Into the Blue Beyond: William Beebe’s Dazzling Account of Becoming the First Human Being to See the Deep Ocean

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived… an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.”

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in her pioneering essay Undersea in an era when the deep ocean was more mysterious than the Moon. The essay became the basis of her lyrical 1951 book The Sea Around Us, which won her the National Book Award and which she dedicated to William Beebe (Jul...