Science at sea: soundings and instrumental knowledge in British Polar expedition narratives, c.1818–1848

Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 77e87

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Science at sea: soundings and instrumental knowledge in British Polar expedition narratives, c.1818e1848 Sarah Louise Millar Institute of Geography, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Room 1.07, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH 8 9XP, UK

Abstract Measuring the depth of the sea in the early nineteenth century was a complicated but vital component in helping ensure safe passage through treacherous coastal waters, and increasingly as the century progressed, in providing scientific insights into previously scarcely-touched regions of the globe. However, no one sounding device was universally agreed upon to provide reliable results. In consequence, the resulting cartographic representation of the deep sea was error strewn and open to continual modification. This paper focuses on depth recording during British Polar expeditions between 1818 and 1845, drawing on the published expedition narratives, as accounts of sounding as science at sea. The paper engages with work on the role of inscriptions to suggest that expedition captains were forced continually to perform new soundings, and to construct new maps of the polar seas as they experienced them. In showing how soundings were part of a wider network of scientific investigation and navigation, and how the collection and recording of depth measurements with precision instruments was vital in ensuring epistemological credibility, the paper for the first time scrutinises the sounding instruments and the practices of ship-board science in this period. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Sounding; Arctic; Instrumentation; Inscriptions; Nineteenth century

In 1817 William Scoresby Junior, whaling captain and scientist, returned from the Arctic to report that ‘a remarkable diminution of the polar ice had taken place, in consequence of which I was able to penetrate in sight of the east coast of Greenland, in the parallel of 74 . A situation which for many years had been totally inaccessible’.1 This news prompted John Barrow, second secretary to the Admiralty and himself long motivated by a desire to secure the sea’s shipping routes for British commerce, to initiate a 25-year program of expeditions into the Arctic to search for a North-West passage: a route through the ice from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean that would cut thousands of miles off the journey from Europe to the East. In the same period, Scoresby conducted his own, private and unfunded scientific investigations into the Arctic, and Captain James Clark Ross led an exploring and scientific mission into Antarctic waters.2 Official Instructions issued by the Admiralty to the captains of the Polar expeditions, and later included as a matter of

course in their resultant narratives, expressed the desire not only to discover new routes, and new land, but to engage scientifically with the sea and the seabed. Captain John Ross, commander of the first Arctic expedition in 1818, was ordered, for example, to take ‘soundings of the sea, and [investigate] the nature of the bottom; for which purpose you are supplied with an instrument better calculated to bring up substances that the leads usually employed for this purpose’.3 The Polar expeditions were to become one of the first testing grounds for instrumentation that promised to offer new insights into the depths of the sea.4 Nineteenth-century geopolitical and economic concerns pushed more European explorers into the Polar regions: to the Arctic in search of a North-West Passage, and to the Antarctic to locate a viable whale fishery and sealing grounds, as well as to ensure territorial advantage.5 Nations whose economic strength rested largely with their maritime influence relied on their ships’

E-mail address: [email protected] 1

Quoted in: T. Stamp and C. Stamp, William Scoresby: Arctic Scientist, Whitby, 1975, 64. See J. Cawood, The magnetic crusade: science and politics in early Victorian Britain, Isis 70, 4 (1979) 492e518; A. Gurney, The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic, London, 2000. 3 J. Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, Made Under the Orders of the Admiralty, in His Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander, For the Purpose of Exploring Baffin’s Bay and Inquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage, London, 1819. 4 Sounding also began to be regularly undertaken at the end of this period e the mid-nineteenth century e on surveying vessels. Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, in particular, conducted years of sounding investigation, largely in his own time, in the Mediterranean aboard surveying ships. See M. Deacon, Vice-Admiral T. A. B. Spratt and the Development of Oceanography in the Mediterranean, 1841e1873, Greenwich, 1978. 5 M. Reidy, Introduction, in: K.R. Benson, H.M. Rozwadowski (Eds), Extremes: Oceanography’s Adventures at the Poles, Sagamore Beach, 2007, 1e14. 2

0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.06.003

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ability to cross ocean’s in the most extreme weather conditions, and to find safe and strategic harbours around dangerous coastlines when in proximity to land. The strength of Britain as an island and imperial nation demanded that it was increasingly capable of interacting with, and understanding, the world’s oceans. As the politics of imperialism intensified, the Admiralty’s need for scientific and technical expertise became ever more important, as Reidy acknowledges: ‘Empire thus subtly transformed science: in the research questions asked, and the theories adopted’.6 Emerging information from these voyages of exploration was essential and influential in matters of imperial expansion. The Navy was crucial to this programme of development and John Barrow’s dual role in the Admiralty and as a prominent member of the Royal Society, gave him considerable influence on the direction of scientific investigation during the first half of the nineteenth century. The ways in which science was organised and pursued in this period has been termed ‘Humboldtian science’, and is characterised by the intellectual programme epitomised by undertakings such as the magnetic crusade that resulted in Ross’s 1839 voyage to the Antarctic, reflecting a new ‘professionalism’ in the natural sciences.7 This programme of science brought to the fore the need for a focus on the instrumentation rather than on the explorer: particularly so for portable, precision instruments. The Humboldtian example, Susan Faye Cannon argues, inspired the explorers and early scientists of the early and mid-nineteenth century across Europe to follow in his footsteps. Dettelbach argues that Humboldt broke the mould by focussing on measurement rather than collection and, in so doing, instruments took pride of place: Humboldt’s personal narratives posited the instruments as the main protagonist rather than himself. For Humboldt, a single instrument to perform a task was insufficient. What was needed were instruments by different instrument makers, built on different principles, being used together with their errors constantly compared. Using precision instruments thus corroborated basic standards and constants for the first time.8 This type of scientific pursuit required global observations because general theories were desired, not local principles. Whilst Cannon’s model has been criticised by some for its generalisations and its better applicability to some fields of science over others, it is a framework that fits well with scientific practice, and the resulting representations, in the Polar regions in the first half of the nineteenth century.9 Whilst studies of terrestrial exploration and expeditionary culture have long been emphasised over those of maritime endeavour, recent work has attempted to redress the imbalance, focussing on the role of the ship in the production of scientific knowledge at sea;

