The voyage that launched oceanography
The 2000-ton HMS Challenger anchored at Queens Wharf, Wellington, on June 28, 1874.
Her crew were stunned and saddened as one of them, Edward Winton, had washed overboard in heavy seas and drowned as the ship neared Port Nicholson.
Twenty-five years old and married only a few days before the ship left England, Winton was taking soundings off the foredeck when heavy seas washed him overboard.
One of the crew wrote: ‘‘The passage is over at last and so is the long voyage of one poor fellow, drowned in broad daylight while performing his duty, and not one of us to see him go or to throw him a life buoy. The ship went steaming on to Wellington and he to his last home’’.
The Challenger was on a roundthe-world expedition between 1872 and 1876, surveying the seabed for prospective telecommunications cabling between the continents. She carried a crew of 230 and 10 scientists who were trying to do things never done before.
They regularly dropped lines to measure the depth of the water and bring samples of the seabed to the surface.
They also measured the water temperature at different depths, magnetic variation, and dragged trawls across the seabed and nets through shallower water to capture living things.
While crossing the Atlantic, the crew was very excited to discover a submerged mountain chain. They thought they might have found the lost continent of Atlantis.
Before the 1870s, it was generally believed that no sea life could exist below about 600 metres, but Challenger trawls brought up plenty of animals from several thousand metres deep. These were processed in a shipboard laboratory and preserved in test tubes and bottles.
The ship stayed eight days in Wellington. Scientists on the ship noted that the region was covered with dense, almost impenetrable forest. They saw few birds except gulls and kingfishers, and recorded that, in poulterer’s shops, ‘‘the curious parrot or kaka was hung up for sale’’.
A Mr Travers brought to the ship 40 peripatus (worms) from rotten logs in the dense Hutt Valley bush, while the local museum presented the scientists with whale bones, a Maori skull and more skulls from the Chatham Islands.
Governor of the colony, Sir James Fergusson, and many of the inhabitants ‘‘gave entertainments’’ in honour of the expedition. It sailed for Tonga on July 6. Of the 240 original crew and scientists, Bill Bryson tells us, one in four jumped ship, and eight more went mad or died, driven to distraction by the mind-numbing work of dredging.
The Challenger sailed 130,000km on its four-year voyage, calling at 354 ports and landings and collected more than 4000 animal species previously unknown to science.
These and other observations were catalogued in 50 volumes amounting to 29,000 pages. It is generally agreed that the Challenger expedition round the world launched the scientific discipline of oceanography.
While in Wellington, officers and crew sent the hat around and raised £50 for Winton’s widow.