Brad Fox documents the first deep sea explorations and explores how nature works in this deep and intoxicating book featuring some fantastic illustrations
Review by Duncan Madden
In the summer of 1930, zoologist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton climbed inside a 1.4-metre-wide steel ball and descended some 1,000 metres into the Caribbean Sea. Connected to the surface by steel cable and a phone line, everything they saw was relayed to and charted by marine scientist Gloria Hollister. Together, they sparked a new era in ocean exploration that continues to inspire scientists and adventurers to this day.
This description of Beebe and Barton’s first descent is an unnerving start to The Bathysphere Book, reverberating as it does through history right up to the modern day and the tragedy of the Titan submersible. It speaks to isolation and the fragility of our existence, balanced against the will to risk everything in the hope of knowing that which is unknown.
Brad Fox has written a strange and intoxicating book. Documenting Beebe’s deep-sea explorations during the first half of the 20th century, his narrative drifts in the currents of the story like Beebe did in his metal sphere deep underwater. The bathysphere dive logs come to life in novel, unexpected ways. Quoting them throughout, Fox uses their sparse simplicity to create dreamlike, often abstract poetic interludes, left to float free in the reader’s mind.
Chapters embark on surprising tangents, telling stories from the archives of deep-sea exploration, introducing an extraordinary cast of characters Beebe met, inspired and worked with – presidents and aristocrats, authors and historians, madmen and eugenicists.
The Bathysphere Book is an exploration not only of the world but of the nature of the world and how it works – how colour is formed and behaves in different media, how water fractures perceptions of distance and light. It’s a study of psychophysics – the relationship between matter and measurement and perception – and Beebe’s struggle to understand it all in his own mind. Bold and colourful, it leans heavily on the extraordinary illustrations of Else Bostelmann, Beebe’s collaborator, who brought to life his descriptions of the creatures he saw in the deep, despite not seeing them herself.
