We always used to think of the deep sea as a place of SILENCE.

The idea that there could be sound under water had never entered most people's minds. Nor had it ever occurred to them that fish or whales or porpoises had voices.

This common misconception was corrected during the Second World War.

When Navy technicians began listening - with underwater microphones or hydrophones - for submarines

they heard a most extraordinary uproar. In fact, the tumult of undersea voices was so great that whole fleets of submarines could have passed by undetected. Later, of course, means were developed for filtering out and separating the various sounds.

Today, I thought it might be fun for us to take a trip under water and listen to the sounds of the deep sea. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution possesses some remarkable recordings of the sounds made by shrimp and fish and whales. Through the courtesy of the Institution, I have obtained a few of these recordings, and in a moment we will listen to them.

First, just a word about the method. These recordings were made by lowering a hydrophone into the water. The sound frequencies are the same as would be heard by the human ear under water. Most of the recordings were made in the open ocean, where the water was more than two miles deep. Sometimes we can tell you the identity of the sound-makers, sometimes not.

1

People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea.

This is especially true, I find, of men.

Perhaps they have been used to thinking of the more exciting fields of science as exclusively masculine domains.

In fact, one of my correspondents a few days ago addressed me as "Dear Sir" -- explaining that although he know perfectly well that I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to E.E.W.N.I.W.X. acknowledge the fact.

Then, even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not an oversize, Amazon type woman.

I can offer no excuse for not being what people expect, but perhaps I might say a few words about why a woman, and only an average-size one at that, should have become a biographer of the ocean.

I seem to have been born with a fascination for the sea.

For years before I ever saw it, I thought about it and dreamed about it and wondered what it would be like.

I loved Swinburne and Masefield and all the other great sea poets.

When I wrote stories for my classes in English composition, they often had a marine background.

2

As a college student I became interested in biology; soon I very naturally began to specialize in marine biology.

I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.

I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole—that wonderful place of whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing water.

I loved to watch the waves breaking at Nobska Point after a storm.

At Woods Hole, too, I first discovered the rich scientific literature of the sea.

But it is fair to say that my first impressions of the ocean were sensory and emotional, and that the intellectual response came late

RECENTLY I HAVE FOUND that a great many people feel just as I do about the ocean.

A really overwhelming number of them have written to tell me so.

This past summer I have been traveling along the New England coast, gathering material for a new book.

I have been looking at people as well as at sea animals.

And I have been deeply impressed by what I saw.

Everywhere there were people who simply sat — or stood— and gazed out over the sea, without saying a word.

Whatever they consciously thought, the spell that it cast over them was plainly written on their faces.

I have been trying to ANALYZE some of the reasons for that fascinatio

4

Exciting things are happening on

NOW HERE IS THE PARTICULAR MAGIC OF THE SEA.

Exciting things are happening there today, just as they did millions
of years ago.

Evolution, and the adaptation of creatures to new surroundings, did
not stop back in prehistoric time; they are still going on.

That very day, only a few weeks ago, we saw hundreds of small, incon-
spicuous sea animals that were in the midst of a GREAT EXPERIMENT --
the transition from a sea life to a land life.

The animals were small SNAILS known as PERIWINKLE S.

I am sure most of you have seen them on rocky coasts.

In some places their dingy grey shells are so abundant you can hardly
take a step without treading on them.

The *periwinkles* are now in the process of LEAVING THE SEA AND TURNING INTO LAND SNAILS.

*Onowhyxuowx* They are cutting the ties that bind them to the sea, one by one
You can see that some of them have made more progress than others.

HERE ON OUR NORTHERN ATLANTIC COAST there are 3 species of *periwinkles*.
One of them is still almost completely marine.

It lives down among the rockweeds where it is always wet at least
very damp.

It lays its eggs on the weeds; the young hatch out and develop there.

5

Another species, called the COMMON PERIWINKLE, is intermediate.

It comes far up on the shore -- as far as the waters of the high tide.

