The Road to There

by Val Ross

  A week later they met their first Shoshone, a warrior on horseback who invited them to his village. Sacagawea, normally reserved and calm, began “to show every mark of the most extravagant joy.” As the travelers seated themselves in the tent of Chief Cameahwait, Sacagawea prepared to translate. Suddenly she jumped up, hugged Cameahwait, and burst into tears. He was her brother. She had not seen him since she was kidnapped as a girl.

  Chief Cameahwait gave the expedition horses and guides, and the Corps of Discovery bade the Shoshone farewell. Again, Sacagawea picked up young Jean-Baptiste and followed. As sister of the chief, she could have stayed among her people. But perhaps she figured that her baby would have a better chance with Clark as doctor and protector. Maybe the Americans begged her to come along. Probably she was curious to see the world.

  DAVID THOMPSON

  Canada’s greatest mapmaker was fourteen when he kissed his mother goodbye and sailed from London to Canada to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company. David Thompson never saw his mother again.

  The boy spent his first winters in the 1 780s in a fort on the desolate Churchill River, reading poetry and learning to speak Native languages. The Hudson’s Bay Company trained him to survey and measure longitude and latitude by sighting heavenly bodies, so his Native friends called him Koo-Koo-sint, or “the man who looks at stars.” In 1793 Thompson mapped the lands west of Hudson’s Bay and, in 1 798, the Mandan lands of the Dakotas.

  The next year, he took a half-Cree teenager, Charlotte Small, as his wife. White men often abandoned their Native wives and families when they returned to Europe, but Thompson was different. Charlotte and their children even accompanied him on some of his explorations of the Rockies.

  In 1811, he found a route through the mountains to the Columbia River, which he charted as it tumbled to the sea. But when Thompson emerged out of the forest, he saw the Stars and Stripes flying over Fort Astoria at the river’s mouth. Thompson was too late to claim the land for England, but his accomplishments are remarkable. In his twenty-seven years in the fur trade, he made beautiful, accurate maps of North America’s northwest, covering some 80,000 km2 (50,000 square miles). His journals are fascinating accounts of living among the Native peoples. As for his own family, when he retired from the fur trade in 1812, he took them all back east, and married Charlotte for a second time.

  But the going was rough. Each time the Corps of Discovery climbed to the top of a mountain ridge, they expected to see the sea in the distance. Each time, they saw more white-capped mountains along the horizon. In September, it began to snow. Food grew scarce and they had to kill some of the horses to eat.

  Coming down from the heights, the expedition entered the semi-desert lands of the Nez Perce people. On white elkskin, the Nez Perce drew maps of the rivers that lay ahead: the Clearwater, which flows into the Snake, which flows into the Columbia, which flows to the Pacific. As they journeyed, Sacagawea was their goodwill ambassador, wrote Clark: “The sight of this woman assured people of our friendly intentions.”

  By November 1805, the weather got damper and the forests thick and dark. The group knew they must be nearing the sea. Lewis and Clark asked the other members of the expedition to vote on where they should spend the winter. York the slave voted — six decades before black people got the vote in the United States. Sacagawea voted too — more than one hundred years before most North American women could legally vote.

  The group voted to stay in a grove of pines near the site of present-day Astoria, Oregon, and built a wooden fort, which they named Fort Clatsop. At Christmas, a delighted Clark wrote that Sacagawea gave him “two dozens white weazils tails” (there is no mention of her giving anything to Lewis). For Christmas dinner they all dined on rotten elk meat.

  Early in 1806, some Native people visiting the fort mentioned that a huge whale lay dead on a beach not far away. As the men prepared to go and see, Sacagawea made the only complaint she voiced for the entire expedition. She had come a very long way, she said, hoping to see the great waters of the ocean. “And now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either.” Clark agreed to bring his curious comrade along.

  On their return from the expedition across North America, Lewis and Clark produced a map. It revealed the major difficulty of their journey. Not one range of mountains lay between the Missouri River and the sea, but three: the Rockies, the Cascades, and the Coastals.

