Higher Education News from the Collegiate Way

M/S Explorer, 1969–2007

Posted by R. J. O’Hara for the Collegiate Way

23 November 2007 (collegiateway.org) — Two principles often articulated here on the Collegiate Way are that the life of a residential college is best sustained through a regular rhythm of events—including things like poems and quotations-of-the-week—and also that the members of a collegiate society should not merely teach but should embody the knowledge they seek to convey. The senior members of any residential college, artists and scientists, younger and older, will almost always have enough collective life experience that anything breaking into the world’s headlines will have been encountered in some personal way by some of them. And the stories of those personal encounters are just what students need to hear.

Today is a sad day in the maritime world and in the world of popular science education. The M/S Explorer—the most famous adventure-travel ship in the world, commissioned in 1969 by Lars-Eric Lindblad and still often called the Lindblad Explorer—struck ice this morning and went down in the deep waters of the Bransfield Strait off the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Fortunately, the passengers and crew, 154 in all, were safely rescued.

How can we mark such an ephemeral news story in the educational environment of a residential college? By passing on to our students, as a quotation-of-the-week in the college newsletter, the story of another great sinking, told by a narrator who declared “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard”:

“The ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

This would be effective education as far as it goes. It would serve the valuable purpose of encouraging students to see the world not as a collection of isolated events, but as a collection of events that can be linked together, across time, across space, through cause and effect, and through parallel patterns.

But can we do more?

If you were my residential college student I could do a bit more, because years ago in graduate school I worked on the Explorer as a naturalist-lecturer during three voyages between Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The work was brutal.

Well, it wasn’t that brutal. But it was good work and important work, and I’m pleased to have been one of the many scientists over the years who had an opportunity to teach on the Explorer for a brief time.

The Explorer brought more people face to face with the Antarctic environment than any vessel in history. And as Lars-Eric Lindblad himself often said, you can’t protect what you don’t know. Thanks to the Explorer, tens of thousands of people from dozens of countries got to know Gentoo Penguins, Blue-eyed Shags, calving glaciers, and South Polar Skuas—Melville’s sky-hawks—and they got to visit the remote research stations of the Antarctic Peninsula and the volcanic waters of Deception Island in the South Shetlands, where fire and ice compete for supremacy.

As the sea’s shroud rolled over the Explorer for the last time today there were surely small fowls circling the foam around her last resting place, like these Pintado Petrels, photographed from her deck many years ago.

Let us hope that an Explorer II will soon appear to carry on the little red ship’s name and her important educational work for many years to come.

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