This is a research piece I wrote for my Marine Ecology course using the archives at Mystic Seaport’s Collections and Research Center.

Before Her Deepness

The Long-Forgotten Predecessors of Sylvia Earle

In 1979, Sylvia Earle was the first person to walk, untethered, on the ocean floor. If she looked up, she could see the faint glow of the surface – 1,250 feet above her head. Despite years as a pioneering oceanographer and explorer, what she saw in the twilight zone was unlike anything she had seen before: spiraling corals pulsed with a firey, blue bioluminescence; pink, yellow, and red crabs weaved themselves inside of giant sea-fans; eels wrapped around the base of corals. “There’s heaven on Earth,” she said matter-of-factly in an On Being interview. “It just happens to be in the ocean.” There is no doubt that Earle forged the path for the next half-century of female explorers. In 1970, she led the first group of all-female “aquanauts” on an underwater living experiment called the Tektite II, a long awaited successor of all-male trips of the same nature. In 1992, she served as the first female chief scientist for NOAA, and became the first female explorer-in-residence for National Geographic.

However, it is vital to consider that women like Earle did not elbow their way into the male-dominated realm of oceanographic exploration. They had a head start. Their efforts were buoyed by over a century of adventurous women who came before her, women whose lives are equally — or perhaps even more — fascinating than Earle, but whose endeavours are oft-overlooked. In the mid-1800’s, women’s environmental imagination swiftly migrated from inland to the coast, and from an ethos of nurturing botany to one of brazen marine exploration. This is a celebration of the women who paved the way for “her Deepness,” as Earle is affectionately name, specifically the inquiries of upper-class american women vacationing on the New England coast, and the voyages of the upper-upper-upper class English explorer, Lady Brassey.

Part 1: The Sea-Garden

Over the 18th century, upper-class American women’s curiosity about natural processes migrated from one of an inland, botany-memorizing dilettante, to a coastal, specimen-examining woman who could almost call herself a naturalist. This phenomenon was entirely due to the rise to popularity of the marine aquarium. “Nothing is more easily missed yet more bizarre, than the continuing propensity of Americans for bringing home seashore animals and plants,” writes Stilgoe in Alongshore. Over the course of a decade, the trend of families cultivating a freshwater ecosystem dipped out of vogue, and in its wake slid the “sea-garden.” The marine aquarium craze peaked in the mid-1800’s, but to fully understand this phenomenon, we must travel back to the turn of the century. The Embargo Act and the War of 1812 worked to depress coastal New England towns, and the rise of steamships to power was the last nail in the coffin. By 1840, the United States had an established practice of building and boating steamships. Towns that once had a vibrant economy based upon the trade of more traditional sailing vessels were now eerily quiet. By the 1830’s, coastal villages became revitalized from the influx of “boarding” city-slickers seeking quiet and cheap vacation spots. In 1845, only 15 years after tourists began to trickle into coastal towns, the marine aquarium craze began. All sorts of marine specimens began to make mysterious disappearances from their homes (sea lavender, rockweed, seaweed, coral, shells, along with many others) finding themselves transported, steel-hulled, back to their owner’s houses. 

This phenomenon was in part driven by the encouragement of writers at the time for sea-goers to explore the coast, but even more weightily, it was spurred by the mere fact that women were bored. “Many well-educated women,” writes Stilgoe, “having mastered the classification of terrestrial plants and inland birds, had determined to demonstrate their intellectual capabilities by making sense of inshore ecosystems.” However, an important distinction must be made — in this time, women largely didn’t want to explore the littoral realm because they were bored of gardening and thus wanted to try out a summer as a marine ecologist (they left that to the next century of pioneers); instead, they left their coastal cottages to rummage through the intertidal because they were bored of gardening on land and instead wanted to garden by the sea. Women on the coast and at sea seem to have been stopped by another class ceiling; they allowed themselves to learn previously outlined taxonomy, but they did not think themselves qualified to initiate any schemes of original scientific inquiry. 

Women pictured in LIFE Magazine, in a 1895 issue. They lean into the waves, intrigued by the mystical woman who lives at depths in the ocean. Little did they know that, in a century, that mermaid would be them. 

