On a Farther Shore (12 page)

The dangers inherent in this undertaking were never out of Beebe’s thoughts during a dive. Every time the bathysphere was lifted from the boat deck and swung out over the water to begin a dive, Beebe was struck by how their journey down into the ocean always began with a ride twenty feet into the air. Once in the water and out of sight of the boat, their connection to the surface was almost an abstraction. Sometimes a wave would pass beneath the boat above them and the bathysphere, suspended motionless, would suddenly pitch disconcertingly. What happened? Had they broken free? Were they being hauled up for some reason—or sinking into the abyss? On their first dive the hatch had sprung a leak. As water trickled in and pooled around them, Beebe and Barton watched to see if the flow increased. When it didn’t, Beebe ordered the bathysphere lowered more rapidly so as to complete the dive before the water got too high inside the bathysphere. Beebe knew that as they went deeper and the pressure outside the bathysphere increased, the result of any failure of the steel or the quartz windows would be something they’d take no notice of. “There was no possible chance of being drowned,” Beebe wrote in
Half Mile Down
, “for the first few drops would have shot through flesh and bone like steel bullets.”

On another occasion, the seal on one of the windows failed during an unmanned test dive to three thousand feet. When the bathysphere was brought back up and lowered onto the deck it was full of water that everyone realized was highly pressurized. The center wing bolt on the hatch was loosened—and the bathysphere hissed ominously. The deck was cleared and the wing bolt was cranked open until it exploded from the hatch, rocketing across the deck as if shot from a cannon, followed by a solid jet of water powerful enough to
slice a man in two. A few days later, the same thing happened again on another test dive.

But against all risks was the immense reward of exploring the unknown, of shining a light into an ocean realm where light had never visited and where only the creatures that dwelled there had looked upon one another. Beebe wrote that the deep ocean made him feel small.

Carson echoed this closely in “Undersea,” in her description of the abysmal depths and their “blackness of primeval night in which the ocean came into being, unbroken, through aeons of succeeding time, by the gray light of dawn.” Carson’s picture of the topography of the sea floor, rendered as it might look to someone literally flying above it through the water, was also inspired at least partly by Beebe’s observations in
Half Mile Down
.

Between their deepwater dives, Beebe and Barton had tried something they called “contour diving.” The bathysphere, rather than simply being lowered into the ocean at a fixed location, was instead towed slowly behind the boat. Starting out in the shallows as close to shore as they dared, the bathysphere was dropped to within a few fathoms of the bottom and then slowly moved out to sea. Beebe watched the changing bottom and telephoned up to the winch operator to either raise or lower them. The bathysphere swam along the contours of the sea floor, rising over reefs, sinking down into holes, and aiming ever
deeper as it traveled seaward. This was, in Beebe’s estimation, much more dangerous that making a straight-down deep dive in the open ocean. If he were to miscalculate his distance or speed—or fail to notice some obstacle suddenly looming into their path—the bathysphere could snag and break loose. They had a few close calls. As Beebe dryly put it, “In spite of a constant watch ahead, accidents were on several occasions barely avoided.” Although the bathysphere was sturdy and might have survived a collision with something on the bottom, smashing a window or becoming entangled in an outcropping of coral “would not have been so good,” Beebe said.

Carson was beguiled by Beebe’s adventures and observations. It’s a little harder to imagine that she was tempted by them. Carson tolerated boats but did not really care for them. She never did become a competent swimmer and rarely ventured into water much deeper than her ankles.
But as Carson began a more careful consideration of the book project, Elmer Higgins, her boss at the fisheries office, suggested that if she really wanted to get it right she needed to go “undersea” herself for a firsthand look. Bravely, Carson agreed that this was a good idea. A ride in a bathysphere presumably out of the question, Carson decided she should attempt helmet diving, preferably somewhere warm and inviting. When she wrote asking van Loon for an introduction to Beebe she told him she hoped Simon and Schuster might give her enough of an advance that she could “invest it in a trip to Bermuda or the Bahamas for this purpose.” Carson wanted to talk with Beebe about how to go about all of this.

