Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson

Author:James Hamilton-Paterson [James Hamilton-Paterson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265541
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

At some point the air-containing parts of Stokes’s body would have ruptured, principally those of his face, chest and abdomen. The head would not have burst because the cranium contains no air, only incompressible liquids, but the delicate bone honeycombs of his sinuses probably collapsed before water could leak in to equalise the pressure. Sooner or later the chest could have imploded, the broken ends of the ribs coming through the skin. Any air in the gut would probably rupture the abdomen, so if Stokes had been a flatulent boy it would in the end have been his literal undoing. The pressure would also have been likely to cause stress fracturing of certain parts of his skeleton. There might, for example, have been some splitting around the pelvic crest since the abdominal wall is highly compressible whereas the pelvis is not. The same would have applied generally to any structures of finely divided bone (i.e. not solid and thick as in the femur). Stokes would have arrived on the bottom somewhat smaller than he had been on the surface, especially if he was fat, since fat is more compressible than water. The creatures of the seabed would make short work of his flesh, of course, once they had found their way through the holes his rib-ends had poked through the canvas; yet even his skeleton would not last as long as in a conventional earth burial since bone softens in seawater as its salts are leached out by osmosis. Thus softened, the boy’s remains would have crumbled away beneath the pressure.

A vivid demonstration of what deep-sea pressure can do is shown in the experiment beloved by modern oceanographers of sending down with a piece of high-tech equipment an ordinary empty polystyrene coffee cup. It comes back in miniature, a tiny white thimble, all its insulating air cells having collapsed. Yet there seems to be a reluctance to perform this experiment with the body of an animal. I scoured the Farnella for a ship’s rat, hoping that if we could kill a brace we might send them down a couple of thousand fathoms to see what ruptured, but this piece of curiosity was greeted with cries of distaste and accusations of being a ghoul.

In all, the Challenger covered 68,930 nautical miles and at the end of three and a half years brought back so many samples of marine plants, animals, seawater, sediment dredgings and corings that it took the next nineteen years to process them. By then Wyville Thomson was dead and his place had been taken by his assistant John Murray. The subsequent report, which by 1895 had reached fifty volumes, has been described as ‘the most complete expression of man’s knowledge of the deep sea’.* Perhaps as importantly, the enterprise encouraged similar expeditions by other nations, principally the USA, France, Germany, Russia, Italy and the Scandinavian countries. Even Monaco came to hold an honourable position in marine research since Prince Albert I was himself an expert yachtsman and oceanographer who financed his own expeditions.

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