  Through the winter days, Lewis and Clark worked on their journals and on transferring compass readings and latitude and longitude measurements to larger maps.

  In the spring of 1806, the Corps of Discovery left Fort Clatsop and headed back east. Sacagawea picked up her boy, Jean-Baptiste, now a heavy toddler, and followed once more. This time the group found easier routes. Clark wrote, “The Indian woman, who has been of great service to me as a pilot through this country, recommends a gap in the mountains more south, which I shall cross.”

  By August they were back among the Mandans, where Charbonneau and his wife left the expedition. Lewis and Clark paid Charbonneau $500 in wages. Although they had found that his wife was “particularly useful,” they did not pay Sacagawea. However, Clark later adopted Jean-Baptiste. When Sacagawea’s son grew up, he went to Europe and worked for a German prince. Most accounts say Sacagawea died of a fever around 1812. Back in the east, Lewis and Clark were greeted with honor and fame. Clark married, named his eldest son after Meriwether Lewis, and lived to a ripe old age. But after Clark’s wedding, Lewis fell into a depression. He missed the glory days, and his friend. He was unable to finish his journals. In 1809, he died of shotgun wounds — probably suicide.

  The maps these men made profoundly changed traditional Native life. North American land would never again belong to everybody. Captured by lines of latitude and longitude, western North America was jerked from Aboriginal to white hands. After the explorers, a new kind of mapmaker followed — surveyors carrying measuring chains and posts, which they drove into the earth to mark the boundaries of new townships, so the land could be sold to white settlers.

  So the maps of North America kept changing. No longer did people sketch wild rivers into the ashes of campfires, or draw on elkskins to show great hunting grounds. And they didn’t transfer exploration notes onto maps of a vast wilderness. Instead, people made real estate charts showing property lines, town lots, and ranches. Then came roadmaps showing highways connecting sprawling new cities. The charts of Thompson and Lewis and Clark — maps scribbled by the light of camp-fires somewhere in a vast wilderness — were put in archives and museums to sit alongside the maps of the Native peoples.

  But the story of North American mapmaking is not over. The latest chapter is like the story of a ghost who comes to life again.

  In 1987, two British Columbia Aboriginal nations, the Gitksan — led by Ken Muldoe, or Delgamuukw — and the Wet’suwet’en, took the British Columbian and Canadian governments to court to claim their ancestral lands. They asked the Lower Court to consider the traditional Aboriginal stories as “oral maps” that would establish their claim on the land. The Lower Court decided that such song-and-story maps were vague, and were concerned that the territories they described often overlapped. The Court ruled against the Native nations.

  But Delgamuukw and his fellow claimants appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1996, in a landmark case now known as the Delgamuukw Decision, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed that oral traditional maps had to be considered along with European-style maps. Since the Delgamuukw precedent was set, other nations have been able to use their oral maps to win back land. For example, the Nisga’a have regained control of 120,000 km2 (46,000 square miles) of the Lower Nass River Valley in British Columbia.

  So those Aboriginal maps aren’t dead after all. They have just been sleeping — and some are starting to awake.

  THE UNDERSEA MAPMAKER’S

  Mapping the Ocean Depths

  IT IS A brilliant day off the Azores
Islands, and the H.M.S. Challenger, a British Royal Navy ship, is taking up her first station, or fixed position. From here, her crew will measure the speed of the oceans current and the water’s temperature, and will take samples of the sea bottom. As gentle trade winds try to blow the Challenger eastward, she uses her engines to hold steady, to allow the scientists to take their first readings. According to what the ship’s chemist, John Buchanan, will later write, the science of oceanography does not exist until this point: “It may be taken that the science of Oceanography was born at Sea, at Latitude 25 degrees 45 minutes North, Longitude 20 degrees, 14 minutes west on 15th February 1873 ….”

  It takes hours for the Challenger’s lines to spool out. The winch makes an annoying grinding noise (over the next three years the crew will grow to hate it). It takes another four hours to haul up the dredge from the ocean floor 5 kilometers (3.5 miles) below. In late afternoon, John Murray, a curly-haired Canadian medical student from Cobourg, Ontario, joins everyone else on deck to see the dredge open its mechanical jaws and drop out 45 kilograms (100 pounds) of reddish, lifeless clay.