It can stand a good deal of exposure to air.

But it is still tied to the sea, for it sheds its eggs into the water, and all the babies pass the first period of their existence swimming about in the ocean.

The third species is almost a land animal, a land animal,

It is called the ROUGH PERIWINKLE.

It often lives in crevices high in the rocks where it is wet only by the spray of breaking storm waves.

It can live without any contact with sea water for a week or more.

Even in its method of reproduction it has cut its ties with the sea-- for the young undergo complete development within the body of the mother, and emerge as little snails exactly like their parents, ready for adult life.

And so the three species of periwinkles give us a beautiful demonstration of the pattern of evolution, as this pattern has been working out in the sea over the ages.

That sort of thing is part of the fascination of the ocean.

But most of all, THE SEA IS A PLACE OF MYSTERY.

One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved; but often the solution brings with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery.

I doubt that the last, ultimate mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved.

In fact, I cherish an unscientific hope that they will not be.

6

A CENTURY IS REALLY A VERY SHORT TIME.

Yet only a century ago men thought nothing could live in the greatest
depths of the ocean.

Now, of course, we know better.

Back in the 1860's some of the vessels that were laying the trans-
Atlantic cable began to bring up living creatures from the bottom
of the ocean.

Soon after that the famous CHALLENGER EXPEDITION went around the world.

The CHALLENGER nets and dredges brought up weird creatures from all
depths.

WE ARE STILL EXPLORING THAT STRANGE UNDERSEA WORLD.

Only this summer a Danish ship was probing into the great Mindanao Deep, off the Philippines, where the sea bottom lies more than 6 miles below the surface.

One of the GREATEST MYSTERIES OF THE SEA at the present time is the nature of the life of those middle regions-- far below the surface, far above the bottom.

We had always thought of these regions as comparatively barren.

They lie beyond reach of even the strongest rays of the sun.

Where there is no sunlight, no plants can live; so it seemed likely
food would be too scarce to support many animals.

7

Now, IME NSE CONCENTRATIONS OF LIVING CREATURES have been discovered, spread like a cloud over much of the ocean at a depth of a quarter of a mile or more.

No one is sure just what they are.

As yet they have been "seen" only with the impersonal eye of echosounding instrument

These instruments automatically record the depth of water under a moving vessel. They trace the contour of the ocean floor as a continuous line on a strip of paper.

They also record any solid objects, like schools of fish, that lie between the surface and the bottom.

Hundreds of vessels have now found this layer of living creatures over the deeper parts of all oceans of the world.

It has sometimes been called the PHANTOM BOTTOM because people at first mistook it for shoals or sunken islands.

Now everyone agrees that the layer is composed of some forms of animal/

At night -- in darkness-- it moves up to the surface of the sea.

Before daybreak it descends again into deep water where light cannot follow it.

Some small shrimplike creatures are known to do this.

Also, some of the weird creatures of the deep sea come to the surface at night, like those Mr. Heyerdahl described in KON TIKE.

Scientists have tried to sample the layer with nets.

You can never be sure, though, that your nets are catching everything.

Perhaps the very creatures that are the key to the mystery are too swift to be caught.

The results, so far, are not very satisfying.

9

The first recording was made by the vessel CARYN, near Bermuda.

The sound you will hear is made by shrimp. It is a sizzling, crackling noise. It is made by the snapping of the pistol like claws of thousands of shrimp ...

The next recording was made over water 2½ miles deep, about 30 miles from Bermuda. No animals were seen at the surface at the time, and the voices cannot be identified. You will hear a series of curious moans, groans and howls -- which apparently are characteristic sounds of what we once called the "silent sea".

This next recording is a particularly fascinating one. It was made by the vessel ATLANTIS about 100 miles north of Puerto Rico.

This particular sound was heard only where the water was nearly 3 miles deep. It is a peculiar cry -- always followed by a fainter cry exactly like it. This second sound has been interpreted as an echo of the first, reflected back from the bottom. So the name "echo fish" has been applied to this unknown creature. It has been suggested that the fish -- whatever it is -- may use this echo of its own voice as a means of navigation, or to hunt food in this region of complete darkness.

