“For the Victorians the voyage of the Challenger between December 1872 and May 1876 was akin to the Apollo astronauts’ trips to the Moon – it was a journey into the unknown.”
Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton 2019
In the Exploring our Ocean FutureLearn course that I’ve just started, Emeritus Professor Howard Roe describes the significance of the HMS Challenger expedition. I wondered if the Challenger would feature in The Sea and its Wonders but the book dates from 1871, the year before it set out on its four-year voyage.
The book captures the excitement of the latest discoveries.
“Wonders abound in the Ocean. It is a world in itself, and is subject to its own laws.
“The fantastic forms and shining creatures that people the recesses of the Deep are here placed before [the reader].”
Mary and Elizabeth Kirby, Preface to ‘The Sea and its Wonders’, 1871.
The Last Great Auk
With its lively engravings, The Sea and its Wonders reads like a combination of the National Geographic and, in places, The Pirates of the Caribbean but the scenes of turtle hunting, harpooning whales and driving albatrosses from their nests are hard to take, given what we know today about the effect this was going to have on wild populations.
The authors, sisters Mary and Elizabeth Kirby had crowd-funded a Flora of Leicestershire in 1848. It’s interesting to learn in Mary’s autobiography that for The Sea and its Wonders, the pictures came first:
” . . . our engagements with the publishers were increasing, and we were obliged to devote two hours or more every morning, and a couple of hours in the evening, to pens and paper. We had a number of plates from Mr. Nelson, suitable for a volume he wanted to bring out and to call The World at Home.
“This was a very pleasant book to do, for it required us to hunt up all the information that was applicable to the subjects, and there was so much latitude allowed us, that we were at liberty to range from the North to the South Pole.
“As soon as this task was finished, more plates arrived for Beautiful Birds in far off lands, and also for the Sea and its wonders.”
Mary Kirby, ‘Leaflets from my Life’, 1888
The last great auk had been seen just nineteen years earlier on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, but two of them appear in an illustration in the chapter on penguins. To confuse things still further, in the chapter on St Kilda, the great auk is described as if it is still resident on the remote Scottish island but the illustration shows a king penguin. As the pictures came first, we’ll blame Thomas Nelson Jr. rather than the Kirby sisters for the mix-up.
As you can see from the end papers, I bought this book so long ago that it was priced in pre-decimal currency, ten shillings, reduced to seven shillings and sixpence.
I’ve looked up John Taylor in the 1871 census for Leeds but unfortunately this was a common name, so, apart from us knowing that he was doing well in the French class at the YMCA, I can’t tell you anything more about him. He didn’t leave any annotations in the book.
Links
Exploring our Ocean, FutureLearn course, University of Southampton
Mary and Elizabeth Kirby in Wikipedia