  What a disappointment, Murray must have said to himself. Is the bottom of the sea really so dull?

  Humans have sailed across the seas for thousands of years, but for most of that time knew little of what was below. The average depth of the shallowest ocean, the Indian, is almost 4,000 meters (13,000 feet). Its dark down there, and the pressure of all the water would crush a mapmaker and his instruments.

  Only in the late 19th century did we start to chart the oceans. As nations began laying underwater telegraph cables, the need for accurate maps of the ocean floor began to grow. American, British, French, German, and Scandinavian expeditions set out to do the job.

  In 1752, a French mapmaker, Philippe Buache, made a chart showing the contour lines of the floor of the English Channel. In 1855, Matthew Maury, director of the U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts, used soundings, or depth measurements, given to him by whaling ships and his own naval vessels to produce the first contour map of the Atlantic sea floor. Maury detected an undersea ridge in the mid-Atlantic, which he named Middle Ground or Dolphin Rise. But Maury’s information was limited. To make his bathymetrical map of the Atlantic, he had used only 200 soundings of regions that were deeper than 1000 fathoms (1.8 km/1 mile), and his chart was dotted with question marks.

  In fact, scientists had many questions about what lived in the deepest seas. A respected English naturalist, Edward Forbes, declared that the depths were frigid, dark, and empty — “zero of life.” But Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary science, insisted that the sea held the secrets of life’s origins.

  In 1871, the U.S. sent out a deep-sea expedition — it wasn’t a success, but that’s another story. English national pride bristled. A professor at the University of Edinburgh, Wyville Thomson, scolded the British government for “leaving everything to our rivals to gather up. Is this creditable to the Power which claims to be Mistress of the Seas?”

  THE PRINCE AND THE SEA

  Prince Albert, heir to the throne of Monaco, was disappointed that France was not leading the way in sea exploration. Although he lacked the resources of the U.S. Navy or the Challenger expedition, he joined the race to chart the ocean depths. In September 1873, Prince Albert set out in his schooner Hirondelle (Swallow), to show what one imaginative individual could do. Off the Azores, he threw overboard glass bottles and beer barrels containing messages asking anyone who found one to return it with news about where the sea currents had carried it. Over the next few years the Prince released more bottles off England and Newfoundland — a total of almost 1,700 bottles. Only 227 were ever returned. But they showed that the North Atlantic current flows clockwise, from the Gulf of Mexico northwards, then across the Atlantic to the British Isles, where one stream peels away to the north while the other turns south and crosses the Atlantic again. During World War I, Prince Albert predicted that German mines that broke loose along the European coast would be carried westward across the Atlantic and then back to Europe. Sure enough, more than sixty mines that had followed that route were recovered.

  Another of Prince Albert’s low-tech strategies for ocean study occurred to him one day off Africa when he harpooned a whale. The wounded beast charged the Hirondelle, but died just before smashing into it. Then its great mouth opened and out floated the remains of its last meal, eaten in the deep. Prince Albert stared in fascination. “What precious regurgitations!” he shouted. He ordered lifeboats over the side to scoop up all the whale vomit they could. In the mess, he discovered five new species of squid. By checking out the vomit of dead whales, the prince had a low-cost, organic dredge.

  The “Bathymetrical Chart of the World’s Oceans, according to Sir John Murray” was produced two decades after the Challenger’s historic voyage. The Challenger made 364 stops to gather sea-bottom samples and take depth soundings, but Sir John also used additional information from other ocean-going ships to make this map.

  Alarmed, the British government agreed to equip a navy corvette, the H.M.S. Challenger, with state-of-the-art laboratories and a steam-driven winch to pull up a deep-sea dredge. The crew included Wyville Thomson and his young Canadian student John Murray, who joined the expedition at the last minute. Their mission: to find out all they could about the currents and geography of the sea; to study marine life forms; and to find out if the deepest parts of the sea really were “zero of life.”

