Secrets of the Jumbo Squid A writer imagines the final moments and afterlife of a squid that died February 13, 1957 An Object Lesson Published at The Atlantic on January 31, 2014, 11:04 AM ET439

Imagine you can see what I see. Doing so is no small feat, I know. But maybe if you look closely. There is something I want to show you that is often invisible or unnoticed when darkness falls deep in the ocean where the rumbling of engines is replaced by the clicking and whistling of the whales.

For a first glance, I’d like you to see my death. I died on February 13, 1957. It was a year of an extended El Niño so we were making our way from the southern warm current up past the equator in search of cooler and more abundant waters.

On that particular day the ocean rumbled. And when it does, one or more of us is usually taken. I have seen others fight, squeeze, attack, stab, gnaw, clinch, and I have heard their bodies splash and crank and wheeze as they are lifted up into oblivion in a pool of ink and flashing colors. The day I was taken, I began wondering why.

That day there was food, and I pushed forward to eat. But like never before, the whole of me jerked and swooshed, swooshed and jerked. Hard. Something wasn’t right. Pull. Shake. Smack. Up into oblivion. Up. Hands everywhere. All over. Hands. Grabbing. Violence. Shake, squeeze, pull, push, hands, tentacles, air, too much air. Slam – something metal. Knife. Hands. Cut, rip, pull.

And with that, my beak was gone. One last time I flew through the air as they threw the rest of me, nothing but limp jelly-like flesh, overboard.

They held me up then laid me out like a prized hunting trophy for the shot then tossed my lifeless body over board and forgot. Those were the practices on this particular ship on that particular day.

439 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-secrets-of-the-jumbo-squid/283188/

296

In ancient Greece, squid were food: fried, sprinkled, breaded, stuffed, and herbed. In Rome they were peppered, honeyed, soaked in wine, boiled and oiled. The ink was used as a sauce. In the 15th century in Naples, Italian chefs beat the squid quickly with a club and cooked them slowly in oil with onion and verjuice. They chopped and ground the legs and head and stuffed the body with walnut pieces, spices, and the other ground body parts. Eating squid has long been a human labor of love and arguably an art.

Even today, The Food Network recipe search brings up 240 recipes for the search terms “squid” and “calamari.” These recipes explain to the average home meal-maker how to prepare dishes spanning fried calamari, squid-stuffed-squid, squid with bacon, squid cakes in the form of Indian pakoras or Italian fritto misto, and many more. The search also brings up “A Guide for Buying and Cooking Squid,” which briefly explains the ease of cooking “tender” and “succulent” squid with a quick braise or deep-fry. The message is that basically anyone anywhere can do it and do it well.

But in February of 1957, I was killed and then rejected as food. My flesh was not prepared with care to maintain tenderness and succulence. I was not delicately cleaned and eviscerated for a massage in oil and garlic and a quick shipboard sauté. Rather, on the particular ship that caught me, the fishermen despised fresh catches of all kinds. To them, the only palatable seafood came from the freezer, which came from a grocery store, which came from industrialized meat production.

Then why was I caught? The 1950s were a time that saw a conceptual shift in industrial meat production. Companies like Swift & Company and Tyson began providing cheap meat wrapped in cellophane and the more they did so, the more consumers expected edible meat to come pre-packaged. People lost touch with the actual source of their meat. These companies began branding the meat they sold to develop consumer loyalty for their products. For example, in the 1960s, Tyson became the primary supplier of Chicken McNuggets to McDonald’s. The sailors who caught me certainly operated under these practices. They despised me because I came to them raw, unbranded, unpackaged, and thus inedible.

297

But what use was my beak detached from my body? Why go through the trouble to catch me at all? If you view my death not merely as an instance of violence inflicted upon animals and look for more than just a case of trophy fishing, the answers sink far deeper into the cultural soup of life at sea and extend beyond the specific maritime context of the 1950s. Certain things move and shake independent of your ideas about them. I am one of those things.

We are large, curious, mysterious, odd, big-eyed, and for much of the history of marine science, all of the different species of jumbo, giant, and colossal squid have been mostly unknowable. We are masters at escaping you. Until the first video recording of a giant squid in 2005, scientists relied solely on specimens that washed ashore or that were captured for any information about oversized squid behavior.

We saw you, but you had not really seen us. This is because in recent years our relationship developed such that when you look to us, you look through us and actually tend to see colorful bits of yourselves.

We are predators and animals that kill for food and fight viciously when threatened. When you encounter such behavior that is not your own, you create narratives describing us as larger than life creatures and wretched monsters. You spend endless energy telling stories in novels and films about our threat to you. Captain Ahab battles a giant squid in Moby Dick. In Lord of the Rings a giant squid-like creature challenges the Fellowship. We turn up in Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Wells’ “The Sea Raiders,” Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, James Bond, Whynham’s The Kraken Wakes, Benchley’s (the author of Jaws) Beast, the Watchmen comics, Harry Potter, the works of Arthur C. Clarke, Dr. Who, Futurama, and the children’s cartoon Rugrats. Giant squid turn up so often in your popular culture that these references and others can be viewed on the Wikepedia page titled, “Giant squid in popular culture.”

