The Wake of HMS Challenger, How a Victorian Voyage Tells of Our Oceans’ Decline

We look at The Wake of HMS Challenger, How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline. See more about the book here.

The Wake of HMS Challenger, reviewed

This is an important book, albeit a depressing one. Even a century and a half ago when this truly epic, multi year voyage took place, the seas had already been significantly impacted by humans and their activities. In the time since these voyages took place, and the author writing this book, even further environmental devastation has taken place, causing even more irrevocable damage. One surprise was that the phrase shifting baseline syndrome only appears for the first time on page 150. This is clearly a huge problem for humanity, both in terms of the scale of damage done to our oceans, and the fact that things have so completely changed that no one, in anyone life time, can realise or remember just how bad it has been.

This book, with passion and interest showcases the impressive achievements of the Challenger. Crossing the major oceans many times, suffering tough weather and numerous deaths among it’s crew and even the scientists too. Several years passed during the voyage, numerous crew members deserted, others drowned, swept away, or succumbed to tropical diseases. The distances covered were vast, and it took another fifteen years after finally returning to England for the fifty volume collected works, learnings and observations to be described, written up and published. The insights for science were massive, but, time and time again, as the author details, they were capturing a world, either lost, or soon to be, especially with the future wide scale dredging of the sea bottom that has destroyed so much sea life.

This is an important, but sad book to read. In these crazy times of climate change denial, and the denigration  of evidence based learning the efforts of the HMS Challenger show that the science is not wrong, rather that short term human profit is, time and time again destroying so much of the beauty and biodiversity of our planet.

More about the author

Gillen D’Arcy Wood is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice (both Princeton).

More about the book

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