The Remarkable Life of William Beebe sat on my shelf for more than a year before I
picked it up. The truth is I wasn't that interested. While Beebe was a
childhood hero of mine, that status was based solely on his exploits as the
first deep-sea explorer. But his life had been much more than that and unlike
the other recent Beebe book, Descent, The Remarkable Life takes
it all into account -- his career as a world-renowned ornithologist, a
naturalist extraordinaire, prolific best-selling author and mentor to countless
young scientists eager to follow in his footsteps. Despite my lack of interest
in any of these subject areas, though, I gave it a shot.
I'm glad I did. The picture that emerges of Beebe is indeed a remarkable one.
He starts life as a young boy obsessed with collecting, categorizing and
understanding the wildlife around him, and then carries that obsession with him
straight through the next eighty-plus years in a single-minded pursuit of
knowledge that sharpens, but never varies. And all that stuff I was wasn't
interested in ... well, it's pretty interesting.
The key point for me, though, and for anyone principally interested in Beebe as
an ocean explorer, is that The Remarkable Life puts it all into context.
We see that Beebe didn't just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields
from ornithology to marine biology. Of the many expeditions he had made to
study tropical birds, each began and ended with a long ocean voyage. During
those voyages, Beebe's boundless curiousity had no where to turn but the
water around him. He was constantly trawling for fish, observing invertebrates,
collecting saragassum. It was only a matter of time before too many questions
had been raised, too much curiousity piqued.
We also see how his study of wildlife evolved from the Victorian model of a naturalist
looking at each animal species in a vaccuum, removed from its environment, to a
wholistic approach taking it all into account -- the weather, the seasons, its
competitors for food and mates, its predators and prey, etc. Rather than making
a simple study of birds in a rainforest, he mapped out a quarter-mile square in
that forest to study the inter-relationships of everything in it from the
ground up to the tree canopy. At a time when the rest of the scientific world
was beginning to prize specialization, Beebe was, of neccessity, casting his
own observational net wider and wider. It's only natural that he found no
barriers preventing him from moving his field of study from that of birds, to
marine life, and then back again.
Beyond that, we see Beebe's own extraordinary social life, in which he counted
among his friends and acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine
Hepburn, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few. He was also among the first of his
generation to encourage the women around him to pursue their own scientific
studies and both of his wives had successful writing careers of their own. He
was truly a man ahead of his time.
The Remarkable Life captures all of this and more. It doesn't examine
his adventures in the bathysphere to the same degree of detail that Descent
does, and nor should it. But it's no exageration to say that it does put
everything in Descent into a whole new prespective. The Remarkable
Life of William Beebe is a wonderful book.
The Remarkable Life of William Beebe was published by Island Press in 2004.
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