OCEANIC EXPLORATION

The oceans came into focus as objects and sites of scientific study in the nineteenth century. Previously, ocean explorers sought sea routes and new lands. The aim of nineteenth-century explorers shifted from novel geographic discoveries to systematic surveys directed toward exploiting natural resources, finding new markets, and demonstrating political might. Before the invention of chronometers and the lunar-distance method solved the longitude problem, the challenge of finding longitude had drawn the attention of explorers and navigators skyward, into astronomy. With the longitude problem solved by the late eighteenth century, Captain James Cook (1728–1779) established a precedent for a scientific style of exploration that included investigation of the ocean itself. Modern science thereafter formed the basis for establishing knowledge about the ocean.

Cook's voyages demonstrated that geographic discovery was most informative when followed by detailed botanical, mineral, zoological, and geodetic investigations. This scientific style of exploration emerged in response to political and economic concerns including whaling, trading, colonial settlements, and new industrial activities. New lands and seas were surveyed for utilitarian purposes and to increase scientific knowledge. Science and empire were tightly linked by the late eighteenth century through oceanic exploration, as exemplified by the work of national botanical gardens to transport and transplant plants such as rubber for tires, cinchona with its antimalarial qualities, and the breadfruit carried by the ill-fated Bounty.

Control of the ocean conferred significant power on imperial nations, whose strategic and economic interests depended on trade. Knowledge of the ocean's tides, currents, storms, and seabed made possible the expansion of shipping and the inauguration of new transportation and communications technologies including the steamship and the submarine telegraph cable. An understanding of the ocean and its depths enabled European powers to dominate lands and cultures connected by its waters.

As early nineteenth-century western explorers neared completion of the discovery of the earth's landmasses and the sea routes between them, they set forth with scientific companions to the far reaches of the globe—the icy polar regions, the "dark continent" of Africa, the gigantic Himalayan mountains, and the desolate Australian outback. Oceanic exploration concentrated especially on polar regions throughout the nineteenth century, most infamously in the doomed 1845–1849 expedition led by John Franklin (1786–1847) and the numerous parties sent out in search of it. The surface and depths of the ocean also came under scrutiny at midcentury by physicists searching for laws of nature, by naturalists interested in marine organisms, and by hydrographers aiming to chart the ocean basins.

Emerging scientific interest in the sea developed in tandem with the growth of modern, professional science. Following the example of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), those scientists who studied the oceans adopted his methods of collecting data over large geographic areas and mapping it to discern general laws of nature. Conceiving of the oceans as one connected whole allowed scientists to speak decisively about areas of the sea where measurements were difficult or impossible. Examples of such global synoptic studies include both the British physicist William Whewell's (1794–1866) tidal studies, especially the so-called "great tide experiment" of 1835 in which observers throughout the world took detailed tidal measurements for two weeks, and also the "Magnetic Crusade" masterminded by the British magneticist Edward Sabine (1788–1883) in the late 1830s. In the 1850s the American naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–1873) directed a deep-sea sounding project that resulted in the first bathymetric chart of the Atlantic basin in 1853. This investigation took on importance for the emerging submarine telegraphy industry, but its origin, and the motive for tidal and magnetic studies, lay in efforts to improve navigation due to the meteoric expansion of shipping that accompanied industrialization.

In 1872 the British Admiralty dispatched HMS Challenger on a circumnavigation voyage to study the world's oceans. Three and a half years later, after seventy thousand nautical miles and 362 stations, Challenger returned with seven thousand specimens, half of them new to science, and ample evidence that life exists at all depths in the ocean. The fifty volumes of Challenger reports laid a solid foundation for physical, biological, chemical, and geological oceanography, but the voyage itself did not set a precedent for the practice of this new field. Instead, scientists began to study regions of the sea intensively. In 1902 eight northern European nations founded the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Governments supported the Council because of the economic value of fisheries combined with the recognition that marine resources were most effectively studied cooperatively. The Council served as the world's leader of marine science through the post–World War I period.

See alsoExplorers; Science and Technology.

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Helen M. Rozwadowski