Centuries of Science Afloat

Captain James Cook’s ships Resolution and Discovery beat through ice off Alaska in 1788. Watercolour by John Webber.

EXPLORATION Centuries of science afloat In explorers’ journals, Huw Lewis-Jones found a rich record of discoveries made in cramped cabins, on open decks and on forays to shore to bring back proofs of marvels.

amuel Johnson once remarked that geography, oceanography and astronomy to the Americas, India and the Spice Islands “being in a ship is being in a jail, meteorology, botany and zoology. Navigation — now the Maluku Islands of Indonesia — with the added chance of being was one of the greatest scientific challenges demanded re-engineered ships and growing Sdrowned”. Hence the eighteenth-century of Johnson’s time. Mapping had progressed expertise in celestial navigation. By the eight- lexicographer’s admiration for explorers: steadily from the thirteenth century, when eenth century, some ships had become mobile “The adventurer upon unknown coasts, Italian merchant-venturers had developed labs in which instruments from sextants to and the describer of distant regions” is to the earliest portolan pilot charts of the chronometers were tested and improved, and

be welcomed, he declared, because they Mediterranean, using compass directions ever more accurate sea charts plotted. MUSIC & ARTS/ALAMY LEBRECHT “enlarge our knowledge”. and observations to locate harbours. The Beyond advances born of the need to stay And enlarge knowledge they did, from Atlantic voyages of European mariners to on course, many seafarers kept journals,

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used ships to get to the start of journeys inland. In the case of Antarctica (where I’m heading as I write this), they were sail- ing off the edge of the chart. The continent was not seen until 1820, and no one over-

wintered on its frozen landmass until 1899, EVANS NHM COLL./MARY when an expedition led by Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink from the ship Southern Cross survived through the darkness in a hut at Cape Adare. The more well-known expeditions that followed in the wake of whalers and sealers, such as those of Robert Falcon Scott, took observational science to the very edge of things. SPONTANEITY AND RISK ‘Explore’ comes from the Latin explorare, to investigate. Many seafarers’ journals also con- tain the word adventure, from the Old French aventure, ‘to happen by chance’, and the Latin adventura, a thing ‘about to happen’. That mix of spontaneity, apprehension and risk lies at the heart of exploration: seafarers set forth to venture, to hazard, to bring back proofs A devilfish painted by Georg Forster in the 1770s. of marvels. Pioneering natural observers on the move, they deployed all their skills and understand nor control. Consider Tahitian instrumentation to probe the unknown. navigator Tupaia, whose knowledge of the One of their great tools was draughting, Pacific’s ‘sea of islands’ hugely assisted Cook. long valued at sea for recording unfamiliar For generations of Polynesian voyagers, the coastlines. The skill became important in sea sea was not so much an obstacle as a way. officers’ formal education. Some ships had Cook’s exploits, charts, life and violent official artists, and surviving sketchbooks death in Hawaii have given him equal celeb- speak of their achievements on course, or rity and notoriety. Less known is a young of being locked in floes, adrift, becalmed or British vicar with a passion for mathematics, waiting for whales to surface. (Sigismund who held the fortunes of men, and nations, Bacstrom, a little-known German surgeon in his hands — by arbitrating a contest for with a passion for alchemy, spent almost five new precision equipment. In 1763, Nevil years on a voyage around the world, surviving Maskelyne was sent to Barbados to test a ‘sea stranding, a mutiny and time in a Mauritius watch’ devised by clockmaker John Harrison jail before returning to London in 1795.) in a navigational arms race whose outcome Early maritime journals bear witness to the would transform the world. Maskelyne’s days beginnings of scientific disciplines such as were spent minutely inking out calculations meteorology, oceanography and the discov- as his ship lurched across the Atlantic. ery of species. And as established scientists His reward was to be made astronomer increasingly took to ships, the art of recording royal in 1765. He published the first volume recording minute observations of sea life, found new levels of accuracy and precision. of The Nautical Almanac two years later. This coastlines and curious natural phenom- British mariner James Cook, a veritable celebrated work contained a table of lunar ena. As I discovered while doing research astronaut of the Enlightenment, set out on distances for computing longitude, and was for my forthcoming book The Sea Journal, his voyages to the Pacific 250 years ago with assembled with a team of human ‘computers’ these documents show science conducted well-chosen crews, many talented with brush — assistants versed in arithmetic, geometry, in situ — in cramped cabins, on open deck and pen. Among them were father and son trigonometry and observational acuity. and on exploratory forays from ship to shore. Johann and Georg Forster, as well as Sydney From the work of Venetian scholar Antonio Parkinson and William Hodges. The Endeav- MAPPING INFORMATION Pigafetta in the sixteenth century to that of our expedition changed our understanding of A generation later, Irish hydrographer the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, the cosmos, as astronomers used its observa- Francis Beaufort orchestrated one of the botanist Jeanne Baret, in the eighteenth, they tions of the 1769 transit of Venus across the greatest mapping exercises ever attempted. form an immensely valuable archive. Sun to measure Earth’s distance from our star. With British merchant and naval fleets com- Nascent navies led the way in the newly Cook was fond of the phrase “voyages of manding the seas, it was Beaufort’s job at important business of charting coasts and discovery” to describe his travels. Yet this bril- the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty oceans for commerce and strategy. Navi liant cartographer, who journeyed emotion- to track information on which ships relied, gators followed routes into the Pacific Ocean ally and intellectually into waters unknown from where to lay anchor to intelligence discovered by fifteenth-century Portuguese to him, encountered people from cultures about fortification and trade. Officers’ naval explorer Ferdinand Magellan, and later that had navigated, voyaged and built under- journals were crammed with such data, and pushed south, searching for the coast of a standing of their own marine environment Beaufort’s Admiralty charts became the gold suspected continent, or north into the Arctic for centuries. Tahitians, Hawaiians and Maori standard. In them, centuries of the art and maze of ice and islands. As familiarity with people would place this enigmatic visitor on science of seafaring are distilled into two sea routes improved, explorers increasingly their own maps in ways he could neither dimensions and half a square metre.