The last recording brings us the voices of white porpoises, heard in the Lower Saguenay River of Quebec. The recordings were made as part of a study of marine mammals by William Schevill and Barbara Lawrence. These scientists described the voices of the porpoises as a medley of "chirps, mews, and canary-like trilling" with occasional calls like a crowd of children shouting in the distance. Sometimes the sounds are reminiscent of calls heard in a tropical jungle...

In their own rather dramatic fashion, I think these recordings demonstrate how completely our ideas about the ocean have changed during the past decade or so -- and why the sea is a place where the thrill of fresh discovery is always at hand.

For Book and Author Luncheon - October 16, 1951

People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea. This is especially true, I find, of men. Perhaps they have been accustomed to thinking of the more exciting fields of scientific knowledge as exclusively masculine domains. In fact, one of my correspondents not long ago addressed me as "Dear Sir" -- explaining that although he knew perfectly well that I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact.

Then even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not a tall, oversize, Amazon-type female. I can offer no defense for not being what people expect, but perhaps I might say a few words about why a woman, and only an average-size one at that, should have become a biographer of the sea.

I seem to have been born with a fascination for the ocean. For years before I had ever seen it, I thought about it and dreamed about it and tried to picture what it would be like. I loved Swinburne and Maeefield and all the other great poets of the sea. The stories I wrote for my classes in English composition often had a marine background. After I became interested in biology as a college student, I very naturally came to specialize in marine biology. At the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole I had my first prolonged contact with the sea. There I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole, and the waves breaking on Nobska Point after a storm. It was there, too, that I first discovered the rich scientific literature of the sea. But it is fair to say that my

2

first impressions of the sea were sensory and emotional, and that
the intellectual response came later.

Recently I have discovered that a great many other people feel
just as I do about the ocean. A really overwhelming number of them
have written to tell me so. During this past summer I have been
travelling along the New England coast, gathering material for a
new book. And I have been looking at people as well as at sea animals.
I have been deeply impressed with what I saw. Everywhere there were
people who simply sat -- or stood -- and gazed out over the sea,
without saying a word. Whatever they consciously thought, the spell
that was cast over them was clearly written on their faces. I have
been trying to analyze some of the reasons for this fascination.

The sea is a place where one gets a sense of the great antiquity
of the earth. It seems changeless; but it is always changing. It
links the dim beginnings of time with the present. The same sort
of waves that we watch today must have rolled in from Paleozoic
seas. I suppose that the surface waters of the ocean look much as
they did half a billion or a billion years ago, when the first prim-
itive forms of life starred in it. And even some of our shores
must look about as they did in that period, some 300 million years
ago, when the first animals were coming out on land to take up a
strange new life.

I was reminded of that last summer when I stodd on one especially
beautiful point on the rocky coast of Maine. We had come down to
the point through an evergreen forest that had its own sort of
enchantment. All its trees, the living and the dead, were hung with
the silvery grey of mosses and lichens. But it was a foggy morning,

when we reached the

3

and when we reached the rocks above the surf the mists lay between us and the forest, and all we could see were those massive, primeval rocks and the sea. Except for our own presence, the scene might have been one of the closing periods of the Paleozoic Era. Some of the animals clinging to the walls of the tide pools might almost have been those early pioneers from the sea, that first came out on land back in Silurian time.

Now here is the particular magic of the sea. Exciting things are happening there today, just as they did millions of years ago. Evolution and the adaptation of creatures to new surroundings did not stop back in prehistoric time; they are still going on. That very day, only a few weeks ago, we saw hundreds of small, inconspicuous sea animals in the midst of a great experiment -- the transition from a sea life to a land life.

