Expedition – Stanfords Blog

From Destinations: The Holiday & Travel Show in London’s Olympia, The Stanfords Travel Writers Festival welcomes author and ‘travel tailor’ Amelia Dalton. She talks to Ann Morgan about her book Pages From My Passport and her many adventures.

Amelia Dalton, fresh from touring the Scottish islands, takes on the world and sets up exclusive, expedition holidays in remote places for a new cruise ship. She scopes out remote archipelagos, deserted beaches and tiny local museums from Norway to Madagascar, by campervan, taxi, boat and small plane. While planning her itineraries, she explores inaccessible islands, survives a hotel fire, a bomb in a palace, being stung by a scorpion and thrown into jail. Meanwhile, she’s being wooed from afar by a mysterious stranger who turns up in the most unexpected places.

This article is an edited introduction from The Challenger Expedition: Exploring the Ocean’s Depths by Dr Erika Jones, Curator of Navigation at Royal Museums Greenwich.

The book was published to mark the 150th anniversary of the expedition’s launch.

On the 21 December 1872, HMS Challenger set sail from Portsmouth, England, to begin a global voyage of deep-sea exploration. A landmark endeavour, the findings and the legacy shaped the development of ocean science as we know it and are still influential in our understanding of the planet today.

With technological and scientific developments of the time, supported by extensive international cooperation and a team of research and naval officers, the expedition was part of the concerted nineteenth-century drive to map the ocean floors and search for life in the abyss.

When the ship returned to Britain in 1876, the scientific team on board had amassed the then largest collection of examples of life from the deep sea. Over the next two decades, a global network of researchers prepared the results for publication culminating in a series of works that is considered the intellectual foundation of modern oceanography.

Tag: Expedition

‘Pages From My Passport’ with Amelia Dalton: Stanfords Travel Writers Festival 2024

The Challenger Expedition: Exploring the Ocean’s Depths by Dr Erika Jones