4to. Approximately 167 pages, comprising approximately 44 pages of manuscript journal entries and numerous pencil and pen-and-ink sketches and caricatures recording life aboard ship, places visited, and their inhabitants, with two watercolor coastal profiles, several drawings tipped in, and a large folding caricature of a "Surgical operation on board." (Some leaves torn or excised, occasional soiling, several leaves loose). Contemporary quarter calf, morocco lettering-piece gilt on upper cover (covers detached, spine largely perished).

AN EXTRAORDINARY FIRST-HAND RECORD OF THE CHALLENGER EXPEDITION, THE PIONEERING VOYAGE THAT LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN OCEANOGRAPHY.

H.M.S. Challenger, a Pearl-class corvette of the Royal Navy, was launched in 1858 and specially refitted for scientific exploration before departing Portsmouth on 21 December 1872 on a circumnavigation that would last more than three years. Conceived through the efforts of William Benjamin Carpenter and the Royal Society, and with its scientific staff directed by Charles Wyville Thomson, the expedition undertook the first systematic investigation of the physical and biological characteristics of the world's oceans. Among the naval officers aboard was the young Sub-Lieutenant Arthur Channer.

Over the course of nearly 69,000 nautical miles, Challenger took hundreds of deep-sea soundings and collected extensive biological, geological, and hydrographic data, fundamentally altering contemporary understanding of the deep ocean. On 23 March 1875, her crew sounded a depth of 4,475 fathoms, or 26,850 feet, in the Mariana Trench, an early measurement of the immense depression whose deepest region would subsequently take the ship's name.

Channer's journal offers a strikingly personal counterpoint to the expedition's official scientific record. Approximately 44 pages contain his manuscript account of the voyage, including visits to Bahia, Inaccessible Island, Simon's Bay, Cape Town, Kerguelen, Melbourne, and Sydney, and the expedition's passage into Antarctic waters. The remainder is devoted principally to drawings and caricatures, recording with humor and immediacy the personalities and routines of shipboard life as well as the landscapes and peoples encountered during the voyage. Particularly notable is a large folding caricature depicting a "Surgical operation on board." A number of Channer's drawings were reproduced by Eric Linklater in The Voyage of the Challenger (1972).