By Lorraine Boissoneault

To learn about the deep sea is to immerse oneself in both wonder and terror. Utter darkness, freezing water, crushing pressure, strange creatures—it’s not an environment made for humans. And yet, we’ve spent more than a century trying to find out what’s down there. Writer Brad Fox stumbled on the story of one of the earliest attempts of diving in a metal sphere, and recounts that tale in The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths. Along the way, he introduces readers to as many odd humans as odd fish. From famous politicians to forgotten artists, this is a book that offers one surprise after another. In our conversation, we talked about embodied experiences, destructive naturalists, and the impossibility of conveying the otherworldly.

I’ve done a fair amount of research on the deep ocean for my job recently, and I’d never heard anything about the naturalist and diver, William Beebe. How did you come across this story? 

I kind of happened upon a couple paragraphs from Half a Mile Down, which is Beebe’s nonfiction book about the bathysphere dives. It was a popular nonfiction book. And I found these couple of paragraphs that describe him coming up from one of the deeper dives and emerging back out into the afternoon sun and feeling this sense of transformation, the “I saw a blue so blue the yellow of the sun will never be the same,” that kind of feeling. And so I was just attached to this idea of the deep ocean as a locus of transformation. 

I really liked all the ways these researchers tried to convey what they were seeing down there. There’s a scene where the artist Else Bostelmann was struggling to paint underwater while her brushes floated away. It’s such an absurd and wonderful vignette. We can see so much more of the deep sea now because of submersible technology and cameras, so we’ve gained a ton, but do you think we’ve lost anything by not having to go to such great lengths to convey what’s down there? 

I think that’s a whole part of it, that not only Beebe but other deep sea explorers have contemplated. There’s something about the physical demands of going to the deep ocean that set the conditions for the perceptions that happen. Beebe, being crumpled up in the ball with Barton, stuck down there in the dark waiting for a shrimp to squirt out some bioluminescent fluid so he could see what was lit up in that momentary flash, is an entirely different experience than sitting here and watching a NOAA feed [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] of some marine drone that’s beaming footage from the Mariana Trench. I don’t know if it’s something that we’ve lost, but it’s an entirely different way and experience of encountering the world around us. There’s something inherent about that bodily experience. 

It definitely does seem like a bodily experience, whether it’s being down there cramped in the bathysphere, or being underwater with the big clunky helmet, tubes connecting you. When he says he knows he’s adapted when water no longer feels wet, that’s such a great way of thinking about it. 

Yeah, that’s a line from Beebe. I felt there was also a bit of pride in that statement, that he was in a way asserting his own familiarity with this realm that he knows to his readers will be exotic. 

Beebe had such a strange combination of awe for nature and total disregard for killing many things to study them. Was he just a product of his time?

Somebody, it might’ve even been Theodore Roosevelt, talks about visiting Beebe in South America and being charmed that he had no compunction about blowing away birds all day long. He would sit in his chair and count birds in a tree and then shoot them. So, of course there’s the tossing sticks of TNT into the sea and blowing up sections of reef, no doubt killing the coral forever, which I’m sure he didn’t understand. Somebody doing these activities today would have a different sense of it. So certainly some aspect of it is the time period, but people were also aware of the strangeness enough to describe it that way. “Oh, he’s a naturalist but he’s also crazy, shooting birds all day long.” So it’s not just the time. 

Something else that was different about him from the way a lot of researchers work today is how wide-ranging his interests were, from birds to fish, mountains to jungle to deep sea. It seemed like he was always looking for big picture connections. I’m curious if that inspired the structure you chose for the book too. 

Certainly not consciously. I feel like I was following my own sense of teasing the threads out that interested me and seeing where they went, and then seeing these greater connections. But obviously the book is in some way a contemplation of interconnectedness: thinking about politics, economics, history, the natural world, interpersonal relationships, how all of these form an event. In that way, I think it is related, but there wasn’t a thing where I thought, ‘Oh, he was somebody interested in ecology, so I should do an ecology of a historical event.’ But that’s in a way what I ended up doing. 

Did you have any surprising discoveries that you made along the way as you were following all those different tangents? 

Something else that Beebe mentions on a number of occasions is articulating what he’s seen and what he’s experienced and how it’s sort of impossible. Did you feel that same challenge? 