The business of an advance from her publisher was meanwhile a matter of concern to Carson, and she asked van Loon for advice. From the start, Carson proved to be a careful businesswoman when it came to every aspect of becoming an author; no detail was too small for her attention. By the spring of 1939 Carson had completed a chapter of the book. She sent it to Howe and asked if it was enough for Simon and Schuster to offer her an advance. Howe, who liked what he read, said he could give her $250 for an “option” on the book. This seemed reasonable to Carson and she told van Loon how much she liked and
trusted Howe. But she also wondered what if, after writing more on the book, Simon and Schuster decided not to go forward with their option—or offered her final terms that were less than she might get from another publisher? And how long would the option period last? Carson said she felt “helpless” because she didn’t know what a normal publishing contract looked like. Explaining these routine concerns to van Loon, Carson also confessed her deepest worry—one every author knows. When the book was done, would Simon and Schuster do its utmost to sell it?

“
I suspect the best thing is just to go ahead and trust that everything will come out all right,” Carson wrote, “especially since I do need some immediate cash so badly that I have no time to stop and bargain now. I should hate, however, to let them do the book if those who would have the job of putting it over are going to be luke-warm about it.”

Carson and van Loon exchanged several letters about her arrangement with Simon and Schuster.
Van Loon told her that a $250 advance was a good one, especially for a first-time author, and was better than he ever got “in the olden days.” Rumors of publishers paying out big advances against royalties were just that, he said—except for a handful of bestselling writers whose work was all but guaranteed to do well. As for the eventual contract, van Loon said Carson could be confident she’d get the same royalty as everyone else in the business, as this was now all standard.
Behind in his own work and testy about it, van Loon assured Carson that both he and Quincy Howe remained “101 percent” behind her. In a short, cranky note, he also lamented having wasted the better part of the past year “trying to make people understand the perils of Hitler.” At the bottom of the page he drew a toothy, sharklike fish with a swastika on its flank.

Carson meanwhile completed an outline for the book to go along with the first chapter. She told van Loon she hoped it would cause Howe to increase his advance offer to $500.

• • •

Carson eventually agreed to the $250 advance—and Howe, in turn, said he’d pay her another $250 if Simon and Schuster exercised its option after seeing the first fifteen thousand words. Working evenings and weekends, Carson continued writing features for the
Baltimore Sun
while slaving away on the book. She apparently had no social life at all.
In the summer of 1939, the Bureau of Fisheries was transferred from the Commerce Department to the Department of the Interior—a move that was part of Secretary Ickes’s plan to concentrate conservation programs there. Carson’s position and salary—
which had recently increased to $2,300 a year—were unchanged.
A year later, the bureau was merged with another unit at Interior, the Biological Survey, to form the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Carson was transferred from Baltimore to a research laboratory at College Park, Maryland, where she continued editing technical reports and writing press releases and brochures.

Carson’s ability to work invisibly into the small hours of the morning and her deliberate approach to research concealed an eagerness to gain the recognition and respect she believed was due any serious author. A year and a half elapsed after “Undersea” had come out before the first chapter of the book was done, and her letters to van Loon at the time made it seem that she was only barely started. This wasn’t the case.
In the fall of 1938, Carson, along with her mother and the girls, Virginia and Marjorie, had gone on what was a working vacation for Carson to the Bureau of Fisheries station at Beaufort, North Carolina.