These animals were small snails known as periwinkles. I am sure all of you have seen them on rocky coasts, between the tide lines. In some places you can hardly step without treading on the dingy grey shells of the common periwinkle. The periwinkles are now in the process of leaving the sea and turning into land snails. One by one, they are cutting the ties that bind them to the sea. Some of them have made more progress in this direction than others.

Here on our northern Atlantic coast there are three species of periwinkles. One of them is still almost completely marine. It lives down among the rockweeds where it is always wet or at least very damp. It lays its eggs on the weeds, and the young hatch out there and develop. Another species, called the common periwinkle,

4

comes far up on the shore -- as far as the waters of the high tide.
It can stand a good deal of exposure to the air. In fact, it has
developed a very simple sort of lung for breathing out of water.
But it is still dependent on the sea, for it sheds its eggs into
the water, and all the baby common periwinkles must spend the first
period of their existence swimming about in the waters of the ocean.

The third species, called the rough periwinkle, is almost a
land animal. Some of them live in crevices in the rocks where they
are wet only by the spray of breaking storm waves. They can live
without any contact with sea water for a week or more. Even in
their method of reproduction they have cut their ties with the sea.
The young of this species undergoes complete development within the
body of the mother. They emerge as little snails exactly like their
parents, ready for adult life. And so the three species of peri-
winkles give us a beautiful demonstration of the pattern of evolution,
as it has been working out in the sea over the ages.

That is part of the fascination of the ocean. But most of
all, the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of
yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring
with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last,
final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish
a very unscientific hope that they will not be.

A century is a very short time. Yet only a century ago men
thought nothing could live in the deep waters of the ocean. They
believed that, at most, there could be only a "few sparks" of life
in the black waters of the oceanic abyss. Now, of course, we know

better. In the year 1860 a surveying vessel was looking for the best route for the trans-Atlantic cable. When the sounding line was brought up from a depth of about a mile and ahalf, there were starfish clinging to the line. The same year a cable was brought up for repairs

from the bottom of the Mediterranean. It was heavily encrusted with corals and other animals that evidently had been living on it for months or years. Such discoveries gave our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers their first proof that the floor of the deep sea is inhabited by living creatures.

Now, in our own time, another mystery of the sea is engaging the attention of scientists. This is the nature of the life of those strange, middle regions of the sea -- far below the surface, but also far above the bottom.

We had always assumed that these mid-depths were a barren, almost lifeless, Sahara of the sea. They lie beyond reach of even the strongest rays of the sun. And where there is no sunlight, no food plants can live. So we assumed that life would be too scarce to support a very abundant animal population there.

Then about ten years ago came the discovery of immense concentrations of some living creatures, spread like a cloud over much of the ocean at a depth of a quarter of a mile or more. No one is sure just what these creatures are. As yet they have been "seen" only with the impersonal eye of echo sounding instruments. These instruments automatically record the depth of water under a moving vessel. They trace the contour of the ocean floor as a continuous

line on a strip of paper. They also record, as traces or smudges
on the paper, any solid objects, like schools of fish, that lie
between the surface and the bottom. Hundreds of vessels have now
found this layer of living creatures over the deeper parts of all
oceans of the world. It has sometimes been called the "phantom
bottom" of the sea, because people at first mistook it for shoals
or sunken islands, and reported submerged land where none existed.
As Everyone agrees now that the layer is composed of living creatures,
At night -- in darkness -- it moves up to the surface of the sea.
But just before daybreak it descends again into deep water where
light cannot follow it. Many small shrimplike creatures are known
to do this. Also, some of the weird fishes of the deep sea come
to the surface at night, like those Mr. Heyerdahl described so
vividly in Kon-Tiki.

Scientists have tried to sample the layer with nets. You
can never be sure, though, that your nets are catching everything.
Perhaps the very creatures that are the key to the mystery are
too swift to be caught. So the results are not very satisfying.
Some people think the mystery creatures are shrimps -- billions
and billions of them. Others think they are fish or squid. If
they should turn out to be something edible, The layer would re-
present an enormous food supply because of its almost ocean-wide
dimensions. The answer to this enigma may come very soon, for
a great many people are working on it.

One very common misconception about the sea was corrected
by studies made during the Second World War. We always used to
think of the deep sea as a place of silence. The idea that there

could be, sound under water had not entered most people's minds. Nor had the idea that fish or shrimp or whales had voices. When technicians began listening for submarines during the war, they heard a most extraordinary uproar. In fact, the tumult of undersea voices was so great that whole fleets of submarines could have passed by undetected. Later, of course, means were developed for filtering out and separating the various sounds.

I thought it might be fun for us today to take a trip under water and listen to the sounds we might hear if we could actually visit the deep sea. Scientists of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have made some remarkable recordings of the voices of fish and shrimps. Through the courtesy of the Institution, I have obtained some of these recordings and in a moment we will listen to them. But first, a word about the method. The recordings were made by lowering a hydrophone into the water. The sound frequencies are the same as would be heard by the human ear under water. Most of the recordings were made in the open ocean, where the water was more than two miles deep. Sometimes we can tell you the identity of the sound-makers, sometimes not.

The first recording was made by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution vessel CARYN, near Bermuda. The sound you will hear is made by shrimp. It is a sizzling, crackling noise. It is made by the clicking and snapping of the claws of thousands of small shrimp.

People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea. This is especially true, I find, of men. Perhaps they have been used to thinking of the more exciting fields of science as exclusively masculine domains. In fact, one of my correspondents a few days ago addressed me as "Dear Sir" -- explaining that although he know perfectly well I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact.

Then, even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not an oversize, Amazon-type woman. I can offer no excuse for not being what people expect, but perhaps I might say a few words about why a woman, and only an average-size one att hat, should have become a biographer of the MABUMAX sea.

For years before I ever saw it, I thought about it, and dreamed about it, and tried to picture what it would be like. I loved Swinburne and Masefield and all the other great poets of the sea. When I wrote stories for my classes in English Compositi n, they ofetn had a marine background.

As a college student I becam interested in biology; and very naturally I soon began to specialize in marine biology. I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. I never tired wix of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole -- that wonderful place of wix whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing waters. I loved to watch the waves breaking at Nobska Point after a storm. At was at Woods Hole, too, that I first discovered the rich scientific literature of the sea. But it is fair to say that my first impressions of the sea were sensory and emotional; and that the intellectue response came later.

Recently I have discovered that a great many people feel just as I do about the ocean. A really overwhelming number of them have written to tell me so. This past summer I have been traveling along the New England coast, gat hering material for a new book. I have been looking at people as well as at sea animals. And I have been deeply impressed by what I saw. Everywhere there were some who simply sat -- or stood -- and gazed out over the sea, without saying a word. Whatever they were consciously thinking, the spell that it cast over them was plainly written on their faces. I have been trying to analyze some of the reasons for that fascination.

The sea is a place where one gets a sense of the great antiquity of the
earth. It links the dim beginnings of time with the present. The
same sort of waves we watch today must have rolled in from Paleozoic
seas. I suppose the surface of the ocean looks about as it did half
a billion or a billion years ago, when the first primitive forms of
life were stirring in it. And even some of our shore lines must look
as they did in that period, some 300 million years ago, when the
first animals were coming out on land to take up a strange new life.

I was reminded of that last summer when I stood on one very beautiful
point on the rocky coast of Maine. We had some down to the point
through an evergreen forest that had its own sort of enchantment. All
its trees -- the living and the dead -- were hung with the silvery
grey of mosses and lichens. But it was a foggy morning, and when we

reached the rocks above the surf, the mist lay between us and the forest, and all we could see were those great, primeval rocks and the sea. Except for our own presence, it might have been a scene in one of the closing periods of the Paleozoic Era. Some of the animals clinging to the rock walls of the tide pools might almost have been those early pioneers that first came out on land, back in Silurian time.

