Nineteen Sixty

After dinner, Polly found a black-and-white photograph pinned to the wall of the mess hall. It showed two men in cloth caps. They stood on the deck of an older, blockier ship. Behind them was a strange machine. It looked more like a bathtub than a submarine.

The two men were Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh. The date below the photo was January 23, 1960. The machine was the bathyscaphe Trieste. On that day, the two men became the first people to reach the bottom of the deepest place on Earth.

Polly perched on a chair and studied the picture. The Trieste had a steel ball at its base, just under two metres across. The walls were thirteen centimetres thick.

Above the steel ball was an enormous tank. The tank was full of gasoline. Gasoline is lighter than seawater. It is also very hard to compress. This made the whole craft float.

To go down, they let some gasoline out. To come back up, they dropped iron pellets they carried as ballast. That was the whole system. No engine. No electric control. Just chemistry and faith.

The trip down took four hours and forty-eight minutes. At about nine thousand metres, one of the plastic windows cracked. Piccard and Walsh felt the craft shake. They heard a sharp sound. They thought about turning back. They did not.

At 10,911 metres, the Trieste settled on a pale clay seabed. Walsh later said he saw a flat fish there, about a foot long. Some biologists still debate whether what he saw was really a fish. The men stayed for twenty minutes.

Then they started the slow trip back to the surface.

Fifty-two years passed before the next person reached the same depth. In 2012, the film director James Cameron made the dive alone, in a craft he had helped design.

After Cameron came Victor Vescovo. In 2019, Vescovo began making the dive again and again. Sometimes he brought passengers.

Polly looked at the picture for a long time. The gap struck her. Fifty-two years between the first and second dive. The deepest place on Earth, visited once, then left alone.

From the galley next door came the soft sound of someone washing dishes. The mess lamp was warm. The photograph hung quietly on its nail, three men looking out from a winter morning sixty-six years ago, when the bottom of the world was about to be visited for the first time.