The Voyage of the Challenger

In 1872 HMS Challenger left Portsmouth on a voyage that was to take her round the world, eight times across the Equator, into the Antarctic ice, and over 68,000 nautical miles in a thousand days at sea. She was a three-masted corvette with auxiliary steam, and as well as a crew of 243 she carried a team of scientists led by Professor Wyville Thomson.

The voyage of the Challenger was a pioneer expedition of immense importance. It was sponsored by the British Government and organized by the Royal Society in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, where the science of Oceanography was born. The ambitious aim of the voyage was to chart the depths, movement and content of the seas, to scour the oceans for marine life, for clues to climatic phenomena, and for minerals.

The naturalists on board - Henry Moseley and John Murray - were observant recorders of life ashore as well as at sea, and the narratives and drawings of the naval officers, Lord George Campbell, Herbert Swire and Richard Channer, provide a sharp picture of three-and-a-half years afloat.

Imagine an Australia in which Melbourne could stage an elegant nine-course dinner for Challenger's officers, while at Cape York aborigines lived in such a primitive state of culture that their only shelter, writes Moseley, was a palm leaf. In New Guinea the expedition encountered the opposition of savage cannibal tribes; in a newly awakened Japan they found all the delights of that amazing land; in Hawaii there was a climb into the active crater of Kilauea; in Tierra del Fuego a glimpse of a race soon to become extinct.

Eric Linklater has distilled from such events as these a continuous and compelling narrative for the general reader, a book of adventure as well as discovery. He uses the personal journals to give an individual edge to the scientific triumph, and to convey a masterly immediacy to his readers. In 1872 the camera was a recent invention. A darkroom was installed on board the ship, and photographic plates were coated and exposed to bring back a unique record of the voyage. This new narrative is illustrated with photographs made from the original plates, and from the scientists' albums there are many other illustrations which have never before been published.