This was one of the first things that attracted me to the subject, this failure, breakdown of language and thought in the face of the unknown. The logbooks from the dives, so much of it is “There’s no words, it’s beyond.” In some other parts of my life as a literary scholar, I’ve studied the history of visionary literature and often this is an aspect of it, this linguistic, cognitive breakdown. And so there’s a way that all of communication and storytelling comes from that ultimate breakdown. Somebody said something like, ‘It’s because of what cannot be said that we must keep talking.’ So for me, before starting the book I already had a relationship with this notion of the unsayable core of the matter being the thing that drives the storytelling. 

It makes sense, in as much as it can make sense. Getting around the fact that there is something that can’t be expressed about confronting the deep sea. It’s so alien. 

Exactly. These conditions aren’t meant for us. We’re not adapted to that. 

Did you have any desire to, I don’t know, call up James Cameron and get down to the deep sea, do dives of your own?

I did get trained as a scuba diver, and over the course of researching the book, I did a research trip to Bermuda and interviewed a couple oceanographers that worked there. So I got their accounts of being in a small submersible. They weren’t like the bathysphere, they were way more high tech, but still this sense of what it was like to be in a ball looking at the deep sea beneath the island. I would’ve jumped at the chance to go myself, but it just wasn’t available. Cameron was busy. 

What do you think is the legacy of Beebe’s expeditions and the related research today? Like you said, it’s not something that most people know about despite how groundbreaking it was at the time. 

I think it’s vast and complex. On one hand, so much of ecological thought flows from that. Rachel Carson was in communication with Beebe and it helped bring attention to her work when she was getting started. But there’s also a part of it that’s ‘American Empire,’ and science as conquest. Those histories that Madison Grant is emblematic of, or even Theodore Roosevelt for that matter. In as much as technology at the service of exploration is also part of, in some way, conquest. 

Definitely Madison Grant and the connections with Naziism and the idea of what are “good species” and “bad species.” Whew. 

The natural history museum was conceived as a way to portray white supremacy. And those were Beebe’s colleagues and backers. 

And the story about the man who was put in the zoo. 

Ota Benga, yeah. It’s just such an emblematic story, there was no way not to include that. To say, as Beebe is coming up and writing his article about ducks, meanwhile this horrific stuff is happening, people being trafficked to St. Louis for the World’s Fair and Ota Benga ending up in the zoo. 

I think it definitely is a good reminder that we like to think of science as being detached from whatever politics or prejudices exist at the time, but it never can be. It’s always informed by that. 

Exactly. 

Is there a hope that you have for what readers might take away from the book? 

It was a really joyful project in many ways, not to discount the darker aspects that we were just mentioning. Part of what was so enjoyable is that I found it a literary challenge. Formally, I felt like it was full of colorful characters and histories and different meanings and you could approach and interact with it in so many ways, so I hope that readers will respond to it in many ways. On one hand as a contemplation of the natural world, as just a yarn, as a way of thinking about what is embodied experience, and vision. Obviously I think conserving the oceans is important, but that kind of goes without saying.

There was also so much art and photos and additional visual material in the book. How did you decide on what to include? 

Some of these are just photos of notebook pages and things from the archive. I wanted to include some of that to give a sense of the dig to gather these stories. And then the illustrations are just amazing. There’s so many more I could’ve included, so it was kind of a matter of selecting images that represented the different types of work that was produced by the team. A lot of it was just instinctual, something like the fish with the extremely long tentacle reminding me of that legend of the guy who stole all the poems and jumped off the earth. There was a way of responding in the moment to what I was thinking about and what I was seeing, but also trying to compose an experience of paying attention to the rhythm of the placement of the images. The connections are often oblique. 

I’m curious if you thought about your research at all during the recent search for the missing Oceangate submersible. Is that kind of danger something Beebe and the others contemplated? What does it convey about deep sea exploration?

When Beebe and Theodore Roosevelt were first dreaming of designing a vessel to go into the deep ocean, they imagined a metal cylinder, similar in shape to the Titan. They published an article about it, which was read by Otis Barton, who understood that a cylinder would not be able to withstand the extreme pressure of the deep ocean. It would get crushed like a tin can. Despite the advances in technology, that’s essentially what happened to the Titan. Its fate was imagined by the man who designed the first deep ocean submersible.

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Brad Fox is a writer, journalist, translator, and former relief contractor living in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and other venues. His novel To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) was a finalist for the Big Other Fiction award and a staff pick at the Paris Review.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes for a wide number of publications. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award. She has received grants and fellowships from the Society for Environmental Journalists, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. She has also appeared on documentaries and radio stations like the BBC to discuss American history.