 

By setting out to learn of the world where sea meets coast, these women, perhaps unwittingly, were elbowing their way into a new set of gendered assumptions. Women used their broadened scope knowledge to prove to their husbands that they had the ability to be an expert in more than just what time of year is the best to plant an azalea. Henry Butler’s 1858 book The Family Aquarium clues readers into how the marine aquarium became a phenomenon: “Its tempting peculiarity, to thoughtful minds, is an introduction to the study of nobler and more recondite pages,” writes Butler. The byline of the book is “New Pleasure for the Domestic Circle.” So, the ‘thoughtful minds’ about which he speaks must be women. Women also used the act of collecting as an intellectual excuse to exert themselves in the outdoors. In Ausugsta Foote Arnold’s The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide, she encourages her readers to not shy away from ocean spray; instead, she encourages them to get their petticoats soaked. She writes that readers should go adventuring “at the height of great storms to see what deep-water specimens are washing shoreward, and to venture “as deep as one cares to wade” off sandy beaches before collecting . The “New Woman” of 1880, then, described the fearless women who “used marine biology as an irreprochable reason for hiring or borrowing a skiff or another small boat and rowing out into the estuaries, or hiking out into the marshes.”

Part II: The Lady’s Sunbeam

Lady Brassey, writing Our Voyage in the Sunbeam: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months. 

 

Given the option, I’d wager that many of these women, if they could, would trade their small skiffs and rowboats for a full-fledged steam-powered yacht in a heartbeat. One such woman who did have the means was Lady Brassey of England. By recording her experiences in male-dominated realms, she sets a precedent for generations to come. She climbs aloft when sailing to Tatatorka, and feels the sublime exhilaration that proportionately few women have experienced to this day. When sailing around Patagonia, she saw “truly ‘virgin peaks,’ on which the eye of man has rarely rested, and which his foot has never touched.” She even muses about entering the male-dominated field of cartography. “I believe that in these seas there are many islands marked that have no existence, and that several that do exist are not marked,” she writes around Tatartoka. “How much I would like to be one of those officers appointed to the service!” 

Brassey’s penchant to reduce the sea into a collectible item dwarfed that of the sea-coast explorers. When looking at botanical specimens of a coastal Japanese tea-garden, she exclaims, “If only some fairy could, with the touch of her wand, preserve it all intact until a few months hence, what a delight it would be in the hot summer weather.” When her ship is being fumigated, she is astonished at the amount of items she had collected over the months. “There were forty-eight birds, four monkeys, two cockatoos, and a tortoise,” she exclaims, “besides Japanese cabinets and boxes of clothes, books, china, coral, shells, and all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable things.” In addition, her writing illuminates the fact that collecting was a global phenomenon. She wrote of her visits to a museum in Oahu with all sorts of curiosities, and a market in China that sells caged, wild birds.   

Lady Brassey’s collection of corals. 

Her writings are resplendent with observations of natural processes. She writes of the ways in which Martyna proboscidea spreads its seeds. In sailing by the island of Chiloe, she indicates that she is familiar with the works of Darwin and Byron. When observing an atoll from aloft, she writes that “it was moreover possible to better understand the theory of the formation of these islands.” Though not expressly put, this passage seems to hint that an observation she makes could make a significant contribution to the world’s bank of scientific knowledge. When she sees an albatross, she asks, “where do these birds rest? How far and how fast do they really fly?” These are the exact kind of questions, I am sure, that Darwin and Cuvier and Lyell would ask if they were in her position. 

How Frought With Sorrows and Heartpangs 

However, Brassey knew all-too-well that she was not Darwin, nor could she wish to be. Immediately succeeding her questions about the albatross, she writes that these are “questions for the naturalist,” but not for her. She asks many scientific questions about the sea, and even mentions that a theory could be formed, but she never proposes a theory herself. Along the same vein, shoreside women could not yet cross the threshold between collector and naturalist. Even if they did regard themselves as ‘female naturalists,’ ‘male naturalists,” did not acknowledge them as such. In Shirley Hibbard’s Book of the Marine Aquarium, he looks down upon women that ventured too far into the sea. “The naturalist must encounter a few perils, and he does encounter them boldly… but it is not to be expected that all who commence the study of nature at the sea-side, will care to encounter the perils which an experienced student thinks lightly of.” According to him, man is a “naturalist,” whereas women are simply among the many “who commence the study of nature.” 

It is essential, also, to return to the point that these coastal pioneers are all upper or middle class urban dwellers. Women who actually lived in those coastal villages that so many visited only ephemerally,  conducted their lives much differently. Women whose husbands were off on extended voyages were concerned with keeping up the family finances and maintaining the household. They were concerned with the “community disorder” that was linked to the swift evolution of the maritime industry. And, of course, they occupied themselves while waiting for their husbands to come home. They simply may have not had the mindspace to concern themselves with differences between Fucus and Ascophyllum. 