### NOW HERE IS THE PARTICULAR MAGIC OF THE SEA

Exciting things are happening there today, just as they did millions of years ago. Evolution, and the adaptation of creatures to new surroundings, did not stop back in prehistoric time. They are still going on. That very day, only a few weeks ago, we saw hundreds of small, inconspicuous sea animals that were in the midst of a great experiment -- the transition from a sea life to a land life.

These animals were small SNAILS known as PERIWINKLES.

I am sure most of you have seen them on rocky coasts. In some places their dingy grey shells are so abundant you can hardly step without treading on them.

The periwinkles are NOW IN THE PROCESS OF LEAVING THE SEA AND turning into land snails.

One by one they are cutting the ties that bind them to the ocean. You can see that some have made more progress than others.

HERE ON OUR NORTHERN ATLANTIC COAST there are three species of periwinkles.

One of them in still almost completely marine. It lives down among the rockweeds where it is always wet or at least very damp. It lays its eggs on the weeds; the young hatch out and develop there.

It comes far up on the shore -- as far as the waters of the high tide. It can stand a good deal of exposure to air. In fact it has developed a simple lung for breathing out of water. But it is still tied to the sea, for it sheds its eggs into the water, and all the babies spend the first part of their existence swimming about in the ocean.

The third species, called the ROUGH PERIWINKLE, is almost a land animal.

Many of them live in crevices high in the rocks where they are wet only by the spray of breaking storm waves. They can live without any contact with sea water for a week or more. Even in their method of reproduction they have cut their ties with the sea. The young of this species undergoes complete development within the body of the mother -- emerging as little snails exactly like their parents, ready for adult life.

AND SO the three species of periwinkles give us a beautiful demonstration of the pattern of evolution, as this pattern has been working out in the sea over the ages.

That sort of thing is part of the fascination of the ocean.
But most of all, the SEA IS A PLACE OF MYSTERY.
One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved.
But often the solution seems to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper
mystery.
I doubt that the last, the ultimate mysteries of the sea will ever
be resolved.
In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.

A CENTURY IS REALLY A VERY SHORT TIME -- yet only a century ago men
thought nothing could live in the greatest depths of the ocean.
Now, of course, we know better. Back in the 1860's some of the
vessels that were laying the trans-Atlantic cable began to bring
up living creatures from the bottom of the ocean. Soon after that
the famous WALKER CHALIFFE GER expedition went around the world; the
CHALLenger nets and dredges brought up weird creatures from all
depths.

Only this past summer a Danish ship was probing into the great
Mindanao Deep, off the Philippines, where the sea bottom lies six
miles below the surface.

One of the greatest mysteries of the sea at the present time is
the nature of the life of those middle regions -- far below the
surface, but also far above the bottom.

We had always thought of these regions as comparatively barren and
lifeless. They lie beyond reach of even the strongest rays of the
sun. Where there is no sunlight, no plants can live. So it seemed
likely food would be too scarce to support many animals.

NOW IMMENSE CONCENTRATIONS OF LIVING CREATURES have been discovered, spread like a cloud over much of the ocean at a depth of a quarter of a mile or more. No one is sure just what these creatures are. As yet they have been "seen" only with the impersonal eye of echosounding instruments.

Hundreds of vessels have now found this layer of living creatures over the
deeper parts of all oceans of the world. It has sometimes been called
the PHANTOM BOTTOM, because people at first mistook it for shoals
or sunken islands. Now everyone agrees that the layer is composed
of living creatures of some forms of animal life. Aright, in darkness,
it moves up into the surface of the sea. Before daybreak it
descends again into deep water where light cannot follow it. Some
small shrimplike creatures are known to do this. Also, some of the
weird fishes of the deep sea come to the surface at night, like
those Mr. Heyerdahl described in Kon-Tiki.

Scientists have tried to sample the water with nets. You can never be
sure, though that your nets are catching everything. Perhaps the very
creatures that are the key to the mystery are too swift to be caught.
So the results are not very satisfying.