The Ocean Laboratory: Exploration, Fieldwork, and Science at Sea

Abstract

In framing the history of field sciences most historians emphasize terrestrial sites rather than marine ones. But, to ignore marine spaces is to omit an extensive geography to which the abstract notion of "the field" has also been applied. While the importance of laboratories as a space for scientific work has been well established by historians, and though there has been a growing body of recent scholarship on the history of field science, the link between laboratories, ships, museums, and the development of oceanography as a field science has yet to be fully explored. Tracing this history sets the history of oceanography within the larger history of science in the field and thereby offers to the history of science a contribution which bridges two subfields, the history of the development of laboratory and field sciences and the history of the exploration of the marine environment. A central theme of this project is the shifting conception of the research vessel over the period from ca. 1830 to present, as it underwent a change from the ship as instrument, to the ship as laboratory, and finally, in its most recent incarnation, to the ship as invisible technician operating within an ocean transformed into credible scientific space. Beginning with a description of expeditionary science at the turn of the nineteenth century, this dissertation charts a gradual re-centering of spaces of scientific analysis from the metropole to the field, via the marine station and finally, the research vessel. In doing so, it examines the social, political, and cultural context in which these shifts took place, and reveals an emerging scientific and political discourse equating international cooperation, and progress in marine science. These were both goals of Prince Albert Ist of Monaco; his scientific program, and the oceanographic institutions he founded, helped permanently link these dual agendas. Thus, this study sheds light on the social and cultural processes involved in the emergence of global sciences framed in terms of large-scale systems, both physical and political. Furthermore, by tracing the development of oceans as scientific spaces, this work demonstrates how the idea of a "Pacific World," with roots in nineteenth-century expeditionary science, contributed to the self-conscious geopolitical construction of this concept in the interwar period. Public proclamations about the Pacific World, along with the development of museum exhibits focused on marine science and interpreting the results of oceanographic expeditions, demonstrate the ways in which popular culture and politics interacted with the cultures of marine science. Hence, in the twentieth century, world's fairgrounds on the west coast of the United States became an important venue for popularizing large-scale science and presenting appeals for scientific internationalism in the Pacific.