Science: Ocean Frontier

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When he entered Harvard in 1922, he concentrated at first on mathematics because he thought it had something to do with the banking business. But the sea was in his blood, and in his junior year he discovered Professor Henry Bigelow, who was then officially a zoologist but whose real interest was oceanography. Columbus gave up all thought of banking. He ordered the schooner Chance built in Nova Scotia, on graduation set off in her for the icy coast of Labrador with a crew of college students on his first oceanographic trip. The student-scientists fraternized with Eskimos, exploded firecrackers in one another's beds, and otherwise acted their ages, but the Chance, loaded with real scientific apparatus, came back with useful data on the Labrador Current that chills the New England coast as far south as Cape Cod.

Report for $3,000,000. Iselin's demonstration that the little Chance (length, 72 ft.; displacement, 37 tons) could do serious scientific work was useful to Professor Bigelow, who was writing a report on oceanography for the National Academy of Sciences. Relieved to find that very large yearly sums for big vessels were not necessary, the Rockefeller Foundation gave Bigelow $3,000,000 to outfit and endow an oceanographic institute. Bigelow set up his institute in Woods Hole—a small town on a narrow strait ("The Hole") connecting Buzzards Bay with Vineyard Sound. The ocean is always a presence there, flowing around the town and through its small, snug harbors. Grey fog often drifts through the town, smelling of the sea, and sometimes hurricanes slam ashore. No better place exists to keep an oceanographer pleasantly mindful of his business.

Iselin helped Bigelow plan the Atlantis, which is still the only U.S. vessel to be designed as an oceanographic ship. The Atlantis was built in Copenhagen, and Iselin sailed her back to Woods Hole as her first skipper.

Rugged Science. A steel-hulled, 142-ft. ketch (tall mainmast forward, shorter mizzenmast aft) with berths for nine scientists and a crew of 17, the Atlantis was still a very small ship to cope for months with the North Atlantic in all its ferocious moods. She had a rather feeble engine, but sails were her main reliance. Such a laboratory makes oceanography a rugged science. While the little ship rolls and pitches, the scientists work round the clock, snatching bits of food and sleep during quiet intervals in their experiments. Dress is informal. In the Tropics, oceanographers favor ragged shorts or underdrawers; on North Atlantic cruises the men are generally cold and wet, and during the first week at sea most of them get seasick. "The best seagoing oceanographers," says Iselin, "are the result of picking over a lot of stomachs."

For the next ten years Iselin sailed with the Atlantis, crisscrossing the Atlantic and doing an oceanographer's chores—trailing thermometers at varying depths, testing water for density and salinity. In 1940 he became director of Woods Hole, saw U.S. oceanography transformed into a Naval auxiliary. For some reason, neither the German nor the Japanese navies ever got in touch with their oceanographers, who were excellent. "This made a hell of a difference in World War II," says Iselin.