HMS Challenger

Challenger was launched on 13 February 1858 at Woolwich Dockyard, a Pearl-class corvette of the Royal Navy. Her first career was conventional enough: with the North America and West Indies Station she took part in naval operations during the Second French intervention in Mexico, including the occupation of Veracruz in 1862, and from 1866 she served four years as flagship of the Australia Station, undertaking a punitive expedition in Fiji.

In 1872 the Royal Society of London obtained her from the Royal Navy and remade her for the first global marine research expedition. All but two of her guns came out and her spars were cut down; laboratories, extra cabins and a special dredging platform went in. She was loaded with specimen jars, ethanol for preserving samples, microscopes, trawls, dredges, thermometers, water sampling bottles, sounding leads — and 181 miles of Italian hemp rope for sounding, trawling and dredging.

Challenger sailed from Portsmouth on 21 December 1872 on a voyage organised by the Royal Society in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh — a grand tour of the world covering 68,890 nautical miles. She carried a complement of 243: officers under Captain George Nares (relieved by Frank Tourle Thomson in 1874), and a scientific team led by Charles Wyville Thomson, with naturalists Henry Nottidge Moseley and Rudolf von Willemoes-Suhm and oceanographers John Young Buchanan and John Murray.

Her crew was the first to sound the deepest part of the ocean, thereafter named the Challenger Deep in her honour. The expedition's findings filled the fifty-volume Report on the scientific results of the voyage of H.M.S. Challenger, published in London between 1880 and 1895, prepared under the superintendence of Wyville Thomson and completed by John Murray. Two of her own company got into print far sooner: Moseley's Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger in 1879, and W. J. J. Spry's The Cruise of the Challenger in 1876, the year she came home.

After the expedition she was commissioned as a Coastguard and Royal Naval Reserve training ship at Harwich in July 1876. In 1878 she was overhauled at Chatham Dockyard with a view to becoming a training ship for boys of the Royal Navy, intended to replace HMS Eurydice, lost off the Isle of Wight that March — but the Admiralty never went ahead. She lay in reserve until 1883, then spent decades as a receiving hulk in the River Medway.

Sold to J B Garnham on 6 January 1921, more than sixty years after her launch at Woolwich, she was broken up that same year for her copper bottom — an ordinary end for a ship whose survey work was anything but. Only her figurehead remains, kept in the foyer of the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton. Her name travelled furthest of all: the deepest sounding her crew took carries it still as the Challenger Deep, and the United States Space Shuttle Challenger was named after the ship.