麻豆传媒

Brad Fox (Pushkin Press)

DECADES before Trieste, a deep-submergence vehicle, entered the Mariana trench in the western Pacific Ocean, a new kind of prototype submersible was lowered into the Atlantic waters off Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, more than 14,000 kilometres away. The Bathysphere, a simple steel ball 1.45 metres in diameter, was designed to document creatures rumoured to live at depths no human had visited.

The story of the amazing sub and its record-breaking 900-metre dives between 1930 and 1934 is given the scientific and colourful retelling it deserves in The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the luminous ocean depths by Brad Fox. Designed by diver and engineer Otis Barton, the Bathysphere was created in response to an article written by William Beebe, a swashbuckling biologist who had previously published accounts of tracking pheasants as they migrated around the planet.

Beebe鈥檚 desire to catalogue deep-sea life is presented as one of his many quirks. Fox paints the zoologist as a high-society playboy, having tea parties with A. A. Milne and receiving fan mail from Arthur Conan Doyle, who was keen to know whether he could find proof of Atlantis.

Beebe and Barton are described as well-matched, the latter having discovered Beebe鈥檚 submersible sketches while he was a postgraduate engineering student at Columbia University in New York City.

Barton had been fascinated with the idea of visiting the sea bed ever since he watched pearl divers in Asia as a young boy. Later, as a student, he replaced Beebe鈥檚 first cylindrical design with a sphere, reasoning that it would be better at distributing the high pressure experienced during deep dives.

Using an inheritance, Barton was able to pay for some extras: a 180-kilogram door; boxes of soda lime to absorb the carbon dioxide exhaled by the Bathysphere鈥檚 occupants; and a telephone battery to allow communication with the surface via the craft鈥檚 connecting lifeline.

Although there were two men staring out of the Bathysphere鈥檚 quartz windows during dives, Fox stresses it was the scientist hired by Beebe, Gloria Hollister, who kept the team going from above. She transcribed their sightings and arguably possessed the most rational mind of the three.

Fox outlines how Hollister went from playing with an air hose as a child in the Mahwah river, which weaves in and out of the states of New York and New Jersey, to breaking the ocean descent record for women in 1930.

She had carried out cancer research at the Rockefeller Institute before joining Beebe鈥檚 team at the Department of Tropical Research within the New York Zoological Society, now the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Hollister would go on to solo scientific distinction herself, trekking more than 300 kilometres through the Guyanese jungle to catalogue tropical birds and frogs.

The dives are covered in exquisite detail. Aware that the lethal pressure around him meant a crack in the hull wouldn鈥檛 just drown the voyagers, but shred them, Beebe was bewitched by what he saw. How could fragile, ghost-like jellyfish survive around 700 metres underwater?

Fox doesn鈥檛 appear to have missed out a single one of Beebe鈥檚 sightings, describing wonders such as darting fluorescent fish (鈥渢he stars gone mad鈥�, wrote Beebe) and the black swallower, a small predator whose distended stomach allows it to eat prey 10 times its own weight.

Although Beebe wrote up his descents in a book of his own, Half Mile Down, Fox鈥檚 account is vivid enough to merit a reappraisal of the zoologist鈥檚 work. Beebe was always ambivalent about his studies, imagining his finds would eventually be naturally erased, like pictures drawn in sand. But while the scientific community of the day was sceptical about his sightings, two fish species Beebe saw, Bathysidus pentagrammus and Bathyembryx istiophasma, today take their names from his voyages.

And while the Bathysphere鈥檚 depth records may have been quickly surpassed by postwar underwater vessels, the craft in which they were set lives on. The Bathysphere was exhibited at the 1939 New York World鈥檚 Fair and used by the US Navy during the second world war. Today, it can be seen in Titans of the Deep, a 1938 B-movie retelling of Beebe鈥檚 dives using footage shot by Barton.

George Bass is a writer based聽in聽Kent,聽UK