XIV CHALLENGER 



to resume work on the survey; while the junior surveying officers 

 are often content enough to hear the wind howHng or to see 

 the fog closing in to give them some respite from the apparently 

 endless days of sounding in boats. 



Modem surveying ships have borne the names of many of the 

 great surveyors of the past, such as Cook and Dalrymple, Fitzroy 

 and Flinders. 



The ship about which this book is written also bore a famous 

 name. She was called after H.M.S. Challenger, built at Woolwich 

 for the Royal Navy in i8(^8, and more famous in the fields of 

 science and exploration than in the line of battle. This earlier 

 vessel was a screw corvette of 1462 tons displacement with a 

 two-cylinder engine, using a twin-bladed propeller which could 

 be disconnected and hoisted clear of the water when she was 

 imder sail. 



In I 861 she left for service on the east coast of North America 

 and the West Indies, taking part in operations against Mexico in 

 1862. Her next commission was on the Australian Station, where 

 little unusual occurred, except that she visited Fiji on a punitive 

 expedition to avenge the death of a missionary and his dependants 

 who had been murdered by the Fijians. 



It was in 1872 that her career took a dramatic turn when she 

 was selected as a surveying vessel to be employed on a scientific 

 cruise round the world. 



For some years the Royal Society had been sending scientists 

 to sea in naval surveying ships. These were the first real efforts 

 made to find out something of the physical make-up of the ocean 

 and of the life within it beyond the immediate vicinity of the 

 coast. Professors W. B. Carpenter and Wyville Thomson had been 

 the prime instigators of these cruises which had been conducted 

 off the north-west coast of Scotland and in the Mediterranean. 

 But knowledge of the depths of the oceans was still extremely 

 vagxie ; there was a widespread belief that there was an azoic zone 

 below a thousand fathoms or so where no life existed, despite 

 evidence to the contrary provided by starfish which had become 

 entangled in deep sounding lines ; many considered that the 

 ocean's floor would be flat and featureless ; of what the ocean bed 

 was composed no one knew; there had been considerable dis- 

 cussion, based on slender data, whether the temperature of the 



