The Secret Museum Page 10

  Kurt explained that the tale of Jason Junior is part of a bigger story about naval technology. The navies of the world have state-of-the-art equipment: ‘We don’t even know exactly what they do have,’ he said, but their ideas, and their investment in new technologies, filter into the world of science and industry and all come massively to affect our world.

  Undersea exploration is crucial to so much of modern life but, because it’s invisible, we who live on the surface of the Earth tend not to think about it too much. The ocean is used all the time for transportation of goods (this book, for example, was printed in China then shipped to bookshops) and that is the most obvious and visible trading that goes on in the maritime world. Yet the things you can’t see have just as much impact on our daily life.

  If you’re reading these words digitally, the files will have been sent though undersea fibre optic cables. Every time you make a phone call or send an email, the information probably passed under the sea. Much of the technology we use each day is powered by oil, a lot of which comes from deposits found below the seabed, with the help of robots.

  These robots are also doing vital work collecting data. The ocean is still the least known environmental region on earth, but there are countless robots exploring it under the sea right now. Kurt explained, ‘Space gets all the attention, but there is a huge robotic presence in the ocean.’ This presence is likely to increase. ‘Twenty-five years from now you may well be able to rent time on a system to go down and take a look at the ocean depths. Personal submarines will be cheaper to buy than a private jet.’

  I thought it might be a little weird if the ocean were full of people bobbing about in private subs, but Kurt reminded me: ‘The ocean takes up 75 per cent of the surface of Earth. Essentially, when you’re in a sub, you’re flying in a vast, open space. Even if we had as many subs in the ocean as we do cars on the surface of the Earth, the chances of meeting anyone else on your underwater travels would be less than running into someone in the Sahara.’

  Undersea navigation is a big technological challenge. You can’t use GPS underwater, only acoustic signals – most marine mammals use acoustics for navigation and communication, but we’re not as skilful as marine mammals yet; we have a lot to learn. Acoustic signals are used to find oil, to locate long-lost shipwrecks, to image the ocean bottom and to help find lost objects.

  ‘So far, we can only use a really small bandwidth,’ Kurt explained, ‘so we can only send a small amount of information. It’s not yet possible to send high-definition video; we still need fibre optics for robots like ROVs to achieve high-quality imaging of the deep ocean – sometimes robots go down with 80 kilometres of cable attached to them, along which they send back photographs and videos.’ It’s still done in the same way that JJ sent images of the Titanic back to Alvin. Imagine if the ROVs currently roaming around photographing Mars needed a cable to send images back to Earth. That would be one long, long cable.

  Jason Junior was made with the help of lots of MIT graduates. The same goes for a lot of other things inside the museum archive. I went to check out MIT’s Media Lab, where lots of zany people are working on exciting, cutting-edge ideas. I peered into a room containing a huge 3D printer, which is used to print out objects, and upstairs I saw two robots, called Leonardo and Nexi.

  Leonardo was made by MIT in collaboration with Stan Winston Studios, which made movies such as The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Edward Scissorhands and Jurassic Park. Leonardo has huge brown eyes and big rabbit-like ears. He’s super-expressive. When the MIT designers introduced him to a puppet of the Cookie Monster, they told him the monster was bad, and Leonardo put up his hands in defence. He has retired now, and will probably end up in the museum in the future.

  Even more personable is Nexi, a white robot with huge blue eyes. She raises her eyebrows in surprise, slants them in anger and can hear through her ears (they’re microphones). She looks like a robot you could really chat to and people who see her for the first time react to her as if she were human. As with the far less human JJ, the Navy funded Nexi’s development, via a research award. She is still being worked on in the Media Lab but, some day, technology will supersede her, and she may end up in the museum collection with Jason Junior.

  I listened to a TED (Technology, Education, Design) lecture by Cynthia Breazeal who is director of the Personal Robots Lab at MIT. She talked about new kinds of applications for robots. She thinks they can be used for communication. ‘Imagine this …’ she said. ‘What about a robot accessory for your cell phone? You call your friend, she puts her hand into a robot and bam! You’re a mebot. You can make eye contact, you can talk to your friend, you can gesture … maybe the next best thing to really being there.’ She continued by pointing out that families who are living far apart often talk on Skype. In her experience that way of interacting doesn’t work well for children, because they want to play rather than talk. She said she could imagine a day when her mum could become a ‘grandmabot’ and play with her grandson, even though they live thousands of miles away from one another. She and her team at the MIT have also trialled robotic personal trainers, in the MIT lab and in the Boston area. Most people who tried the robots rated the quality of the robot’s advice highly and said they trusted them. Many people dressed, named and talked to their robot.

  I loved seeing the robots, but I wasn’t so sure I’d want one in my house. When I left MIT, I went next door, to Toscanini Ice Cream, which is famous in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, I ate the most delicious ice cream. One day, perhaps, expressive robots with big blue eyes will be able to make ice cream like this. I’d be so impressed.

  [Jason Junior]

  JJ is a small Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), also known as a flying eyeball. Attached to a submersible called Alvin by an umbilical cord that transmits data, JJ was dropped to 3,660 metres below sea level.

  [JJ exploring the Titanic]

  Jason was the first to set ‘eyes’ on the Titanic, which had sunk 73 years before. The ROV sent images of the ship back up to the surface.

  [Submarine fibre optic cables]

  Every time you make a phone call or send an email, the information probably passes under the sea.

  [Nexi]

  I met Nexi, a big-blue-eyed robot, in the Media Lab at MIT.

  ZARH PRITCHARD, KNOWN AS ‘THE merman’, was the first person to paint underwater. Not from memory, but actually sitting on a ledge under the water, paintbrush in hand, creating pictures of what he saw on an easel.

  He was born in 1866 in Madras, India, and was named Walter. In 1909, he changed his named to Zarh. He said this was because there were other men called Walter Pritchard and he kept getting their letters: ‘One was a drunkard, another was a man who never paid his bills, and a third was constantly running away from his wife. It was this last Pritchard who determined me to change my name. I received a letter from his wife. She begged me to return to her, saying that the daughter, Mary, had grown into a fine, tall, good-looking woman. So I changed my name to Zarh, which is Persian for light.’

  Which makes it all the more fitting that Zarh made a niche for himself painting a special, dancing light; the magical, shimmering light of the underwater world.

  He began in the Firth of Forth, Scotland. He put on homemade swimming goggles, dived into the water and took a ‘photograph’ in his mind, observing the new colours and tints beneath the waves, and then ran ashore to paint the memory in his sketchbook. Each drawing took 30 or 40 dives to complete. He must have got pretty cold running back and forth, in and out of the water, to swim, then out again to paint, shivering away in his towel.

  For the next 14 years he worked making costumes – for Sarah Bernhardt, among others – and spent a stint in New Zealand on a sheep run at Hawkes Bay, painting landscapes. Here, a local chief taught him how to paint underwater: the secret is to make a canvas from leather soaked in linseed, then it will hold the paint.

  Then, he came down with pneumonia. His doctor prescribed a trip to Egyp
t, for the sunshine. Zarh decided to go instead to California, and then Tahiti. It was on this magical island that he found his true calling.

  It was all the result of a drunken bet. At a dinner party, he met the brother of the last Queen of Tahiti, Narii Salmon. After many drinks, Salmon bet Pritchard that he wouldn’t be able to paint a canvas while underwater. Pritchard bet him $500 that he could, so long as Narii would lend him his boat and his so-called ‘diving suit’, the only one on the island.

  The two set off to see who would win the bet. Pritchard dropped into the ocean wearing the diving suit (essentially a diving helmet attached to a sou’wester, waterproofed with the sap of a breadfruit tree). Narii had his crew play a trick on Zarh, and they took him to the top of a 180-metre deep wall in the coral reef. He drifted at 23 metres until he found a shelf at 9 metres on which he could perch and paint. When he was ready, he tugged on a cord, signalling for the crew to send down his painting materials.

