THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 76

him a fraud and a plagiarist, a peddler of “absurdities, too mad for reason, too foolish for
mirth.” 20 The inal straw? O'Reilly had the gall to publish his topic as a lavish, expensive
quarto targeted to Britain's elite circles. From Barrow's point of view, the claims of uppity
amateur naturalists over Arctic science must be denied as emphatically as those of profes-
sional whalers—Scoresby, too, found himself unceremoniously excluded from the new polar
mission. Only Britannia, in her full naval glory, should rule the Arctic waves.
Barrow's scathing review did its work well. O'Reilly's Greenland disappeared from sight,
crushed beneath the wheels of Barrow's Arctic juggernaut. In subsequent years, this unfortu-
nate Irishman traveled the south seas as a ship's surgeon, compiling scientific observations
on Java, Australia, and India for future volumes that never appeared. Bernard O'Reilly was
found dead in a rented room in London in 1827, probably by his own hand, his desk cluttered
with desperate letters to would-be patrons. In one, he takes credit for Britain's renewed quest
for the northwest passage, a blatant untruth he nevertheless had good reason to believe might
have been true … but for his nemesis John Barrow. 21
CAPTAIN SCORESBY'S MARINE DIVER
So how did tropical Tambora—distant and faceless—launch her thousand ships into the Arc-
tic? More pointedly, how could a period of drastic global cooling, precipitated by Tambora's
eruption, be consistent with warming of the polar seas and the release of thousands of square
miles of Arctic ice into the shipping lanes of the Atlantic? William Scoresby, unwittingly,
provides a key piece to the puzzle in his whaling journal of 1816.
Scoresby cut a legendary figure among the whalers of Yorkshire for his superb seamanship
and physical charisma: he was capable, it was said, of staring down polar bears. In addition to
these Ahab-like acquirements, he was a naturalist of rare gifts. In the whaling off-season, he
studied with the renowned natural historian Robert Jameson at the University of Edinburgh
and corresponded, as we have seen, with Sir Joseph Banks. His compilation of a lifetime's
study of the polar region, published in 1820 as An Account of the Arctic Regions , remains a clas-
sic foundational text of Arctic science. Charles Darwin, a fellow student of Robert Jameson,
kept a well-thumbed copy by his bedside onboard the Beagle .
The main theme of Scoresby's correspondence with Banks prior to 1817 is the design of an
instrument for measuring seawater temperature at depth. Banks commissioned a slim bucket
made of glass and wood for Scoresby to collect samples, but the whaler found that, at three
hundred fathoms, the wood swelled and broke the glass. Scoresby then himself designed an
upgraded model of the water sampler—an elegant, self-closing, octagonal cylinder made of
brass, with a single window. The contraption weighed twenty-three pounds and sank by itself
without the need of ballast. Scoresby called it his “Marine Diver.” It was Scoresby's habit to
take advantage of any lull in the hunt for whales to conduct experiments with his diving ma-
chine and record observations in a journal.
On May 21, 1816—a calm but foggy day with no “fish” in sight—Scoresby tied together
all the lead lines he could find onboard his whaler, amounting to “somewhat more than 8/10
of an English mile” in length. He then attached wood blocks of different varieties to the end to
test water pressure, and placed a thermometer inside the marine diver for temperature read-
ings. Attaching the lead lines to his machine enabled Scoresby to lower the device to a depth