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An 1817 map of the south coast of Anatolia, surveyed by Francis Beaufort.

Along with devising an eponymous wind- the ‘bathysphere’, hundreds of metres down in Hollister became invaluable as an experienced force scale in 1805, Beaufort was a prime Bermuda waters. Beebe headed the Depart- ichthyologist, and she made research descents mover behind the Admiralty’s Manual of ment of Tropical Research at the New York in the bathysphere. Her observational skills, Scientific Enquiry, first appearing in 1849. Zoological Society and encouraged female and talent with paint and ink, turned Beebe’s This contained instructions for observation scientists to work with him. Of the many scientific discoveries into true works of art. in a dizzying range of new disciplines — a who joined his expeditions, Gloria Hollister Hollister eventually led three expeditions scientific A–Z from astronomy to zoology, is particularly interesting. A trained zoolo- herself. In Trinidad, she explored the Arma by way of botany, geology, hydrography, gist and cancer researcher, she applied to Gorge and studied the oilbird (Steatornis magnetism, mineralogy, statistics and tides. work with Beebe in 1928, as he was looking caripensis), the world’s only nocturnal fly- Charles Darwin and botanist William Hooker for a professional naturalist, with skills in ing, fruit-eating bird. In 1936, she embarked contributed essays. From a time when British dissection, for an expedition to Bermuda. on an expedition to Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls, surveying vessels could be found in New trekking through more than 300 kilo- Zealand, the Torres Strait and the Arctic, metres of dense tropical jungle. With this monumental work is a snapshot of her team, she discovered species and UK domination of the seas. Its instruc- brought back specimens, including the tions for seafarers were clear: “Let him curiously reptilian-looking stinkbird, or then acquire the habit of never quitting hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin). In the LEEMAGE/GETTY his ship without his note-book and pen- early 1950s, she co-created the Mianus cil, and his pocket-compass.” River Gorge Conservation Committee, As Victorian science gave way to the saving this habitat in Bedford, New twentieth century’s game-changing York, from development. Throughout, discoveries — from continental drift Hollister, like Beebe, kept extensive logs to other galaxies — British rule of the and notes. Her career began, as many oceans ebbed. The journal habit did other field scientists’ did, with discover- not. The 1915 Nature Notes for Ocean ies made from the shifting deck of a ship. Voyagers, co-authored by sea captain In the pages of rare journals and sea Alfred Carpenter, was filled with his logs, private diaries and cloth-bound “personal observations upon life in the sketchbooks, there is much for histori- ‘vasty deep’” — one of the earliest spot- ans of science to discover. Observation ters’ guides to marine wildlife. He was remains at the heart of scientific effort, assisted by scholar-sailor David Wilson and worlds are still there for the explor- Barker, who had ferried passengers to ing — from the microbiome to the sea gold-rush Australia and served on iron bed and into deep space. As the Renais- ships laying submarine cables on the sance humanist Petrarch put it, people ocean floor. Barker was a keen observer go forth to behold “the mighty surge of of seabird migrations and the shapes of the sea ... the inexhaustible ocean, and waves, and found time to sketch the the paths of the stars”. And in so doing, aurora australis and discover remark- they “lose themselves in wonderment”. ■ able plankton blooms off the coast of Ecuador. An author of seamanship and Huw Lewis-Jones is an environmental navigation manuals, he also penned the historian, expedition guide and senior 1918 Things A Sailor Needs to Know. lecturer at Falmouth University, UK. By the 1930s, US oceanographer and He wrote Explorers’ Sketchbooks with zoologist William Beebe was enraptur- Kari Herbert, and his monograph The ing the world with radio commentary Sea Journal will be published in 2019. delivered from a research submarine, Botanist Jeanne Baret, disguised as a man to join an expedition. Twitter: @polarworld