ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Challenging Challenger: Legacies of the Scientific Circumnavigation 150 years Later

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

From 1872 to 1876, HMS Challenger conducted a scientific circumnavigation of the globe studying the ocean itself. A joint project of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Navy, with a naval crew and embarked civilian naturalists, the expedition is sometimes called "Victorian Big Science." Together, the expedition and its results volumes--prepared in Edinburgh over the next two decades and distributed around the globe--are often considered the origins of the modern science of oceanography.

Convening in Edinburgh 150 years after the voyage, this roundtable aims to reevaluate the Challenger. Penelope K. Hardy will complicate the voyage's ocean scientific legacy, as it could be neither global nor synoptic, and few other countries could emulate it. Philip Pearson will discuss the role of the ordinary Challenger sailors who made the science happen, brave and gifted men who are largely absent from the expedition’s story. Erika Jones will attend to the expedition's scientific reports, which also incorporated the work of dozens of voyages from before and after Challenger. Rebecca Martin will explore the voyage as imperial project, by looking at its anthropological examination of the peoples it met en route.

Perhaps, in an era where the oceans have become a climate bellwether, we can identify a new legacy for the Challenger. Gillen D'Arcy Wood will describe how Challenger’s research legacy provides indispensable baseline data for understanding oceanic change over the last 150 years. We look forward to a broad conversation with historians across scientific disciplines for the rest of the session.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Penelope Hardy, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse

Participants

• Penelope Hardy, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse

• Philip Pearson, Independent Scholar

• Rebecca (Becky) Martin, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

• Gillen D'Arcy Wood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Session Organizer

• Penelope Hardy, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse