Among my favourite mysteries of the natural world is Bathysphaera intacta, a 6ft fish said to resemble a large barracuda. The new species was supposedly spotted by the explorer and naturalist William Beebe in 1932 at a depth of 640 metres (2100 ft) off the coast of Nonsuch Island in the Bermuda archipelago. We have no photograph of the fish and the only image that exists was drawn by Else Bostelmann, a German-born American artist, who accompanied Beebe on his expedition. Bostelmann never descended into the ocean’s depths; her drawings, based on Beebe’s descriptions, are 20th-century marine equivalents of Dürer’s Rhinoceros, creatures that the artist had never seen first-hand.
Fans of Dürer’s woodcut will enjoy Brad Fox’s The Bathysphere Book. It is an alternative history of Beebe’s exploration of the deep ocean, a weird and often beautiful fusion of science writing, history and poetry that explores our own relationship with the unknown – how we make sense of something fundamentally new with the limited tools at our disposal. It’s a story largely set in the Bermuda archipelago in the 1930s, but it somehow seems more ancient than that; Fox’s protagonists resemble literary trespassers into the underworld, frustrated by the limits of human language and anxious that their experiences will be misunderstood or dismissed by those on the surface.