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the place of the maritime expedition narrative; the activities of more marginalised figures in maritime knowledge production such as William Dampier the pirate, and William Scoresby the whaler; the representation of the deep sea, and of wrecks, in the early nineteenth century.10 Whilst there has been recent innovative work on the role of instruments used at sea, there is still comparatively little emphasis on the role of sounding instrumentation, and on the epistemic importance it confers on the user.11 Studies of deep-sea sounding have focused on the period after 1850, when the need to lay trans-Atlantic telegraph cables caused a surge in interest in knowing precisely the nature of deep water in the Atlantic basin, and Lieutenant Matthew Maury began to use data from ship log books to produce the first bathymetric maps of the deep-sea floor in 1853.12 Likewise, emphasis has been placed on the importance of the voyage of HMS Challenger, which, in 1872, began a 5-year scientific expedition of the world’s oceans, signalling in so doing a shift from terrestrial exploration to maritime scientific discovery.13 Before 1850, however, a less-structured approach to sounding existed in which new machines were constructed and tested; individual knowledge of the deep sea was as great as that held by any single institution; maps remained simple and without standards; and soundings, taken when necessary for navigation and to avoid danger, were rarely made with science in mind. Moreover, that sounding technology which was used widely at the beginning of the nineteenth century was totally obsolete by the century’s end. As a consequence, the picture that is left to us today of sounding as a scientific, navigational and cartographic practice in the early nineteenth century is patchy and unclear, and, perhaps, has been overlooked as a result. This paper examines deep-sea soundings from the beginning of the period of Admiralty-sponsored Arctic expeditions into the Polar regions, to the end of this phase of intensive sea-going expeditions in 1845 with the loss of the Franklin expedition, in order to reposition focus on the development of deep-sea sounding through advances in instrumentation and cartography. This paper considers the importance of the role of sounding instrumentation and positions sounding in a fluid network of activity at sea, highlighting the vital and changing role of cartographic representation in influencing the perception of the deep sea at this time. The argument advanced is that sounding in the Polar regions in this period formed part of a wider network of scientific and navigational activity that included not only the instruments and the operators but also the resulting representations in the form of maps and charts. The paper contends that examining sounding within Polar narratives can offer important perspectives on the early development of sounding instrumentation and, in turn, upon

M. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy, Chicago, 2008, 292. S. F. Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, New York, 1978, Ch. 4. 8 M. Dettelbach, Humboldtian science, in: N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Eds), Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge, 1996, 287e304; M. Dettelbach, The face of nature: precise measurement, mapping, and sensibility in the work of Alexander von Humboldt, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C, 30, 4 (1999) 473e504. 9 Dettelbach also argues that Cannon’s work prematurely ‘black-boxed’ a complex set of concerns and practices, and criticises the need to ‘decouple’ professional and disciplinary concerns from those regarding sensibility and the aesthetic. Miller champions the role of other key groups e mathematical practioners, the Cambridge network and scientific servicemen e in the development of the physical sciences in early nineteenth century Britain. See: Dettelbach, Humboldtian science (note 8); Dettelbach, The face of nature (note 8); D.P. Miller, The revival of the physical sciences in Britain, 1815e1840, Osiris 2 (1996) 107e134. 10 For work on the ship see: R. Sorrenson, The ship as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century, Osiris 2nd series 11 (1996) 221e236; W. Hasty and K. Peters, The ship in geography and the geographies of ships, Geography Compass 6 (2012) 660e676; A. Winter, ‘Compasses all awry’: the iron ship and the ambiguities of cultural authority in Victorian Britain, Victorian Studies 38 (1994) 69e98; for maritime book history and inscriptions see A. Craciun, Oceanic voyages, maritime books, and eccentric inscriptions, Atlantic Studies 10 (2013) 170e196; for piracy see W. Hasty, Piracy and the production of knowledge in the travels of William Dampier, c.1679e1688, Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 40e54; for Arctic exploration in the early nineteenth century see M. Bravo, Geographies of exploration and improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic whaling, 1782e1822, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 512e538; and for wrecks see F. Driver and L. Martins, Shipwreck and salvage in the tropics: the case of HMS Thetis, 1830e1854, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 539e562. 11 For more on instruments at sea, see: M. Deacon, Scientists and the Sea 1650-1900: A Study of Marine Science, London; Reidy, Tides of History (note 6); H. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, Harvard, 2008. 12 For more on Maury, see: Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean (note 11); D.G. Burnett, Matthew Fontaine Maury’s ‘sea of fire’: hydrography, biogeography and providence in the tropics, in: F. Driver, L. Martins (Eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Chicago, 2005, 113e134. 13 For more on the contribution of the Challenger expedition, see M. Deacon, T. Rice and C. Summerhayes (Eds), Understanding the Oceans, London, 2001. 7

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the hitherto under-studied role of instrumentation and technological testing as integral to the practice of geographical discovery and exploration. Instrumentation: technological innovations and complications Recent work in the history of science attempts to explain the functioning of disciplines as constantly in flux: few ideas or technologies in science remain constant and unchallenged for decades, let alone centuries. The focus of scholarship on the history of scientific innovation has long been on the idea rather than the machinery which enabled it. Pinch and Bijker were among the first to criticise the separation of science from technology, arguing that the formation of a new technology should be considered using the same theoretical tools as that of a scientific idea.14 For Withers, ‘modernity has tended to accord primacy to science over technology because of its emphasis upon means’, but proposes that technology need not be subordinated to science if we consider the epistemic authority which instruments confer on the user and the science.15 Discussing the role of method in geography in the nineteenth century, Withers highlights the importance of the role of instruments, and their ability to confer authority on the user, drawing links between the credibility of ‘instruments, inscriptions and the real world’.16 Richard Sorrenson argues that the ship itself should be treated as an instrument, not just a means of transporting people and objects or a vehicle on which scientific investigation could be performed. Ships ‘shaped the kinds of information observers collected’, as the ability of the ship to continue operating was the most important consideration in any scientific endeavour.17 As a consequence, the type of ship chosen for a voyage of discovery was of the utmost importance in establishing the credibility of the resulting expedition. Captain James Cook, Sorrenson writes, chose a ‘dumpy North Sea collier’ as the type of ship best suited to probe the unknown.18 James Clark Ross wrote proudly of his ships, the Erebus and Terror, being strengthened for sailing in extreme conditions of ice and cold, in comparison to the American Charles Wilkes’ all-sail team of inadequately built and equipped vessels.19 Dorinda Outram has addressed the issue of how geographical knowledge was produced and consumed in the context of voyages

