Below is an extract from an article
in the Times, Friday November 12 2004, by Simon de Bruxelles.
An album containing 40 full-plate black & white
photographs of HMS Challenger's round-the-world scientific voyage setting
off in 1872 was sold at a Dorset auction for £20,000 (November 2004.).
 Some
facts:
- Funded by the Admiralty, HMS Challenger, with a compliment
of 20 officers and a team of scientists, set off from Portsmouth on
its four-year 68,890-mile voyage, surveying all the world's oceans.
- The Royal Naval vessel was refitted with laboratories, together with
the latest scientific equipment and 249 miles of rope.
- The expedition made the first deep-ocean soundings at a record 26,850ft
in a section (still known as Challenger Deep) of the Pacific's
Mariana Trench. The extensive soundings made overturned many
ideas about the deep ocean, and showed the existence of huge underwater
ridges.
- The team also discovered a vast array of sea creatures.
- HMS Challenger "was the successor to Beagle and most of the results
are still valid. They really started the science of oceanography."
(John Shepherd, past president of the Challenger Society - see www.soc.soton.ac.uk/OTHERS/CSMS/Splash_CS.html
).
- (The Challenger voyage took place 41 years after Charles Darwin's
famous expedition in the Beagle in 1831. It took Darwin nearly
30 years to publish his Origin of Species, in which he promoted the
idea of evolution.)
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