A quiet and for much of the year steamy port city, Beaufort is near the southern end of the Outer Banks, a narrow two-hundred-mile-long chain of low barrier islands that lies just off the Carolina coast. On the islands’ landward side are a series of sounds and protected bights that have long provided safe mooring for fishermen and seafarers. To seaward their shoals reach out for many miles beneath the waves—hazards that have wrecked ships and drowned sailors for more than four centuries, earning this treacherous edge of the ocean a nickname: the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Beaufort is old, with some houses from the 1700s still standing. Its harbor is along Front Street, in a section of Taylor’s Creek that opens onto a sound dotted with islands and salt marshes. The town breathes with the rhythms of the sea, its air heavy and salted, the boats lying at anchor in the harbor swinging first one way and then another with the changing tides. Although Beaufort is part of the mainland, a surrounding network of creeks and rivers made road access to the town circuitous until 1926, when a highway bridge finally joined a rail trestle in connecting it more directly to nearby Morehead City.
In 1899, the U.S. Fish Commission had established a marine laboratory at Beaufort, in two buildings on Front Street. A year later, Congress made the research facility permanent—a southern sister of the station at Woods Hole. In 1902 a large, mansion-like laboratory was built on nearby Pivers Island, just west of the town proper. Its main floor housed an aquarium and a museum of mounted fish and marine exhibits.

Researchers at Beaufort conducted surveys of the local commercial fisheries and specialized in aquaculture experiments in an attempt to develop farming techniques for species such as mullet and oysters.
For several decades the station raised thousands of diamondback terrapins in special pens that were continually refined to improve production. A small turtle that inhabits brackish marshlands where fresh and salt waters meet, the diamondback terrapin was a longtime food staple on the East Coast that came to be regarded as a delicacy as its numbers dwindled from overharvesting. Although the Beaufort studies demonstrated that the terrapins could be reared in captivity, nobody but the scientists took an interest, and terrapin farming never came to be.

Carson was intrigued by the terrapin project and the other work ongoing at the lab, but her real purpose in coming to Beaufort was to collect scenery for the story forming in her mind that yet needed a setting. From Pivers Island, Carson could observe the sand spits and tidal marshes of the inner sound, and on clear days could make out the black-and-white checkered 165-foot-high spire of the Cape
Lookout lighthouse. She found something to write about right next to the fisheries lab—an island of scrub and sand called Town Marsh that separated the channel of the Beaufort waterfront from a broad, shallow portion of the inner sound. In the distance beyond Town Marsh lay Shackleford Banks. A nine-mile ribbon of beach and dunes, it runs straight off to the northwest at a ninety-degree angle from the foot of Cape Lookout, which curves protectively around the tip of Shackleford. A century earlier it had been a whaling port. Long since deserted but for a few fishing shacks, it was now inhabited most noticeably by a herd of wild horses descended from Spanish stock that swam ashore from a shipwreck in the 1600s. The island is accessible only by boat; Carson probably hitched rides over to it with someone from the fisheries lab.

At no place on its length is Shackleford Banks more than a handful of feet above the high-tide line, but it changes the character of the sea just the same. On the outside the open ocean lashes at the beach, and contrary winds and fierce currents turn the waves into a confused and mighty froth. Along the inner shore the sound is calm.
Carson, who likely stayed with her family in the nearby oceanfront community of Atlantic Beach, said the mistake most people make when they visit the shore is hanging close to the fishing piers and resorts—and thus to one another. Her preference, she said, was for the solitude found far away from such places. And nowhere had she felt this pull more powerfully than at Shackleford Banks, where half an hour’s walk along the ocean side takes you out of sight of anything but the water before you, the sky above, and the long blinding rim of sand reaching off in either direction.

This “lovely stretch of wild ocean beach,” as Carson thought of it, was to join Town Marsh in the opening of a book that, while as yet unwritten, had evolved from the ideas she’d initially discussed with Quincy Howe.
Carson now thought she could give a “fairly complete picture of sea life” by dividing her story into three parts: one set at the shoreline, another on the open sea, and the third in the murk of the abyss. Each of these settings would feature one animal protagonist
in a complex interplay with the ecosystem and its other inhabitants. Carson had a title in mind, too:
Under the Sea-Wind
. It was a phrase that had come to her from the same source that had inspired Henry Williamson—Richard Jefferies.