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of exploration in the eighteenth century, arguing they raised troubling questions about the authority of the explorer and the resultant travel narrative.20 Driver argues the culture of exploration was heterogeneous, so what constituted legitimate knowledge was open to contention.21 For Dane Kennedy, the traveller’s veracity increasingly came to be measured by his ‘commitment to a rigorous set of scientific protocols and practices’, more than upon social status.22 One way in which credibility was assured, was by the keeping of a daily written record of events observed and measurements taken, in the form of diaries, journals, and log books.23 Another was the use of precision instruments, such as the chronometer, compass, sextant, barometer, thermometer, and sounding device. These practices laid a conceptual framework for equivalency and comparison. Kennedy argues that it was the ‘meticulous attention [Cook] gave to the production of accurate observations and verifiable reports’, especially using navigational instruments such as Harrison’s chronometer to determine longitude that resulted in the almost reverential way Cook’s accounts were treated.24 Driver offers the example of the naval officer and explorer Captain Basil Hall, whose reputation was secured by his diligence regarding use of precision instruments. His reliance on astronomical observations to accurately navigate 8,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, with no sign of land for three months, was held by William Herschel as one of the greatest feats of navigation, conferring authority on the commanding officer by the systematic use of scientific method.25 Credibility, however, was not ensured by diligence to instrumentation alone. Arguably, explorers were willing to endure physical hardship because in doing so their own bodies and minds became ‘privileged sites of truth and knowledge’.26 Outram argues that contemporary accounts of exploration repeatedly return to themes of physical discomfort as a way of authenticating the explorer’s travels.27 Accounts of the Arctic often focused on bodily concerns of starvation, hypothermia and even cannibalism, documenting the extreme environment, and highlighting the authority of the account by virtue of the trials endured.28 For Gillian Beer, this question of the personal thus becomes a key issue: Who sees? What is seen? What are the conditions of observation?29 The credibility of the explorer was emphasised by certain key factors: the length of time away, the events that happened during their absence and their personal associations at home.30 A powerful and

14 T. Pinch and W. Bijker, The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other, Social Studies of Science 14 (1984) 399e441. 15 C.W.J. Withers, Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth-century British geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (2012) 169. 16 Withers, Science, scientific instruments and questions of method (note 15), 173. 17 Sorrenson, The ship as a scientific instrument (note 10), 227. 18 Sorrenson, The ship as a scientific instrument (note 10), 226. 19 Ross’s ships were both bombs, specialised wooden sailing ships used by the navy for bombarding objects on land. The Terror had already seen arctic waters on an expedition for the North-West passage led by George Back. Whilst the bombs were not fast (a top speed of 8 knots) they were strong and steady. Whilst the American Exploring Expedition took 2,157 tons of ship with it, the British Antarctic survey led by Ross took only 698 tons. See Gurney, The Race to the White Continent (note 2). 20 D. Outram, On being Perseus: new knowledge, dislocation, and enlightenment exploration, in: D. Livingstone, C. Withers (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago and London, 1999, 281e294. 21 F. Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, Oxford, 2001, 27. 22 D. Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia, Cambridge and London, 2013, 28. 23 See also C.W.J. Withers and I.M. Keighen, Travels into print: authoring, editing and narratives of travel and exploration, c.1815ec.1857, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 (2011) 560e573; S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth, Chicago and London, 1994. 24 Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces (note 22), 29. 25 Driver, Geography Militant (note 21), 54. 26 Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces (note 22), 94. 27 Outram, On being Perseus (note 20), 290, 291. 28 Reidy, Introduction (note 5), 2. See also B. Hevly, The heroic science of glacial motion, Osiris (1996), 11, 66e86. 29 G. Beer, Travelling the other way, in: N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Eds), Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge, 1996, 323. 30 See also: S. McCook, ‘It may be truth, but it is not evidence’: Paul du Chaillu and the legitimation of evidence in the field sciences, in: H. Kuklick, R.E. Kohler (Eds), Science in the Field, Osiris 2nd series 11, 1996 177e197; S. Schaffer, Visions of empire: afterword, in: D.P. Miller, P.H. Reill (Eds), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, Cambridge, 340.

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prominent position in the scientific community was most often related to an equally important place in a scientific institution, such as the Royal Society, and had a direct impact on observers’ credibility. These factors were the social and intellectual claims to authority the explorer had in their favour, or otherwise. The issue of credibility was vital to the development of expeditionary science in Europe in the early nineteenth century. As Driver points out, whilst gender, class and ethnicity were important factors in establishing authority, they were insufficient to authorise fully claims of foreign lands and people encountered that explorers brought back. The travel narrative served as a powerful vehicle for establishing the integrity of the explorer; but as the century progressed the use and record of ever more sophisticated precision instruments became the de rigueur way of conferring authenticity on the scientific travelled. How this collated data was then recorded and presented, as Dettelbach has shown in his study of Alexander von Humboldt, was key to authenticating truth claims. Humboldt transformed measurements into graphs and tables, as well as maps and charts, stressing a concurrent concern with the spatial relations between the natural sciences and the geography of plants and animals. Humboldt insisted on graphical representation when graphs themselves were a novel mode of representation as late as the 1820s. He not only mapped variables such as temperature and rainfall, but recorded the means and rate of change. Isometric lines, his creation, were a product of averaging and interpolation, showing the spread of mean values over an accurate map. Aesthetic images were still presented but they were defined and secured by precise measurements.31 These graphical representations, or ‘inscriptions’, to use Bruno Latour’s term, of sounding events, in the form of maps and charts were an important factor in making sounding data accessible to expedition captains and to later audiences.32 For Sabine Höhler, Latour’s ideas suggest a framework for analysis of the early pictorial outputs of deep-sea sounding, by illustrating ocean depth as ‘a product of repetition and concentration of measurements’.33 Although the profile of the seabed became the dominant mode of graphical depth representation in the early years of sounding, this proved unstable due to the small number of data points. ‘Representing depth became a question of data compilation’34: the more soundings, the more accurate a chart was deemed to be and thus was judged credible.35 John Law also examines the instrumentation taken on board ship, notably the astrolabe and the quadrant used to determine latitude whilst at sea. Law states that taken by themselves e that is, without human involvement e these instruments were powerless. The image seen through an alidade pointed at the sky, he claims, has little significance in relation to navigation. Rather it is the transformation of these sightings into latitude, which

