THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 45
night, everyone gathered on the top deck
and downed a shot of whiskey—a toast
to the dead. We would reach the site of
the Titanic by dawn. At sunrise, we tossed
a wreath overboard, and watched it sink.
A few years ago, Peter Coope, Buck-
le’s chief engineer, was working on a
commercial vessel that was affixing an
enormous, deepwater anchor to an oil
rig off the coast of Indonesia. The chain
slipped over the side, dragging down
one side of the ship so far that the star-
board propeller was in the air. Water
poured into the engine room, where
Coope worked. It was impossible for
him to reach the exit.
British ship engineers wear purple
stripes on their epaulets. Many of them
think of this as a tribute to the engi-
neers on the Titanic, every one of whom
stayed in the engine room and went
down with the ship. Now Coope, whose
father was also a chief engineer, resolved
to do the same. “I saw my life blowing
away,” Coope recalled. “People say it
flashes in front of you. I was just calm.
I felt, That’s it—I’ve gone.” The bridge
crew managed to right the ship after he
had already accepted his fate.
The next day, Vescovo piloted the
Limiting Factor down to the Titanic,
with Coope’s epaulets, and those of his
father, in the passenger seat. The debris
field spans more than half a mile, and
is filled with entanglement hazards—
loose cables, an overhanging crow’s nest,
corroded structures primed to collapse.
(“What a rusting heap of shit!” Lahey
said. “I don’t want the sub anywhere
near that fucking thing!”) Large rusti-
cles flow out from the bow, showing the
directions of undersea currents. Intact
cabins have been taken over by corals,
anemones, and fish.
That evening, Vescovo returned the
epaulets, along with a photograph of
him holding them at the site of the
wreck. Coope, who is sixty-seven, had
come out of retirement to join this ex-
pedition—his last.
T
he Pressure Drop continued north-
east, past Greenland and Iceland,
to a port in Svalbard, an Arctic archi-
pelago about six hundred miles north
of Norway. Huge glaciers fill the inlets,
and where they have melted they have
left behind flattop mountains and slopes,
crushed and planed by the weight of
the ice. Most of the archipelago is in-
accessible, except by snowmobile or boat.
The population of polar bears outnum-
bers that of people, and no one leaves
town without a gun.
McCallum brought on board two
Eyos colleagues, including a polar guide
who could smell and identify the direc-
tion of a walrus from a moving ship,
several miles away. By now, McCallum
had adjusted the expedition schedule
ninety-seven times. The Pressure Drop
set off northwest, in the direction of the
Molloy Hole, the site of the deepest
point in the Arctic Ocean. The least-
known region of the seafloor lies under
the polar ice cap. But scientists have
found the fossilized remains of tropical
plants; in some past age, the climate was
like that of Florida.
It was the height of Arctic summer,
and bitterly cold. I stood on the bow,
watching Arctic terns and fulmars play
in the ship’s draft, and puffins flutter
spastically, barely smacking themselves
out of the water.
The sun would not set, to disorient-
ing effect. When I met John Ramsay,
he explained, with some urgency, that
the wider, flatter coffee cups contained
a greater volumetric space than the taller,
skinnier ones—and that this was an im-
portant consideration in weighing the
consumption of caffeine against the po-
tential social costs of pouring a second
cup from the galley’s single French press.
Ice drifted past; orcas and blue whales,
too. Buckle sounded the horn as the
ship crossed the eightieth parallel. One
night, the horizon turned white, and
the polar ice cap slowly came into view.
Another night, the ice pilot parked the
bow of the ship on an ice floe. The Pres-
sure Drop had completed one and a half
laps around the world, to both poles.
The bow thruster filled the Arctic si-
lence with a haunting, mechanical groan.
Bongiovanni and her sonar assis-
tants had mapped almost seven hun-
dred thousand square kilometres of the
ocean floor, an area about the size of
Texas, most of which had never been
surveyed. Jamieson had carried out a
hundred and three lander deployments,
in every major hadal ecosystem. The
landers had travelled a combined dis-
tance of almost eight hundred miles,
vertically, and captured footage of
around forty new species. Once, as wewere drinking outside, I noticed a stray
amphipod dangling from Jamieson’s
shoelace. “These little guys are all over
the fucking planet,” he said, kicking it
off. “Shallower species don’t have that
kind of footprint. You’re not going to
see that with a zebra or a giraffe.”
The earth is not a perfect sphere; it
is smushed in at the poles. For this rea-
son, Vescovo’s journey to the bottom of
the Molloy Hole would bring him nine
miles closer to the earth’s core than his
dives in the Mariana Trench, even
though the Molloy is only half the depth
from the surface.
On August 29th, Vescovo put on his
coveralls and walked out to the aft deck.
The ship and submarine crews had so
perfected the system of launch and re-
covery that, even in rough seas, to an
outsider it was like watching an indus-
trial ballet. The equipment had not
changed since the expedition’s calami-
tous beginnings—but the people had.
“This is not the end,” Vescovo said,
quoting Winston Churchill. “It is not
even the beginning of the end. But it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
He climbed inside the Limiting Fac-
tor. The swimmer closed the hatch. Ves-
covo turned on the oxygen and the car-
bon-dioxide scrubbers. “Life support
engaged,” he said. “Good to go.”
For the first few hundred feet, he saw
jellyfish and krill. Then marine snow.
Then nothing.
The Triton crew piled into the con-
trol room. Lahey found a box of lico-
rice from Svalbard, took a bite, and
passed it around. “Just fucking heinous,”
he said, grimacing. “Who the fuck makes
candy like that? Tastes like frozen shit.”
There was a blip on the communi-
cations system. For a moment, the room
went silent, as Vescovo called in to re-
port his heading and depth. Then Kel-
vin Magee, the shop foreman, walked
into the control room.
“Try it, Kelvin, you bastard!” Lahey
said. “It’s from Svalbard. It’s local. It’s a
fucking Norwegian candy.”
“Get it while there’s still some left!”
“It’s that ammonium chloride that
really makes it—and that pork gelatine,”
Buckle said.
“Pork genitals?”
McCallum stood quietly in the corner,
smiling. “Look at these fucking misfits,”
he said. “They just changed the world.”