  As Zarh painted in the silence of the underwater realm, watching out for shark and octopus, he created the first painting ever made underwater. His canvas was soaked in linseed and he stored his paints in a belt, each tube marked with a daub of its own colour, because he realized that the water would soon wash away their labels. Narii Salmon swam down to check on him at one point, wearing only a loincloth. He was grinning and didn’t mind losing his bet. Zarh’s painting was beautiful, capturing the twirling light of the sea.

  Narii insisted on taking Zarh on as many trips as he wanted, showing him the reefs of Tahiti, lending the artistic merman his diving suit. Zarh was thrilled by the silence beneath the surface, watching creatures that had never seen a human before and bringing them back to the surface for all to see. He would paint for half an hour, then come up to get warm in the sunshine. He could leave his easel on the seafloor overnight if he wanted to, as there are few currents in the coral reef of Tahiti.

  Once each painting was complete, Zarh carried it to the surface and added a powder to mimic the veil that covered everything he saw beneath the waves. He said, ‘It is a dream world in which everything is enveloped in soft sheen. On reaching the bottom, it is as if one were temporarily resting on a dissolving fragment of some far planet.’

  When Zarh had completed a set of around 50 canvases, he held an exhibition in San Francisco. They were all destroyed in a fire during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Zarh painted more, and sold his work to royalty and ocean lovers all over the world.

  One admirer was Albert I of Monaco, who founded the Oceanographic Museum which sits, like a temple to the sea, on the edge of a cliff, above the glittering Mediterranean. Albert loved the ocean. He built the museum to celebrate the sea and encourage marine exploration. He went on trips with scientists to the Azores and Svalbard to collect species for his beloved museum, he drew up maps and he explored. In its heyday, the museum was the place to be if you were a marine scientist. Jacques Cousteau was director here for many years. It was he who took down Zarh Pritchard’s paintings and put them in storage, when he modernized the museum in the 1960s.

  There they remain, above the office of the curator of art. She took me to see them. We climbed up a staircase into a small attic room lined with paintings and pulled out the five Pritchards. Each one had been created underwater, some in Tahiti, some in the depths of a loch in Scotland.

  The paintings have a smooth, dreamy, otherworldly feel to them. Like most people, I’ve marvelled over the amazing BBC series Blue Planet, and I’ve also been lucky enough to scuba dive with sharks, turtles and shimmering fish. Now we can all buy goggles and masks in seaside shops and look for ourselves at the ocean. But during Zarh’s lifetime, this was all still to come. When he started painting, what lay beneath the surface of the ocean was a mystery. Prince Albert I collected his pictures because they were pioneering studies of the world beneath the waves. At the time, very few people had seen the colours and corals beneath the ocean first hand. This was the Blue Planet footage of its time.

  The first black and white photographs of the ocean were being taken, and the first films created, but Zarh’s paintings were the first of their kind – paintings created under the sea. They brought secret images from the ocean floor up above the waves. Moreover, he painted them for art’s sake, not for any other reason, just for the pleasure of creation.

  No wonder then that Albert, Prince of Monaco, snapped up some of Zarh’s paintings for his museum. He bought two of the paintings now in storage from an exhibition in Paris. The Illustrated London News wrote about the show in an article printed on 21 January 1922. The piece has an illustration of Zarh ‘painting a picture 50 feet underwater’ and it tells how Prince Albert of Monaco, ‘whose interest in oceanography is well known’, bought some paintings.

  The article shows two of the paintings in black and white. It was a far richer experience seeing them in the archive in full, dreamy colour. In both, orange fish swim across the image. Zarh said he never painted if there were no small fishes around, for ‘that is a sure sign of danger’: sharks must be nearby.

  The painting I like best is of coral statues in the lagoon of Maraa, in Tahiti. Zarh painted it while submerged in the lagoon, watching out for jellyfish. On 4 July 1925, after Prince Albert’s death, Zarh was in Rio de Janeiro and decided to donate the painting to his patron. He wrote on the back of the painting that it was a gift to Albert I, from ‘a sincere admirer of his great character and work’. I like this one because it was a gift to the museum and to its patron, and because it was created in Tahiti, where Zarh won the life-changing bet.