is important. Like Latour’s ‘circulating reference’, which emphasised the importance of the two-dimensional inscription, the transformed object is more important than the original.36 Indeed Law explicitly mentions ‘a scale of reference’ allowing the course sailed by mariners to be compared with a course plotted on a chart. In his work on the Portuguese maritime expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Law argues that the social and natural world are subject to ‘continuous reworking’ and that the technologist should be seen as building a network of components, where ‘bits and pieces, coastal, natural, physical, or economic are interrelated and keep each other in place in a hostile and dissociating world’. Law highlights the temporal and fragile nature of the entity constructed from these dissociated components, and the danger that the whole may break into its constituent parts if faced with a ‘stronger and hostile system’.37 As an example he uses the Vivaldo brothers’ unsuccessful sailing around Cape Bojador in their ill-designed boat. Their demise, he argues, was the result of the dissolution of their technological object in the face of a stronger opponent (the conditions of nature). Some components of the network therefore were suitable for being tampering with e the navigational charts for instance, or the design of a square-rigged ship, whilst the dissociating forces of the ocean were not. Law sums this up by stating that the advance in shipbuilding technique was the key in deciding on the course the boats were able to sail e and in this way the construction triumphed over the other actors in the network attempting to dissociate the component parts of the volta. For Law, the crux of the problem is how the entity constructed by the system-builders will stay as a whole when faced with adversary. Drawing upon this work by Law, Latour and Höhler, this paper argues that in the case of representations of the deep sea, measurements of depth resulted in constantly changing and untrustworthy maps, whose worth was dependent on the credibility of the ship captain and crew, the instruments on board, and even upon the ship itself as a well-run operational device. Sounding: making science at sea The impression of the sea in the early nineteenth century was one of a known layer at the surface, with an unfamiliar abyss below.38 Sounding was thus important both as a means to navigation and a form of instrumental practice designed to explore the sea at depth.39 Whilst the instruments carried on board ship in the early nineteenth century constantly changed in make and type, one instrument remained constant through decades of seafaring: the lead line used to measure the depth of the sea, essential for establishing position and ensuring safety in shallow water. The most common

31 M. Dettelbach, Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldt’s physical portrait of the tropics, in: D.P. Miller, P.H. Reill (Eds), Visions of Empire, 267e270. See also, A. Godlewska, Humboldt’s visual thinking from Enlightenment vision to modern science, in: D. Livingstone, C. Withers (Eds), Geography and Enlightenment, Chicago and London (1999), 236e279. 32 B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Milton Keynes, 1987, ch. 6. 33 S. Höhler, Depth records and ocean volumes: ocean profiling by sounding technology, 1850e1930, History and Technology 18 (2002) 122. 34 Höhler, Depth records and ocean volumes (note 33), 126. 35 B. Latour, Drawing things together, in: M. Lynch, S. Woolgar (Eds), Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge, MA, 1990, 31. 36 B. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard, 2009, Ch. 2. 37 J. Law, On the social explanation of technical change: the case of Portuguese maritime expansion, Technology and Culture 28 (1987) 231e234. 38 Many mariners held to the erroneous belief that water would become increasingly dense at great depth and pressure, even though scientific experiments in the late eighteenth century had shown the density of water did not change to an extent that would affect its viscosity. More significant and lasting misunderstandings involved the belief that water at depth was a homogeneous 4 C and devoid of any movement that would allow the circulation of nutrition and the existence of life. See: S. Schlee, The Edge of an Unfamiliar World: A History of Oceanography, Toronto and Vancouver, 1973. 39 As mathematical or listed figures or symbols of depth, soundings began to appear on charts from the late sixteenth century, mostly with reference to the continental shelf at depths of less than 100 fathoms. Robert Hooke complained of the difficulty of obtaining unequivocal results when experimenting with sounding instruments in 1666, and factors such as the lack of understanding of the properties of wood at depth (it becomes waterlogged at high pressure), or knowledge of undercurrents that pulled the sounder horizontally through the water, contributed to a difficulty in creating and replicating accurate results. In 1727, Stephen Hale introduced the detachable weight for sounders, and there were ideas for sounding devices published in the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In 1773, Constantine Phipps undertook deep sea soundings on a voyage to the Arctic in search of a route through to the Pacific Ocean; for an overview of the Phipps voyage see A. Savours, ‘A very interesting point in geography’: The 1773 Phipps Expedition towards the North Pole, Arctic 37, 4 (1984) 402e428.

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and simple design for sounding in the early nineteenth century, the lead line was an instrument used primarily in the shallower water around the coast, rather than in deep waters offshore. Its basic design incorporated a piece of lead or other weighty object attached to a line that was cast over the side and allowed to run out through the hands of a trained crewman.40 Deep-sea sounding, however, required new and inventive technology. There were two main devices regularly taken on board ship from the early 1800s: Massey’s sounder, and Burt’s buoy and nipper (Fig. 1): there was much competition and controversy over the use of the two instruments during this period.41 In 1800, Edward Massey of Coventry invented a sounding machine designed for use by ships in shallow water based on the idea of recording the number of turns on a central vane. This was a waywiser sounder. It was adopted by the Navy Board in 1807 (500 were ordered), and when it was strengthened for use at greater depth, 1000 more were taken up.42 Massey claimed his sounder would accurately measure vertical distance when in the water, and would not be pulled by underwater currents or the boat’s horizontal movement through the water. It was, however, difficult for the average crewman to use, as a skilled operator was required to be able to read the dials and thus judge when the sounder had reached bottom. Crewmembers complained especially of the difficulty of using it at night, when it was nearly impossible to judge how fast the wire was being paid out. Ultimately difficulties in its use meant the Massey sounder fell out of favour, to be replaced by the simpler Burt’s buoy and nipper. This was adopted by the Admiralty for the start of the Arctic exploring expeditions in 1818, being both easy to launch and use whilst the vessel continued its operation. According to Pinch and Bijker, the stabilisation of an instrument needs to be analysed in order to understand why the final design becomes accepted, they term this ‘interpretative flexibility’. The expedition crewmembers provided the at-sea testing which these instruments so desperately needed, forming the user community that, Pinch and Bijker argue, ultimately decides the instrument best suited to their needs. The superior functionality of the buoy and nipper is reflected in its listing as the main sounding device taken on board the first Polar expedition by John Ross in 1818; there is no mention of Massey’s sounder. Ross was not, however, as enamoured with the instrument as his superiors. In the appendix to his 1819 published narrative, Ross conceals critique within praise, commenting: ‘The invention appears to be very perfect, but owing to the water being generally above 150 fathoms, we had little opportunity of using it’.43 Ross set about constructing his own sounding device on board ship: ‘I employed some of my unoccupied time in constructing an instrument for bringing up substances from the bottom of the sea, to supply the place of our machine, which, from its defective workmanship, had been found ineffective, particularly in deep water’.44 Ross setup a Smith’s forge in situ to make a model on what he believed was an entirely new principle, and named the device the deep-sea clamm, after its integrated

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ability to pick up samples of the sea floor (see Fig. 1). He claimed in typically immodest fashion that the device succeeded on its first sea trial. Ross tested his new invention whenever possible, and unlike Humboldt, appeared content to use just one functioning precision device. In Baffin Bay, Ross described a sounding event in which the accuracy of the clamm was tested at a depth believed to be over 1000 fathoms. Each time the clamm went down it came up empty, corroborating their belief in the great depth of the bay. In his appendix to A Voyage of Discovery, Ross reviewed the operation of the clamm, stating that the temperature of substances brought up using the clamm were well preserved, due to the ‘closeness with which the instrument confines the mud, which is such as to allow not even the water to escape’.45 Ross also reported upon the versatility of the instrument, claiming that, with some modifications to the structure, it would be suitable for water of greater or lesser depth than the Arctic. Ross’s narrative was viewed unfavourably on publication, in part due to the focus on his own accomplishments rather than those of the crew as a whole. However, it can be assumed his instrument managed to avoid a loss of credibility by the detrimental association with Ross, and was deemed successful, as the Arctic explorer Captain William Edward Parry was issued with the instrument as his main sounding device on the very next voyage in search of a North-West Passage, and Parry describes the use of the clamm, not the buoy and nipper, throughout his first narrative. John Ross was not the only captain to re-design sounding devices on board ship. His nephew, James Clark Ross, attempted to measure the depth of the deep ocean down to 600 fathoms whilst passing through the tropics en route to the Southern Ocean, but labelled his efforts ‘fruitless’. He attributed this to the type of line used, but additionally noted: ‘they served to point out to us that which was most suitable. I accordingly directed one to be made on board, three thousand six hundred fathoms, or rather more than four miles in length, fitted with swivels to prevent it unlaying in its descent, and strong enough to support a weight of 76 pounds’, and continued, ‘we succeeded in obtaining soundings with two thousand four hundred and twenty-five fathoms of line’.46 Despite this success, the new line was still subject to interference. When an attempt at a deep-sea sounding was made soon after, the line was accidently checked and broke at 1260 fathoms. Advances could be made in technology to investigate the deep ocean on these long expeditionary voyages, but it was also the case that untested instruments could fail without warning, losing expensive pieces of equipment and affecting the ability to collect scientific data, a key part of the instructions supplied from the Admiralty. One significant problem in historical accounts of technological innovation is the ‘asymmetrical focus of the analysis’, one that relays the events of successful experimentation but hardly ever tackles the nonsuccessful aspects of technology innovation.47 With orders to follow, and reputations to be made, however, it is perhaps not unsurprising that the Polar expedition captains were reluctant to

40 The lead not only allowed one to determine the depth of the sea, it provided an insight into what the sea floor was composed of: a coating of grease or tallow on the lead brought samples of the seabed up for examination. The line had knots, or marks, at each quarter or half fathom to alert the sounder to how much line had gone down and rather than record the results of a sounding event himself, the leadsman would call the depth measured to an officer on deck once the lead came back on board. See H. Raper, The Practice of Navigation and Nautical Astronomy, London, 1840, 91. 41 See: Anon, Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, London, 1819, 135; P. Burt, Copies of Reports of Experiments made for the Purpose of Ascertaining the Superiority of Burt’s Sounding Buoy and Knipper over Massey’s Sounding Machine. London, 1819; E. Massey, A Statement of the case of Mr Edward Massey.most respectfully offered to the notice of every member of Parliament, Prescot, 1820. 42 Deacon, Scientists and the Sea (note 11). 43 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery (note 3), cxxxi. 44 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery (note 3), 60. 45 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery (note 3), cxxxiv. 46 J.C. Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic regions, During the Years 1839e43, London, 1847, 26e27. 47 Pinch and Bijker, The social construction of facts and artefacts (note 14), 405.

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Fig. 1. Three sounding instruments devised and tested in the early nineteenth century: (a) Massey’s waywiser sounder (From ‘How the sea-depths are explored’, Popular Science Monthly, July 1873); (b) The nipper part of Burt’s buoy and nipper (From Oceanographic Museum of Monaco collection, http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/ship4263.htm); (c) John Ross’ Deep-sea clamm (From J. Ross, Voyage of Discovery, 1819, 178). (d) Burt’s buoy and nipper (far left-hand side), a Massey sounder (middle), and a Sandy deep sounder (far right) (From U.S. Coast Survey, Deep Sea Sounding Apparatus, as used by Comr. B. F. Sands, 1857, http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/bigs/cgs06049.jpg).

record the construction of new technology at sea, let alone report upon its failure, in their narratives. As Parry observed in his third narrative, it was not only the instruments and the weather that affected the likelihood of a successful sounding: human fallibility played its part. Parry detailed how sounding had failed to be used as a good navigational tool, in describing the Hecla running aground on rocks which the sounding boats had missed. Perhaps unwilling to be seen as a workman blaming his tools (or a captain blaming his crew), he placed the fault with himself, describing his own journey out on the sounding boat directly before the incident. Although undoubtedly a job that was left to an experienced crewman, when the result of sounding incorrectly was damage to the vessel, Parry was prepared to accept culpability and so damage his own credibility. Yet this may have had less to do with a concern for reputation and more to do with maintaining that straightforward, self-effacing style of writing favoured in the nineteenth-century travel narrative. Parry was greatly admired for his humble prose, in contrast to John Ross who

was denigrated for focussing on his own skill and his own achievements at sea. Although Ross’s deep-sea clamm might have passed the test, his personal credibility suffered greatly when, in his published narrative, he described his own sighting of mountains blocking passage through Lancaster Sound. This mountainous mirage (for so it turned out to be) prevented continuation of the expedition, and, even at the time, was disbelieved by many (notably John Barrow who was convinced a passage to the Pacific existed, and by Edward Sabine who had accompanied the expedition as a scientific officer), and was later disproved by Parry. Given these difficulties of use, questions of accuracy were certainly paramount in interpreting the validity of ocean depth science. Obtaining accurate results on board ship with poorlytested instruments proved a difficult task. In A Journey of Discovery, John Ross complained of the difficulty in obtaining accurate depth measurements due to drift affecting the ability to sound in deep water (where soundings took longer), and of drift so severe that attempts at sounding were curtailed or failed to take place

