On a Farther Shore (10 page)

This was imprecise, though reflective of the limited range of scientific knowledge at the time. The sea does not literally operate inside the impermeable cell walls of diatoms, and the word “alchemy” has a supernatural connotation.
Even the largest pair of hands could at most scoop up enough seawater to hold 100 million diatoms—a number that is a tiny fraction of the 200 to 400 billion stars that make up the Milky Way. But Carson’s broad point, that life is a continuum
in which every organism plays a role, was well made. Carson imagined for her readers the bottom of the ocean as if it were landscape one could journey over:

Carson’s picture of the ocean was a modern one, based mostly on her scrupulous research into a body of knowledge that was still young and evolving. For most of human history little was known about what lay beneath the surface of the sea anywhere but in the near-shore shallows. Even after European exploration had filled in the coastal outlines of the world’s oceans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would be another two hundred years before answers began to emerge on two fundamental questions: How deep is the ocean, and what, if anything, lives in its depths?

For as long as humans had voyaged on the ocean, sailors had determined water depths by means of sounding lines—long ropes or cords that were marked at measured intervals and attached to weights that were plunged to the bottom. By the nineteenth century the conventional unit used to indicate depth was the fathom, which is equivalent to six feet. This system worked well enough in modest depths but was poorly suited to measuring the deep ocean. The “abysmal” depth of the ocean was unknown and perhaps impossible to find by sounding, as the longer the sounding line became the more its own weight tended to pull additional line toward the bottom. And no one had any
idea how long a line would be needed even if that difficulty could be overcome.
As early as 1521, while exploring the South Pacific on his circumnavigation, Ferdinand Magellan put down a sounding line of nearly 200 fathoms—1,200 feet. It did not touch bottom.

Early in 1840, during the British Antarctic Expedition, the first accurate abysmal soundings were made using a specially designed line attached to a seventy-six-pound weight. By observing the rate of the line’s descent, it was possible to determine when the free-falling weight reached the bottom, even though the line then continued paying out on its own at a slower rate. The first of a series of measurements in the South Atlantic indicated a depth of 2,425 fathoms, or 14,550 feet—more than a third of a mile deeper than the 12,500 feet that was later found to be the mean depth of the ocean.

With advanced soundings came attempts to pick up samples of the ocean bottom. Nets and dredges were also used to collect sea life from various depths. In the mid-1800s it was proposed that, owing to the enormous pressure and absence of light, life could not exist at depths greater than 300 fathoms.
But this was soon disproven—spectacularly in 1860 when a telegraph cable lying on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea broke at a depth of 1,200 fathoms, or 7,200 feet down. When the cable was brought to the surface for repair live corals were found growing on it where it had parted, and a great assortment of other sea creatures clung to the cable along sections that had been in shallower water.

The picture of the world’s oceans as deep and teeming with life was brought into clearer focus in the 1870s during one of the greatest scientific ventures ever undertaken: the four-year, around-the-world exploration cruise of the HMS
Challenger
. Sponsored by the Royal Society and the British Admiralty, the
Challenger
expedition was the first-ever true “oceanographic” voyage, a term that was actually invented for the enterprise.
Challenger
, a two-hundred-foot naval corvette powered by both sail and steam, with most of her guns removed and replaced by laboratories and storage areas, sailed from Portsmouth
in December 1872. She carried a crew of 264 officers and men, plus six scientists.
By the time she returned to England in the spring of 1876,
Challenger
had traveled nearly seventy thousand miles across the world’s oceans, made hundreds of deep soundings, taken countless readings of currents, temperatures, and water chemistry, and amassed an extensive collection of bottom samples from the oozes and clays of the abyss.

Along the way,
Challenger
biologists discovered close to five thousand new species of marine life. The full published account of the
Challenger
expedition eventually ran to fifty volumes, a work that would remain a standard oceanographic reference.
On March 23, 1875, as she rode the Pacific swell near Guam in the Mariana Islands,
Challenger
recorded the deepest sounding in the course of her voyage—almost 4,500 fathoms, about 27,000 feet. The “Challenger Deep,” as this place was named, was later learned to be a section of the sea floor within the frigid darkness of the Mariana Trench, not far from its deepest point of more than 35,000 feet—the deepest place in all of the world’s oceans.

By the time Rachel Carson endeavored to describe the world beneath the waves to the readers of the
Atlantic Monthly
, the topography of the ocean bottom was being mapped using an innovation called sonar, an echo-sounding device that was initially developed to help ships detect icebergs after the sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912. Sonar further revealed the vast plains and spectacular deeps, the jagged mountains and sheer valleys of the sea floor. Much of the bottom in the deep ocean is covered by a thick biologic ooze made up of the remains of trillions upon trillions of dead planktonic organisms.

Here, as Carson described it, is a place that is forever changing, renewed in perpetuity by the endless cycling of life and death and rebirth—and yet at the same time a region that is in a sense changeless: “
In the silent deeps a glacial cold prevails, a bleak iciness which never varies, summer or winter, years melting into centuries, and centuries into ages of geologic time. There, too, darkness reigns—the blackness
of primeval night in which the ocean came into being, unbroken, through aeons of succeeding time, by the gray light of dawn.”

