32 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
burned through tens of thousands of gal-
lons of fuel and alcohol.
In 1969, when Vescovo was three years
old, he climbed into the front seat of
his mother’s car, which was parked on
a hill outside their house. He was small
and blond, the precocious, blue-eyed
grandson of Italian immigrants who
had come to the United States in the
late nineteenth century and made a life
selling gelato in the South. Vescovo put
the car in neutral. It rolled backward
into a tree, and he spent the next six
weeks in an intensive-care unit. There
were lasting effects: nerve damage to
his right hand, an interest in piloting
complex vehicles, and the “torturous
compulsion,” he said, to experience ev-
erything he could before he died.
He grew up reading science fiction,
and aspired to be an astronaut; he had
the grades but not the eyesight. As an
undergraduate, at Stanford, he learned
to fly planes. Afterward, he went to M.I.T.,
for a master’s degree in defense-and-
arms-control studies, where he modelled
decision-making and risk—interests that
later converged in overlapping careers as
a Reserve Naval Intelligence officer and
a businessman. Vescovo was deployed as
a targeting officer for the NATO bomb-
ing of Kosovo, and, as a counterterror-
ism officer, he was involved in a hostage
rescue in the Philippines. He learned Ar-
abic and became rich through finance
and consulting jobs, and, later, through a
private-equity firm, Insight Equity, in the
suburbs of Dallas, where he lives.
Vescovo started going on increasingly
elaborate mountaineering expeditions,
and by 2014 he had skied the last hundred
kilometres to the North and South Poles
and summited the highest peak on every
continent. He had narrowly survived a
rock slide near the top of Mt. Aconcagua,
in the Argentinean Andes, and had come
to embrace a philosophy that centered
on calculated risk. Control what you can;
be aware of what you cannot. Death, at
some point, is a given—“You have to ac-
cept it,” he said—and he reasoned that
the gravest risk a person could take was
to waste time on earth, to reach the end
without having maximally lived. “This
is the only way to fight against mortal-
ity,” he said. “My social life was pretty
nonexistent, but it just wasn’t a priority.
Life was too interesting.” He grew his
hair down to his shoulders, and touched
up the color, even as his beard turned
white. On weekends, he used his private
jet to shuttle rescue dogs to prospective
owners all over the U.S. At sea, accord-
ing to members of his expedition team,
he spent hours in his cabin alone, play-
ing Call of Duty and eating microwaved
macaroni and cheese.
But every age of exploration runs its
course. “When Shackleton sailed for the
Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero.
When he returned in 1917 he could not,”
Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduc-
tion to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s
diary. “The concept of heroism evapo-
rated in the trenches of the First World
War.” While Shackleton was missing in
Antarctica, a member of his expedition
cabled for help. Winston Churchill
responded, “When all the sick and
wounded have been tended, when all
their impoverished & broken hearted
homes have been restored, when every
hospital is gorged with money, & every
charitable subscription is closed, then
& not till then wd. I concern myself
with these penguins.”
A century later, adventurers tend to
accumulate ever more meaningless firsts:
a Snapchat from the top of Mt. Ever-
est; in Antarctica, the fastest mile ever
travelled on a pogo stick. But to open
the oceans for exploration without
limit—here was a meaningful record,
Vescovo thought, perhaps the last on
earth. In 1961, John F. Kennedy said that
“knowledge of the oceans is more than
a matter of curiosity. Our very survival
may hinge upon it.” Yet, in the follow-
ing decades, the hadal trench nearest to
the U.S. became a dumping ground for
pharmaceutical waste.
In September, 2014, Vescovo sent an
inquiry to Triton Submarines, a small
manufacturer in Vero Beach, Florida.
He noted that he was a jet and helicop-
ter pilot familiar with the “procedure-
driven piloting of complex craft,” and
outlined what became the Five Deeps
Expedition.
P
atrick Lahey, the president of Triton,
took up scuba diving when he was
thirteen years old, and discovered that he
felt more at home underwater than he
did on land. The muted silence, the slow,
deep breaths—diving forced him into a
kind of meditative state. “I love the feel-
ing of weightlessness,” he told me. “I love
Texan named Victor Vescovo, became
the first living creature with blood and
bones to reach the deepest point in the
Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only
submersible that can bring a human to
that depth: his own.
For the next hour, he explored the
featureless beige sediment, and tried
to find and collect a rock sample. Then
the lights flickered, and an alarm went
off. Vescovo checked his systems—there
was a catastrophic failure in battery one.
Water had seeped into the electronics,
bringing about a less welcome superla-
tive: the deepest-ever artificial explosion
was taking place a few feet from his head.
If there were oxygen at that depth,
there could have been a raging fire. In-
stead, a battery junction box melted,
burning a hole through its external shell
without ever showing a flame. Any in-
stinct to panic was suppressed by the
impossibility of rescue. Vescovo would
have to come up on his own.
S
even miles overhead, a white ship
bobbed in Polynesian waters. It had
been built by the U.S. Navy to hunt So-
viet military submarines, and recently
repurposed to transport and launch Ves-
covo’s private one. There were a couple
of dozen crew members on board, all of
whom were hired by Vescovo. He was
midway through an attempt to become
the first person to reach the deepest
point in each ocean, an expedition he
called the Five Deeps. He had made a
fortune in private equity, but he could
not buy success in this—a richer man
had tried and failed. When the idea first
crossed his mind, there was no vehicle
to rent, not even from a government.
No scientist or military had the capac-
ity to go within two miles of the depths
he sought to visit. Geologists weren’t
even sure where he should dive.
Vescovo’s crew was an unlikely assem-
blage—“a proper band of thieves,” as the
expedition’s chief scientist put it—with
backgrounds in logistics, engineering, ac-
ademia, and petty crime. Some on board
had spent decades at sea; others were
landlubbers. For more than a year, they
faced challenges as timeless as bad
weather and as novel as the equipment
they had invented for the job. They dis-
covered undersea mountain ranges, col-
lected thousands of biological samples
that revealed scores of new species, and