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altogether. Indeed, it was common, when weather conditions were changeable and safe passage rather than scientific endeavour was paramount, that finding ‘no bottom’ at a reasonable depth was as useful e and more credible e than recording an absolute value that could be dismissed on a subsequent voyage or later challenged. To record on a chart that there was a clear line for shipping was of great benefit to fellow mariners. Ross points to the imperfect nature of even this level of precision; after taking soundings and finding no bottom at 650 fathoms, he admitted the real depth may have been much less as the ‘swell was so great, that it was uncertain, after two hundred fathoms, when the machine reached the bottom’.48 Perhaps as a consequence of his knowledge of the limitations of his ship-borne hand-made instrumentation, Ross did not consider deep water a reliable indication of safe passage, merely expressing his surprise at the unpredictable terrain of the sea floor in Polar waters. Parry was more critical, perhaps because he had no need to demonstrate the efficacy of an instrument that was not his invention. He complained that the considerable drift of the ship in turbulent water affected the accuracy of soundings, and noted that in even in very calm weather, if the depth exceeded 500 or 600 fathoms, the actual depth was hard to ascertain as, ‘the weight of the line causes it to run out with a velocity not perceptibly diminished, long after the lead or clamms have struck the ground’.49 On one occasion, the line was brought up from 2,010 fathoms covered in mud from 800 fathoms onwards. Parry, with some understatement wrote, ‘it is not easy to ascertain the actual depth of the sea in the usual manner, when it exceeds five or six hundred fathoms’.50 Even when a sounding event progressed smoothly, the equipment still proved to be an encumbrance for the ship: ‘the clamms being now down, we were about to try the setup of the current, by mooring a boat to the line, when the breeze again sprung up from the westward and prevented it’.51 Whilst illustrating the cumbersome nature of sounding, Parry’s comments also point to the important opportunity afforded to pursue other scientific investigation at depth when sounding was being undertaken. Sounding as part of a network Depth soundings were frequently taken in conjunction with other scientific interrogations of the sea, most commonly temperature at depth, but also the speed and direction of underwater currents, specific gravity of seawater and dredging of the sea floor. Depth and temperature were in particular closely allied: without knowing true depth, it was impossible to tell what compensation for pressure was needed when using thermometers. Detention in ice overwinter afforded Parry the opportunity for taking repeated measurements of the sea temperature and the specific gravity of seawater at different depths. Captain John Franklin described trying for soundings due to calm weather, whilst also attaching a Register

48

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thermometer to the line and a corked bottle to collect samples of seawater from depth.52 Soundings were pursued and obtained as part of a larger system of scientific and operational activity at sea, and their success was dependent on surmounting, in Law’s words, ‘the dissociating forces’ of harsh Arctic conditions, poor weather, reduced visibility, untested instrumentation and dubious cartographic representations of the deep.53 James Clark Ross’s narrative opens with his instructions that ‘temperature of the sea at the surface and at stated moderate depths should be observed as frequently as possible, and whenever opportunity may occur, also at the greatest depths attainable’. He was also instructed that ‘soundings should be attempted in deep seas, and specimens of the water brought up be preserved for future examination’.54 James Clark Ross certainly described more bottom dredging in conjunction with sounding than his predecessors. From the sounding of 230 fathoms he described small stones, coral and crustaceous animals commonly found in the Arctic seas coming up with the lead, but remarked on the ‘very remarkable irregularity in the ocean bed’55 when HMS Terror, only a mile away, found the sea bottom to be sandy not rocky. He noted how Joseph Hooker, the ship’s naturalist, took accurate drawings of the specimens for future publication, thus showing sounding to be both a means of visualising the sea floor and of accessing the marine fauna that survived there. The animals brought up with the dredge were notable by virtue of the fact they lived at 300 fathoms, and so were rarely, if ever seen. Ross consistently justified his belief in the likelihood of animal life surviving at very great depths, arguing that he had already found life at 1000 fathoms capable of withstanding the great pressures that exist there: so why not at 2000 fathoms and beyond? These findings came at a time when the naturalist Edward Forbes had proposed his theory, then widely accepted, of an azoic layer existing at approximately 300 fathoms, below which, it was postulated, no animal life could survive.56 Ross appears to have provided good evidence to contradict this theory, but as Anderson and Rice argue, naturalists then were anyway already persuaded by the idea that no life could endure in the extremes of the deep-sea, and evidence to the contrary was disregarded.57 Whilst the instructions to the expedition captains expressed a clear wish to take depth measurements for scientific investigation, soundings on the Polar voyages were more commonly employed as navigational requirements. Parry referred to repeated soundings being taken in bad fog, as ‘as we had no other means of knowing the direction in which we were sailing’58 and took sounding in 90 fathoms of water at two thirds of a cable’s length from the shore as indicative of safe passage. Parry wrote of sending boats to sound for safe passage in the Duke of York’s Bay, and confidently declared it a safe harbour after regular soundings were taken: ‘a boat being kept ahead to sound, discovered and enabled us to avoid another rocky shoal’.59 Fig. 2 shows the resultant map of the entrance to the

Ross, A Voyage of Discovery (note 3), 176. W.E. Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Performed in the Years 1819e20, in his Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper, 1821, 30. 50 Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (note 49), 293. 51 Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (note 49), 30. 52 J. Franklin, Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827, London, 1828. 53 Law, On the social explanation of technical change (note 37). 54 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research (note 46), xlvexlvi. 55 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery and Research (note 46), 199. 56 E. Forbes, Report on the mollusca and radiata of the Aegean Sea, and on their distribution, considered as bearing on geology, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1843 (1844) 129e193. 57 T. Anderson and T. Rice, Deserts on the sea floor: Edward Forbes and his azoic hypothesis for a lifeless deep ocean, Endeavour 4 (2006) 131e137. 58 Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (note 49), 63. 59 W.E. Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Performed in the Years 1821-22-23, in his Majesty’s Ships Fury and Hecla, London, 1824, 113. 49

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Fig. 2. Map of Duke of York Bay, made in 1821, originally published in W. E. Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, London, 1824 (Original from John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, http://shimmer.shu.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/JCBw1w1w4071w6390001:Entrance-to-Duke-of-York-Bay-1821).

harbour, with soundings along the line the boat entered, highlighting obstacles capable of causing harm to other boats. The map shows two distinct lines of travel, likely to be the path of HMS Fury and HMS Hecla, the latter led by the then Lieutenant, George Francis Lyon. As Sorrenson argues, the ship is important and unique in the way it leaves marks of its own existence on the maps it helps make, leaving ‘a trace of its interaction with the medium it passes through’.60 We are here given not only a record of the route the ships took, but also of how the resultant map of the coastline of the bay was constructed: one ship taking a steady course through the centre, the other moving closer to land on both sides of the sound to take measurements of depth.

60

Sorrenson, The ship as a scientific instrument (note 10), 228.

