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The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline
A scientific adventure story that dramatizes how profoundly our oceans have changed over the past 150 years
In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger’s naturalists delved the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition’s achievements are the stuff of it identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench; it measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since; and, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS “Challenger,” Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.
The Challenger’s scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encounter a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS “Challenger” offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet’s final frontier.
In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger’s naturalists delved the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition’s achievements are the stuff of it identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench; it measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since; and, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS “Challenger,” Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.
The Challenger’s scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encounter a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS “Challenger” offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet’s final frontier.
328 pages, Hardcover
First published October 21, 2025
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About the author
Gillen D'Arcy Wood
13 books7 followersAssociate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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January 9, 2026
The Wake of HMS Challenger is a beautifully written and profoundly unsettling work that connects one of the greatest scientific voyages in history to the environmental crisis unfolding in our oceans today. Gillen D’Arcy Wood revisits the groundbreaking nineteenth century Challenger expedition not simply as a tale of discovery, but as a vital ecological baseline that reveals how drastically marine life has declined in just 150 years.
What makes this book exceptional is its fusion of scientific history with environmental reckoning. By retracing the expedition’s encounters with once abundant species and ecosystems now endangered or devastated Wood creates a powerful before and after portrait of the oceans. Lyrical yet rigorous, The Wake of HMS Challenger transforms archival science into an urgent moral narrative, reminding us that the data gathered by Victorian naturalists now stands as evidence of what we have lost and a warning of what may still disappear if action is delayed.
What makes this book exceptional is its fusion of scientific history with environmental reckoning. By retracing the expedition’s encounters with once abundant species and ecosystems now endangered or devastated Wood creates a powerful before and after portrait of the oceans. Lyrical yet rigorous, The Wake of HMS Challenger transforms archival science into an urgent moral narrative, reminding us that the data gathered by Victorian naturalists now stands as evidence of what we have lost and a warning of what may still disappear if action is delayed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review