  In 1950, when Zarh was 85 years old, he lived in Austin, Texas, the neighbour of Peggy Sparks and her two-year-old son. He would invite the two of them over for tea and homemade cookies and show them his underwater paintings. Peggy recalls he was particularly happy that his work had appeared in National Geographic and he told her he had painted a scene for the Emperor of Japan’s aquarium.

  The elderly artist had a great impact on Peggy, who later painted portraits, restored paintings and took up underwater synchronized swimming.

  Zarh even taught his neighbours how best to look at his paintings. Close one of your eyes and with the other look through a hole made by your fist. If you do it right, this will make it look as if the water in the undersea painting is moving. It worked for Peggy. See if it works for you. I asked the art curator and she said, ‘It might… after a couple of drinks!’

  [Zarh at work]

  He would paint on the floor of the ocean for half an hour and then come up to the surface to thaw out in the sunshine.

  [Jacques Cousteau (1910–97]

  Cousteau was curator of the museum in Monaco for years. He co-developed the aqua-lung (scuba diving kit) and pioneered marine conservation.

  [Pillars of Basalt, west coast of Scotland]

  Zarh wrote a description of this painting – which I saw in storage at the museum – on the back: ‘The rays of sunlight pass between columns of basalt into the dimly-lit undersea world’.

  [Massif de coraux dans le lagon de Maraa]

  My favourite painting by Zarh Pritchard.

  HOW MANY FISH CAN YOU see in the photo at the end of this chapter? Believe it or not, there are two, one of each sex. The female is the big one, and her boyfriend, the little one, is hanging on to her bottom. Trace a line from the female’s jaw downwards to her backside, and there he is.

  This happy couple lives in a glass jar on the third floor of part of the Darwin Centre known as the Spirit Building, behind the main Natural History Museum in London. They’re rarely on display because they are one of only three complete anglerfish couples the museum owns and they need to be easily available to research scientists. If they were out on display in the main museum it would be difficult to access them when they were required.

  This specimen (Linophryne brevibarbata) was collected in 1973 in the eastern central Atlantic. It came to the museum in 1995 and since then has been examined many times by researchers. This couple came out of hidi
ng for the Sexual Nature exhibition in 2011, but now they are back in storage.

  The male didn’t have much of a life. He hatched from a sheet of eggs. He used his superb smelling abilities to sniff out this female and chomp into her bottom. Then his life’s mission was accomplished. All he did, from that point onwards, was squirt sperm whenever it was needed. He spent the rest of his existence as a tiny parasite, living off the nutrients in the female’s bloodstream, incapable of independent life.

  He is not quite as stupid as he sounds: this is clever evolution. When the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate right there ready to do his job; hormones in her bloodstream tell him when it’s time. Without this bizarre arrangement, the female might not be able to find a mate in the vastness of the sea.

  There are 322 known species of anglerfish, living in both deep and shallow water. The male of one species (Photocorynus spiniceps) is the smallest vertebrate in the world (6.2 millimetres in length; the females average around 50 millimetres). Interestingly, some females get lumbered with more than one tiny male. The record number of males on a single female is eight, found on a specimen collected in 2000 off Japan.

  This female has tentacles on her underside called barbels, but it’s not clear what they are for. They do light up, so perhaps they could be used for attracting prey, or maybe they are landing lights for the laziest male in nature. The fish curators at the museum, Ollie Crimmen and James Maclaine, who showed me the star-crossed lovers in their glass jar, still don’t know.

  They held the jar up to the light so that I could peer in and have a good look at the tiny male. They pointed out the esca (from the Latin for ‘food’), the fleshy growth on the female’s head. This is where the anglerfish gets its name. The esca is attached to the end of a finray, which is used like a fishing rod and, in deep-sea species of anglerfish, it lights up, as a lure to attract prey. When this female was alive, if something edible approached her esca, then she would suck it in by opening her huge mouth, which is lined with needle-like teeth, and swallow it.