Successful sounding was not reliant solely on suitable weather conditions and accurate instrumentation: skilled human operators were vital. George Francis Lyon described the physical toll exacted on the men as a result of constant sounding with line and lead. After finding his charts to be inaccurate, the deep-sea leads were cast every hour in deep water and every quarter of an hour in shallow water, for 6 days and nights in succession. Captain Lyon commented upon the strain this took on the men conducting the sounding, describing the constantly wet crew, operating in temperatures barely above freezing, but, the ship was kept safe by their action. When the ship was forced to sail all night after finding no suitable point for anchor, he wrote of the ‘fatigued’ men working

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constantly with the deep-sea and the hand leads: ‘the hands of many were in so very a sore state, that I caused canvas mittens to be made for the use of the watch on desk.’61 If sounding was used as an explicit navigational tool, it was reliant on the physical capabilities of the men as much an interpreter’s ability to use the equipment and comprehend the significance of its measurements. Taking regular soundings with a lead and line or buoy and nipper was integral to ensuring safe passage in poorly-charted Arctic seas, which had the additional hazard of shifting icebergs to contend with. Sounding was not, however, used independently of other visual and aural clues to obtain information on the depth of the sea. Only when sounding became part of wider network of activities on board ship could it overcome the dissociating forces of the Arctic weather: fog, seasonal darkness and icebergs. Parry several times referred to the colour of the sea as a means to estimating depth, taking soundings when the sea was seen to be lighter than expected, indicative of an area of shallow water.62 It was not just colour changes that indicated water depth: John Ross took the presence of large icebergs as proof of deep water, and sightings of seals as evidence of shallower water. All the Polar expedition authors wrote more frequently about depth in situations of distress: when sight alone could not guarantee proximity to land; when the colour of the water changed; in severe weather, particularly fog; and in fields of ice. Lyon’s Unsuccessful Attempt to Reach Repulse Bay (1825) in which he is highly critical of his own performance, contains more useful information on sounding in situ than many of the more successful expeditions, largely because he had great reason to call on it as his ship was struck by misfortune. In poor weather conditions in the Pentland Skerries they were carried straight towards rocks but were successfully guided to safety ‘by the sounds of the breakers, and our hand leads’.63 Lyon apologised to his readers for the numerous details on scientific readings, such as compass and celestial bearings, but justified their inclusion as showing what ‘materially interested us at the moment, and by attention to which, a ship in such a situation as ours, could alone be navigated in safety’.64 After an encounter with rock or ice, Lyon described his boat using two small grounded rocks as beacons, soon after taking a group of walruses as proof that the water must be shallow despite being distant from land. He continued by identifying ‘slight rippling’ in the sea’s surface a mile north which he took to indicate yet shallower water. Lyon consistently verified visual and aural evidence with recourse to sounding. Sounding confirmed what the captain and crew could see for themselves, and in combination with other methods, may also have prompted greater trust in the measurements of the unseen sea floor when visual clues were not available: in fog; and at night. The representation: soundings on maps The soundings derived from the Polar expeditions in the first half of the nineteenth century ultimately formed the basis of new charts, either by replacing existing charts or by serving as the only twodimensional aid to navigation in what were infrequently interrogated regions. This was especially the case for charts of harbours and inlets which could be used to shelter and anchor a boat. Despite

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

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the call for deep-sea soundings in instructions to captains, the vast majority of soundings were taken close to land. Despite a series of approved patents by Edward Massey between 1802 and 1836 showing modifications to his waywiser sounder that suggest sounding technology was advancing and increasing in complexity throughout this period, the same basic designs that were being using during Ross’ expedition in 1818 were still being taken to sea in 1839, suggesting that the technology and the resulting inscription were interlinked at this stage. All the charts continued to mark particular objects of consideration for safe navigation, such as shallow banks and rocks. The style and content of the charts made by William Parry and James Clark Ross was very similar, although 20 years apart. More complex maps of the deep-sea floor, using interpolation to produce contours of the sea floor, were not produced until 1853 when Maury published his first bathymetric map of the Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 3).65 Yet these more advanced maps were constructed on the basic sounding information that Parry and others had used to construct their point-based maps. Maury’s step forward was in suggesting, through the use of contours, that knowledge of the intervening seabed was available between known points. According to Höhler, who draws on Latour, the way depth measurements were collected and arranged in charts served as ‘a new way of accumulating time and space’.66 What Humboldt had done for a range of geological, botanical and geographical phenomena on land using the isoline technique of cartography, Maury achieved for the ocean floor, ensuring that it was the representation of the sea, not the technology that was driving knowledge at this time.67 Study of the Polar narratives from the early nineteenth century show that this work had important precursors. Lyon makes explicit reference to inaccurate sounding maps being used on board ship, as a prelude to the incident which eventually forced him to turn for home on his unsuccessful 1824 expedition. On 24 August 1824, he recorded sounding 5 miles from shore, obtaining depths varying between 50 and 35 fathoms: I am thus particular in stating our soundings on this day, as they are the commencement of constant labour at the leads, and also as a proof of the careless manner in which the old charts of the coast of Southampton Island have hitherto been marked; for it is in them laid down as a bold precipitous shore, having from ninety to a hundred and thirty fathoms off it, while on almost every part which we coasted, our hand leads were going at from four to ten miles from the beach, which in no own place could be approached within a mile by a ship.68 He returned to the issue later, stating that ‘the land of the Bay of God’s Mercy, lies immediately in the centre of the Welcome, which is in consequence, considerably and most dangerously narrowed by it. Hence it is evident that although Southampton Island is laid down with a continuous outline, it has in fact never been seen, except at its Southern extreme’.69 From this point, Lyon decided not to put his trust in the charts on board, and described the leads going day and night as the only way to obtain a timely approach to land. Lyon’s soundings caused him to disregard the charts he carried on board and to construct new representations of the deep. In his idea

G.F. Lyon, A Brief Narrative of an Unsuccessful Attempt to Reach Repulse Bay, 1825, 91. Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (note 49), 115. Lyon, Unsuccessful Attempt on Repulse Bay (note 61), 5. Lyon, Unsuccessful Attempt on Repulse Bay (note 61), 114. H. Rozwadowski, Small world: forging a scientific maritime culture, Isis 87 (2005) 409e429. Latour, Drawing things together (note 35), 31. See also: S. Naylor, Introduction: historical geographies of science: places, contexts, cartographies, British Journal for the History of Science 38 (2005) 9e10. Lyon, Unsuccessful Attempt on Repulse Bay (note 61), 52e53. Lyon, Unsuccessful Attempt on Repulse Bay (note 61), 82.

