Depths of Knowledge: HMS Challenger and the Reconfiguration of Modern Science

Abstract

In 1872 HMS Challenger set sail on a four-year circumnavigation of the globe with the aim of conducting the most complete and systematic exploration of the deep sea ever pursued. The goals were no less than to produce the most comprehensive knowledge of the world’s oceans through temperature and depth measurements, chemical and physical analysis of the seawater, specimen collection and natural history observations. Touted as an emblematic success of Victorian science and continually identified as the beginning of modern oceanography, the Challenger expedition is a fundamental historical moment in the conception of the ocean as a scientific space. This thesis considers the extent to which, and the ways in which, scholarly understanding of the expedition as the originator of modern oceanography has detached it from its historical origins. As a symbol of modern science the expedition has been decontextualised from the social, cultural, and political factors which informed the shape of the expedition and the resulting scientific knowledge. In historicising the expedition and the scientific knowledge which it produced I aim to explore the processes of scientific knowledge making in the modern era that contributed to such an effective and resilient decontextualisation as well as offer a revised historical narrative that re-contextualises the expedition within the histories of maritime exploration, natural history, Victorian science, and British colonialism.