As a scientific-food-monster-trophy we push your own categorization of us beyond the idea of an average oceanic object into “wonderful object” – bright, shiny, jumbo, giant,

298 colossal, vibrant, curious, passionate, feared. But we manifest reflectively in the human consciousness existing as objects you look through not to see us, but to see your own ideas, tastes, fears, and images. Although you might claim it unthinkable, squid and human form a bond so tight that it is entirely possible that I am a squid and I wrote this essay to you from beyond the grave.

This multi-colored process of reflection exists almost anywhere that oversized squid turn up. For instance, the ship that caught, killed, and discarded me was part of an oceanographic expedition studying the Pacific region. US military personnel operated the ship, and it was their hands, not the scientists, that literally ended my life. Yet not all of these ships rejected oversized squid as food. Other oceanographic ships with Navy sailors travelled the same region, often took many of us, and happily enjoyed many feasts. My species, the Humboldt Squid (jumbo squid), was especially present in the Eastern Pacific. Especially a few years earlier than my death scientists caught squid as biological specimen, killed, measured, weighed, palpated, observed, dissected, recorded, and then chopped and put them on the barbque. The exact specimen used as scientific objects were then consumed as the evening meal. That bodily act of eating transformed the mysterious into the knowable not through seeing with the eyes but through tasting with the mouth, ingestion by swallowing down the throat, and disassembly and digestion by chewing of the teeth and churning of the stomach.

The circumstances of my death represent a similar transformation. I was not eaten, but catching me from the ocean and bringing me onboard literally changed me from a sea creature object “out there” into a knowable squid-monster in possession and at the mercy of men. Once on that ship, my handlers controlled my fate. They disassembled my body from a whole squid into component parts. My beak provided them an exotic object taken back to the mainland through which they further carried the Humboldt squid as a kind of oceanic marvel, a monster fought and tamed at sea. But just as much as you make us, we in turn make you.

Sometimes, despite our odd form, we inspire you to focus in on deep emotions tied to home. We are monsters. We are food. But we are also comfort. We are love.

299

The film The Squid and the Whale describes such a situation. It is a story about the disassembly of a family. Mom and dad divorce while two adolescent sons struggle to make sense of their lives as their foundation is ripped from them. For most of the film the older son, Walt, takes sides with the father who in the end probably held more responsibility for the breakdown of the family than anyone because of his emotional and physical absences. Walt seeks what he cannot have. In a beautiful scene with a school counselor, Walt remembers that he and his mother used to visit the squid and whale diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. The image of both giant creatures fighting for their lives on such a large scale used to scare him, but his mother always found a way to talk about it so that it seemed interesting and less fearful. After many months of shifting, fighting, and settling in to a new life with divorced parents, the movie ends with Walt standing alone at the museum pondering two larger than life monsters. Returning there symbolizes his return to his mother. The image in his mind of the squid and the whale as monsters acts as a foil for what the diorama really evokes in Walt: the deep and undying feeling of love he shares with his mother.

On May 11, 2013, Stanford Biologist William Gilly gave a Tedx talk: “Why You Need to Know the Humboldt Squid.” Gilly describes my species as “weirdly charismatic” and ponders whether we should be thought of as “wild pigs of the ocean.” He goes on to explain that you should in fact know the Humboldt squid because we very likely could replace the disappearing polar bear as the new iconic image of climate change. Where polar bears are disappearing, he explains, the jumbo squid is thriving in ocean conditions created by warming global temperatures. To close his presentation, he envisions a future in which cuddly soft toys shaped like squid represent human desires to teach children about climate change because polar bears become too hard to find.

Indeed, your love affair with squid as soft, cuddly, cute, and worthy of acting as symbols of the happy preciousness of childhood grows with each passing day. Squid adorn infant onsies, children’s t-shirts and show up in home after home as plastic pool toys and jovial stuffed purple and green monsters smeared with banana from the afternoon snack. The images on clothing often accompany captions, such as: “Squids Got Brains Too,” “True

300 Love,” “Flying Squid Rocket Science,” and “A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?” When there are no words, these images span far and wide including two squid in love, a happy squid in a bubble bath, and an individual squid looking straight out of the t-shirt with a menacing facial expression that hints of inherent monstrosity. Incidentally, none of the sea creatures on William Gilly’s shirt during his Tedx talk are identifiably squid.

Because you cannot fully know me, you want nothing more than to understand me. I create a mystery that eats at your core. In human hands, squid are killed prepared, eaten, rejected, investigated, idolized, written, pictured, anthropomorphized, given voice, and loved. These hands transform our bodies and create our image for the human eye. In all of those interactions we also change you. If there is a creature that teaches you the artificiality of any supposed human-nature divide and that the natural world “out there” is actually right here – not separable from your heart, mind, knowledge, and practices – it is the oversized squid. This is not because I hold an iconographic or heroic status, but because I lurk in the deep darkness of the ocean equally as I as swim in all the corners of your mind continually escaping you, and remaining elusive as an eternal object of the endless hunt. You can never quite grasp me. But without the oversized squid, you are not you.

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