Part III: Beginnings

Even with all of the 19th-century strides that were made from ‘women as the almost-naturalist,” a large gap still exists between the world of women who wait at home for their husbands to come home from a whaling voyage, and the world in which husbands wait at home for their wives to get back from a deep-sea oceanographic dive. The key to this shift is two-fold. The first vital element is the ways in which these women inspired their peers through their words, and second is the ways in which women at the turn of the 20th-century raised their children. According to Stilgoe, the sea-garden phenomenon cascaded among the classes. “When wealthy women began to collect and classify littoral wildlife, they provided models for middle-class women,” he wrote, “using their growing knowledge of marine biology… to demonstrate to men that their minds could handle exceedingly complex issues.” Over the years, this legacy of proving their intellectual capacity became more and more magnified, and reached a bigger audience, until it caused a remarkable shift in public consciousness. Women like Brassey proved to the world that women could write intelligently and curiously about natural processes, and set a precedent for future female communicators of the sciences. 

What was even more potent was the lessons these women taught their children. “At the seashore in 1908, young children might discover not only the strangeness of the shores but the strangeness of their mothers, the mothers suddenly unrestrained, suddenly secure in marine knowledge,” writes Stilgoe. Earle, though raised a bit later than 1908, speaks of the way in which she was brought up in the exact same way that Stilgoe does. While other parents restrained their children from crouching down next to an insect or a shoreline critter, her parents always encouraged her to do just that. “So often, the adults around [their children] will say, “Oh, don’t touch that beetle,” or, “Ugh, an earthworm,” or, “Caterpillars, yuck.” And my parents were different.” For Earle, that made all the difference. “I have always wanted to be a scientist,” he said. “Early on I discovered that the greatest diversity and abundance of life on Earth are in the ocean, so it was natural that I would make choices that led to being a marine scientist, an oceanographer who uses the living ocean as the ultimate laboratory,” she mused. 

Part IV Endings

As the interview wraps up, Tippett and Earle widen the scope of their discussion from Earle’s ocean exploration to how the ocean – and our planet – has transformed in Earle’s lifetime. Earle brings up what she calls the ‘irony of fossil fuels.’ If it weren’t for the miraculous energy that came from fossil fuels, our world would never have developed to the point where’re at now — a world in which where we can understand, down to the minute detail, just how detrimental fossil fuel is. The same idea can be applied to collecting. The phenomenon that catalyzed the transformation of women from gardeners to botanists to naturalists to scientists has now grown to a point that women who rose to because of that act of collecting, now speak eloquently about the harm of it. 

This issue stems from a mindset transformation that occurred between in the century preceding Earle, one that debunks the myth that the ocean is too vast to be affected by humans. In the 1800’s many fishermen believed the sea to be limitless in mystery, treasure, and power. Nothing could come in its way, especially a few measly humans. Two centuries later, this is not the case. In Earle’s all-female underwater living experiment by the British Virgin Islands, Earle saw coral reefs crumbling before her eyes. A major driver of coral reef decline is extraction, or the removal of coral. We learned this tidbit in a recent ecology class. Befuddled, one student asked our professor  why so much coral was extracted. 

“It gets put in gift shops for tourists,” he said. “People like to collect souvenirs from the places they go.” 

 

Works Cited

Arnold, Augusta Foote. The Sea-Beach at Ebb-Tide: A Guide to the Study of Seaweeds and the 

lower animal life found between the tide-marks” (1901). 

Bolster, Jeffrey W. “The Sea Serpent and the Mackerel Jig,” The Mortal Sea (2012).

Brassey, Anne, Our Voyage in the Sunbeam: our home on the ocean for eleven months, 1881. New York, 

John Wurtele Lovell. Collections Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc.

Butler, Henry D. Family Aquarium; New Pleasure for the Domestic Circle, 1858. New York: Dick & 

Fitzgerald. Natural and Physical Sciences; Aquariums, Smithsonian Libraries. 

Earle, Sylvia. “Her Deepness.” Audio blog post. On Being. The On Being Project, June 7, 2012. 

Web. November 22 2019.

Hibberd, Shirley. The Book of the Marine Aquarium. London: Groombridge, 1860. 

Leitch, Alexandra. Travel Lens: The Legendary Sylvia Earle. National Geographic, National Geographic 

Partners, Inc., December 5, 2013. 

Norling, Lisa. “‘How Frought with Sorrow and Heartpangs’: Mariners’ Wives and the Ideology of 

Domesticity in New England, 1790-1880,” New England Quarterly (1992).

Rafferty, John P. “Sylvia Earle.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Aug. 2019.

Shulman, Peter. “The Debate over Coaling Stations,” Coal and Empire (2015).

Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939. New Haven and 

London: Yale University Press, 1982.