  On December 21, 1872, the Challenger sailed from England for the Azores, performed her first, disappointing dredging, and then headed across the Atlantic. In March, off the West Indies, she did her second deep-sea dredge — another day of listening to the winch grinding down, down, down, and then up, up, up with another enormous mouthful of muck.

  This time, as the sailors washed masses of sea-bottom mud through sieves, something lumpy refused to pass through. A shout went up. Everyone gathered round. Had humans ever before been so happy, so thrilled, to see … worms? There they were, from the greatest depth of the ocean yet dredged, creatures that lived inside tubes of mucus-hardened sand. Floppy, glistening, repulsive — but unmistakably alive.

  This woodcut from the fifty-volume Challenger Report shows the H.M.S. Challenger preparing to take a depth measurement. Challenger carried 230 kilometers (144 miles) of hemp rope and 20 kilometers (12 miles) of piano wire to make depth soundings.

  Now that they had put to rest the idea that the ocean depths were “zero of lift,” the Challenger crew continued to measure water temperatures and speed of the ocean currents. On land, water tends to flow across a surface. In the sea, a current flows up and down more freely. The scientists onboard noticed that in the eastern North Atlantic, the deep-sea temperatures were warmer by several degrees than water at the same depth in the same latitude in the Atlantic off North America. Was there some sort of wall dividing the sea down where Maury had marked Dolphin Rise? The Challenger scientists had no idea how big this wall would prove to be.

  By early 1874, when the Challenger turned into the Pacific, John Murray was the ship’s expert in sea bottoms. When the dredge coughed up new muck from the ocean floor he would rub it to see if it was gritty or greasy. He would sniff it and even taste it. Like a wine snob, he could tell you almost exactly where a sample was from. Tomato-red clay was found deep in the south Atlantic, while from off Australia came liquorice-black lumps — bits of coral coated with a veneer of manganese.

  These marine worms from the sea bottom are depicted in a 19th-century German book on oceanography, Das Meer.

  The crew and scientists aboard the H.M.S. Challenger sifted deposits from the depths of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They found specimens of many forms of life (like those illustrated above right) that were completely unknown until then.

  But even Murray was unprepared for the deep-sea sounding one day off Guam in the Pacific. For several days the Challenger had been sailing above 2,300 fathoms. On this day, when the scientists lowered the line, it kept spoo
ling. It unwound past the 4,000-fathom (7-km/4.5-mile) mark, then 4,500 fathoms (8 km/5 miles). Had the lengthening line somehow been swept sideways by a strong current? Finally it stopped — at 4,575 fathoms or 8.5 kilometers (5.3 miles). The Challenger was above one of the deepest places on Earth, what’s now known as the Challenger Deep, at one end of the great Marianas Trench. Parts of the Trench are 6,000 fathoms, or 11 kilometers (7 miles) down.

  When the line was finally pulled up and its deposits examined under Challenger’s microscopes, the scientists found tiny shells in the red clay. They were learning that the ocean supports life at all levels.

  In 1876, the Challenger returned to England. She had sailed 111,000 kilometers (68,930 miles), returning with 1,441 water samples and 13,000 new sea-plants and sea-animals.

  Young John Murray took over the job of writing up the fifty-volume Challenger Report (the full title was Report on the scientific results of the voyage of H.M.S. Challenger during the years l873-76 under the command of Captain George S. Nares, R.N., F.R.S. and the late Captain Frank Tourle Thomson, R.N). Murray made a lot of money turning phosphates from Pacific islands into fertilizers, and he used his fortune to support more undersea expeditions. He continued to collect samples of sea-bottom muck from everyone else who went dredging, including telegraph companies laying submarine cables. In 1886 he published the first topographical maps of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. His most comprehensive map of the sea bottoms came out in 1895, in the final (50th) volume of the Challenger Report. By the time Sir John published his book The Depths of the Oceans in 1912, he had studied more than 11,000 samples of sea sediment.