Carson closed the essay on a thought she’d had back in her lab at Johns Hopkins about the eternal nature of living matter—the blending and polymerization of atoms into the macromolecules that are exchanged and reused from one generation to the next in a majestic symphony of synthesis and decomposition and resynthesis:

A writer cannot have better luck than to publish something both good and unexpected. “Undersea” was unlike anything Carson had previously written, and different from what the readers of the
Atlantic
were used to seeing in its pages. The piece caught the attention of an author named Hendrik van Loon. Van Loon, whose book
The Story of Mankind
had won the first Newbery Medal in 1922, was a Dutch-born writer of literature and history for children and young adults. He’d immigrated to the United States during World War I and, after working with several publishers, settled with Simon and Schuster.
Van Loon conveyed his enthusiasm for “Undersea” to Simon and Schuster editor Quincy Howe.
Howe wrote to Carson asking if she had ever considered writing a book. Carson, elated but unsure of herself, replied that she had no concrete plans at the moment—though she apparently offered some general thoughts about a book that Howe described to van Loon as “nebulous.” Carson also indicated she’d be eager to consider any ideas that Howe and van Loon might have for her. Howe replied that he’d discuss this with van Loon.

While the September issue of the
Atlantic
was still on newsstands, van Loon wrote to Carson. His letter, posted from Grand Central Station in New York, arrived in an envelope on which van Loon—who illustrated his own books—had drawn a spouting whale cruising on a placid sea that appeared to be alive with sharks. Van Loon proved to be a quirky, jovial correspondent. He wrote out dates in Roman numerals, decorated his letters with small sketches, and composed his thoughts in a private syntax that was hilarious when he used a typewriter and that bordered on incomprehensible when he wrote in longhand. In his first letter to Carson, van Loon—who was in his midfifties—said he’d been curious about the sea since reading Jules Verne “sixty years ago,” and that it was apparent to him that she was “the woman … or words to that effect” who could answer his questions.

Van Loon confessed that he was responsible for bringing her to the attention of Simon and Schuster and hoped she’d deliver them a fine book, as “the better they do with other people’s books, the more they can afford to lose on mine.” He proposed that Carson should take the train up to Connecticut to visit him at his home in Old Greenwich, where he would introduce her to Quincy Howe. He said he was sure the Bureau of Fisheries would give her time off for such a meeting, as the prospect of a book deal would “bring glory” to the department. Van Loon ended this generous note saying he was at Carson’s service and that “Undersea” was a “swell article.”

Through the fall, van Loon continued to press Carson to come to Connecticut.
Carson, feeling unprepared, demurred, saying she was still engaged in a “preliminary browsing in the literature” to come up with ideas.
In December 1937, van Loon told her the tides were such that she could go clamming three times daily—as long as she wouldn’t expect him to eat any of them. Carson, furiously working to make her vague notion of a book coalesce into something definite, waited until after the holidays and
finally went north in mid-January—where the full meaning of having been discovered settled on her.
Van Loon—a great man, she realized—had opened a
door into the refined and wonderful world of publishing, an exclusive club she longed to join. The author, as she now could not help but think of herself, walked boldly in. From that moment on, Carson belonged to something “exciting and fabulous.”

By February 1938, Carson and Howe were in general agreement about a book that would describe life in the sea from the viewpoint of the creatures of the ocean.
Explaining her plan to van Loon, Carson said she didn’t want any human voice or insight in the narrative and that if any people appeared in the story they would be shown as a fish would perceive them—as predators and threats. Nor would she invent a plot as such. The story would emerge from the everyday lives and natural histories of her sea-dwelling protagonists, which she described as “always strange and sometimes incredible.” These she would choose and divide into groups so as to capture the different habitats of the living ocean, from shoreline to the abyss. Carson said she now felt sure this was the right plan for the book and that she, in fact, had a specific narrative model in mind. Having thought long and hard, she said, she was convinced that the right thing to do would be something “in the manner of Henry Williamson’s salmon book.”

A delighted van Loon wrote back to say that he could not have come up with a better concept himself. Sensing that Carson was embarked on a special journey and yet in need of reassurance, he told her to seize her destiny confidently, as there were great things in her future.

“You have the ability,” van Loon wrote. “You have started. And you are going to go to those places you want to go.”

Carson hoped to replace the income she would at least temporarily forgo from writing newspaper pieces by selling chapters from her book in progress to the
Atlantic
,
whose editors were initially receptive to the idea of a serialization.
But when she sent a sample, the magazine’s editors changed their mind, telling Carson that they were publishing a series of articles by the nature writer Donald Culross Peattie
and that his work and hers were too similar for the
Atlantic
to do both.
Carson and the editors discussed the possibility of using excerpts from her book at a later time, but this never came to pass.

Meanwhile, she wrote some book reviews for the
Atlantic
, earning fifteen dollars that spring for a piece on
Maritime Fishes of the Pacific Coast
.
In April 1938, Carson implored the
Atlantic
to let her review
Goodbye, West Country
, the latest book by Henry Williamson.
The magazine declined. Williamson’s American publisher was the Atlantic Press, and the magazine tried to avoid the appearance of promoting its own authors. Plus, the book had been out for several months and sales were disappointing.
But a month later they relented, and Carson was offered a short double review of
Goodbye, West Country
and Llewelyn Powys’s tubercular memoir of life in Dorset,
Earth Memories
. Carson’s letter to the magazine about the Williamson book was nearly as long as the review that eventually ran the following December and revealed the depth of her admiration for the English writer: