Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

REVIEWS 81

Most of his observations, however, were

of the composition of samples of seawa-

ter and ice. Eighteen months into the

expedition, he counted all the icebergs

on the horizon (186). He wrote of the

disappointing voyage, “Instead of meet-

ing with any object worthy of our at-

tention after having circumnavigated

very near half the globe, we saw noth-

ing, but water, Ice & Sky.”

Sediments frozen in the icebergs

suggested the existence of a landmass

beyond the ice, but the Resolution did

not sail near enough to confirm it. The

only lands it encountered on its jour-

ney were the remote islands that are

distributed like a trail of bread crumbs

along the path of the ocean’s current.

Turning around at latitude seventy-one

degrees south, Cook said of the elusive

Southern Land, “I make bold to de-

clare that the world will derive no

benefit from it.”

The Southern Land did turn out

to be inhabited, though not as Dal-

rymple had imagined.

O

n the Beagle’s second voyage

to Tierra del Fuego, in 1832,

Charles Darwin was amazed

at the variety of life found in the sea

off the relatively barren archipelago:

snails, starfish, sea spiders, and fish

abounded in rafts of seaweed. Several

years later, Joseph Hooker, the botanist

with James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expe-

dition and a friend of Darwin’s, appreci-

ated the power of an even greater marine

forest: diatoms, the microalgae ar-

mored in silica that stain the water and

ice yellow and brown. “The universal

significance of such an invisible vegeta-

tion as that of the Antarctic Ocean, is

a truly wonderful fact,” he wrote. “The

end these plants serve in the great

scheme of nature is apparent, on in-

specting the stomachs of many sea-

animals.” We know today that phyto-

plankton, kicked up in sea spray, act as

aerosols that make that ocean the

world’s cloudiest region.

Wild Sea is organized around the

various elements of the Southern Ocean:

wind, coast, ice, deep, current, and con-

vergence. Each chapter has its delegate

species. “Coast” begins on South Geor-

gia’s Salisbury Plain, where McCann is

approached by a king penguin:

As I step from boat to beach, an indi-

vidual separates itself from its com-

panions and waddles up to me. I stand

to attention and await inspection. It

feels like I am being greeted by a long-

lost friend saying “Is it really you?”

This scene is echoed in the ac-

counts of various expeditions en-

countering Adélie penguins as they

forced their ships through the sea

ice. Animals in the Antarctic had

not yet learned to fear humans, and

penguins especially exhibited a social

Top: Ice Islands, by William Hodges, from Captain Cook’s second voyage. From The Sea Journal: Seafarers’

Sketchbooks. Courtesy the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Bottom: Photograph of king penguins in

the Antarctic, by Frank Hurley, circa 1911–14. Courtesy the State Library of New South Wales