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Fig. 3. Maury’s first bathymetric chart of the Atlantic Basin, from soundings taken on board the Dolphin, originally published in ‘Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts’, 1853. From http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/history/readings/vicissitudes/media/gulf.html.

of ‘Circulating Reference’, Latour suggests that the transformation from a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional representation increases the durability of the object in question, and, ultimately, its stability. The transformation does not have to e should not e resemble anything that led to its production: it is more than a copy; rather it ‘takes the place of the original situation’.70 Lyon, however, was not willing to take what had been transcribed previously (that is, depth soundings marked on an existing chart) without questioning it. On testing the representation, and finding it to be false, he went about making a new representation of the deep in which he could trust. Yet this was not stable or immutable: for Lyon, and the other expedition captains, the chart-as-transcription was liable to be changed and updated, as successive trips took place over the same area, with new, more accurate instrumentation. Identifying areas of shallow water from existing charts was a clear motivation to undertake soundings. In his first Polar narrative, Parry described sounding an area where Lieutenant Pickersgill had previously obtained and recorded soundings during the Phipps Arctic voyage of 1773.71 He referred to the deep-sea clamms being sent down and finding no bottom with 1020 fathoms of line, in conflict with Pickersgill’s readings of 320e330 fathoms. This

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instance suggests that Parry was keen to test others’ sounding measurements, and, in so doing, confirm his own position and its depth accuracy on the chart he carried with him. As this instance also shows, however, further soundings tended not to agree with existing depth marks on the charts carried. In his Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (1821), Parry also made reference to passing over an area he termed the ‘Sunken Land of Bus’, as recorded on ‘Steel’s chart from England to Greenland’.72 Despite including a table of depth measurements taken over the course of the 2 days it took to pass over the area, Parry tried for soundings without success. Franklin also noted passing over ‘part of the ocean where the ‘sunken land of Buss’ [sic] is laid down in the old, and continued in the Admiralty charts’ and commented upon information he had received from the commander of their companion boat, Mr Bell, about soundings taken in 12 feet of water ‘somewhere hereabout’.73 He matched this information with his own experience of a turbulent sea at this part, and continued: ‘I cannot but regret that the commander of the ship [Mr Bell] did not try for soundings at frequent intervals’, in order to corroborate the information.74 The first soundings James Clark Ross described with his newlyconstructed instrument were taken in an area marked as

B. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies, London, 1999, 67. C. Phipps, A Voyage towards the North Pole undertaken by His Majesty’s Command 1773, London, 1774. 72 Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (note 59), 5. 73 J. Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, London, 1824, 13. Note that the Sunken Isle of Buss was spelt variously as: Buss, Bus and Busse at this time. 74 Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (note 73), 13. 71

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significantly shallower than the surrounding area on a chart of date 1701.75 Ross was unable to find any areas of shallower water suggestive of a significant underwater bank. The significance of a ship in 1839 carrying charts that had been produced over a hundred years earlier draws attention to the difficulties in constructing, let alone revising, charts of the Polar seas. Whilst Latour argues that the inscription e in this case the map e becomes transportable and comparable, the Polar expedition captains in reality found they were in poorly mapped, inaccurately measured, and often completely uncharted waters, with no existing maps as reference, or, worse, misleading information derived from sounding that served to hinder rather than to help the expedition and its safe passage. Because the representation of the sea and its depth was constantly in flux, in the early nineteenth century, attempts to verify existing measurements often led instead to their dismissal. Conclusions Polar expedition narratives provide important insight into what sounding at sea involved in the early nineteenth century. They also offer something greater than that: they help illustrate and constitute our understanding of this practice in a period of technological development and as a form of sea-borne instrumental science often overlooked in accounts of exploration and expeditionary culture which focus only on the actual successes, less often on their operational and technological procedures. The instruments taken on board the expedition vessels were integral to producing a credible measurement of the deep sea and expedition sailors had a real effect on the instrumentation that would continue to be used and adapted in the first half of the nineteenth century. Whilst overt criticism of the sounding devices was not apparent in the expedition narratives, disparagement of the Massey sounder led to its discontinuation, despite protests from Massey about lack of funds for proper testing. As Pinch and Biker suggest, it was the user community, in this case in relation to the sounding technology that eventually influenced the design and success of an instrument, not the instrument makers at home. Since testing was difficult for the instrument builders, most real modification had to occur at sea, and by the people using it on a day-today basis, such as the ‘hands’. Sir John Ross developed an integrated grab sampling function to add to the standard sounder after problems using the issued model; Sir James Clark Ross lengthened and strengthened the line used for deep-sea soundings when he found the issued length unsatisfactory on his Antarctic voyage. Although Parry described taking soundings in a small boat when his ship neared danger, soundings were more commonly taken by a crewmember. For a relatively unskilled crewman to perform the task successfully, the simpler the equipment the better: this was one of the main reasons for the success of Burt’s nipper over Massey’s sounder. Whilst the instrument was integral to ensuring a credible result, the level of trust in the measurements taken was dependent on a

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number of additional factors: the authority of the sounder, the recorder of the event, and the way in which the measurement was recorded. A list of measurements in a table was one thing, but to record the measurement on a chart lent recordings increased importance. Navigation charts were still in use e and being tested by sounding e over a hundred years after their creation. Just as Latour has described the researcher standing in a field site in the Amazon rainforest looking at a graph, so the mariner in a featureless expanse of sea looks at a representation of the deep on a chart to understand location and position. For Latour, the representation is stronger, more durable, and harder to disbelieve than the original situation, especially when the ‘phenomena we are asked to believe are invisible to the naked eye’.76 Some measurements, and consequently some charts, were shown to have been accurate, and so trust in the representation and so in the deep sea was reinforced. In many cases, however, measurements were found to be incorrect when new instruments and new personnel sounded an area of sea. It was in reality potentially ruinous for an expedition captain to rely on his chart of the Polar sea rather than to take direct soundings to establish depth and, possibly, position. It is also unsurprising that particular soundings were not repeated even if they had been correct at the time, as the means by which position at sea was established at this time were anything but reliable. In such circumstances, the representation of the deep was fragile and changeable: any mark of deep water suggesting safe passage was not taken on trust but interrogated afresh. Soundings formed part of and led a wider network of scientific activities pursued at sea. Some components of this oceanographic network were too strong to be easily overcome: ice sheets; the long periods of winter darkness; and fog made standard clues to position hard to visualise. When the shoreline could not be seen, or the colour and movement of water assessed, soundings offered the crew a way of visualising and interpreting their surroundings. Hacking has suggested that inscriptions themselves could be treated as actants in the networks that Latour proposes.77 In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, no network of technology, men and representations was constructed that was strong enough to overcome the difficulties posed by measuring and representing the depths of the oceans in the Polar sea: soundings were still often taken inaccurately, especially in the case of the deep sea, and the resultant charts were likewise frequently misleading. Polar expedition narratives sketch a picture of sounding in the early nineteenth century as a science in flux. Acknowledgements The research for this paper was conducted with the help of a studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council. I am very grateful to Charlie Withers, Fraser Macdonald and William Hasty for their constructive comments on early versions of this paper, and also to the reviewers who gave such full and helpful comments on the original paper.

75 An Admiralty-supported project in search of the magnetic South Pole was commissioned in 1701, commanded by the astronomer Edmund Halley in the Paramour, and it can be assumed that the chart Ross was using was from data collected on this voyage. 76 Latour, Pandora’s Hope (note 70), 42. 77 I. Hacking, The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA, 1999.