Beebe

kw: book reviews, naturalists, bathymetry

I had the good fortune not long ago to check out two books about William Beebe from the local library.

The first, The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist, by Carol Grant Gould chronicles Beebe's life. It is a good beginner's biography, and is the first biography one could call "authorized," because Ms Gould was persuaded to write it by Jocelyn Crane, Beebe's companion the last ten years of his life, and the holder of his journals and letters.

Beebe is of course best known to my generation for his book Half Mile Down, about the use of the Bathysphere to study creatures in midocean near Bermuda in the early 1930s. He was already one of the best-known scientists of his generation, and was famous for his writing and lectures by the time this picture was taken in 1917. In his early career, he was known primarily as an ornithologist.

A few years after the Bathysphere adventures, he was continuing oceanic studies, but moving more and more in the direction of focused tropical studies. He loved the tropics, and spent increasing amounts of time in tropical laboratories. By 1940 or so, his appearances in his office at the Bronx Zoo, shown in the second image, were becoming rather rare.

Beebe, usually called Will by all and sundry, was associated with the Bronx Zoo and the New York Zoological Society his entire professional life. He was occasionally sponsored by the National Geographic Society, particularly in the 1930s. He wrote articles for them and others, and monographs throughout his career, that are still classics in several fields.

Gould's book is comprehensive, very readable, and unblinking. We have her, and Miss Crane, to thank for presenting to us a fascinating study of a great generalist in a time of increasing specialization.

While his studies of birds, tropical ecologies, and netted sea life gained him great fame, what captured the imagination most—and still does—was the subject of Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss by Brad Matsen.

Beebe had been fascinated with undersea life since some youthful experiments with diving bells and helmets. In his fifties, frustrated with the difficulty of studying abyssal creatures brought up in nets and dredges—they were all too often pulped or exploded by pressure changes—he began to design a deep diving apparatus. His engineering skills were, in this regard, woefully inadequate.

Otis Barton was an engineer who knew his stuff. Scion of a well-to-do family, beneficiary of a generous trust fund, he was Harvard-educated in engineering and mathematics. He also had experimented with undersea apparatus, and planned to create a deep-diving submersible.

Beebe was his idol. When Barton read of Beebe's plans, he was at first depressed, thinking he would be scooped. Then he realized his design was likely to save Beebe's life. He gained audience with Beebe (through much trouble; Beebe had a crackpot a day come by with one scheme or another), and they became partners.

Matsen outlines in exciting detail the development of the initial, too-heavy Bathysphere, its redesign, and the studies Beebe and Barton carried out with it. For this section of Beebe's life, it greatly expands the story told more briefly by Gould. And it brings Barton to light, where he has been rather a cipher previously.

These two ambitious, complex, driven men, who each found the other hard to tolerate, managed to capture the world's attention with great skill and daring. I know, when I read Half Mile Down, more than forty years ago, Beebe's descriptions of the deep they observed were thrilling beyond measure. Beebe had a bit to say about Barton, but it took this book by Matsen to bring both men into a clear light, that I find a much more satisfying understanding of the risks they took and privations they suffered, to begin to open to us the depths of the sea.