9 - Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
Summary
For hundreds of years, Western culture had almost no knowledge about the realm beneath the surface of the sea inimical to human physiology. Most information came from what people fished up or found on shore. Skilled mariners used sounding lines, as well, and assessed depth from the visual aspect of the water's surface. Starting in the 1830s, however, in the most industrially developed societies of the globe, engineering innovations were pioneered which started to permit extended movement, observation and representation of conditions underwater. The emerging sciences of marine biology and oceanography also played a role in accessing ‘the bejewelled palaces which old Neptune has so long kept reluctantly under lock and key’. This lyrical language comes from a contemporary review of The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854), a how-to book on specimen collecting and aquarium maintenance by Philip Henry Gosse, inventor of the modern public aquarium. As the reviewer observed, the modern aquarium, both scientific tool and popular spectacle, was another medium for unveiling an environment at once at our doorstep, and sustaining life on land, yet simultaneously remote, and toxically impenetrable without technological assistance.
The new technologically aided access to the undersea environment led to innovations and discoveries in science, engineering and warfare. From the first glimpses into Neptune's bejewelled palace, the novel biology and conditions of this environment also inspired the arts. As biologists and engineers started to communicate knowledge about the depths, they revealed a realm belonging to our planet yet with physical properties, flora and fauna differing dramatically from known environments on land. They communicated this knowledge to general audiences through books, magazines, illustrations and popular spectacles, such as the aquarium. Publics were fascinated by this new planetary frontier. Before this access, writers and artists imagined it as a hell or horrific graveyard, whose fatal depths were scattered with wrecks and corpses, as well as sunken treasure. Fantasies of life in these depths ranged from terrible monsters to fantastic, alluring if trickster creatures such as mermaids and sealchies. Inspired by scientific and technical information about the world beneath the waves, creators in literature and the other arts then filtered this information through the traditions and idioms of their media and repertoire to create influential new imaginative and aesthetic motifs.
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- Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century , pp. 169 - 185Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018