One of the fun things about my blogging is that I keep turning up relatively unknown works by famous authors which, although not on par with their classics, give fascinating insights into the authors’ views.  They’re usually quite entertaining, as well!

Soon after reading John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, I stumbled across yet another book about the interaction of mankind with the denizens of the deepest oceans: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep (1929).

Doyle, though certainly best known for his stories about Sherlock Holmes, was no stranger to a good adventure or horror story.  The Lost World (1912), for instance, dealt with an expedition to a remote South American plateau where dinosaurs and other monsters still dwell.

The Maracot Deep, however, is set in the other great frontier of that era: the deepest parts of the ocean.  It is one of Doyle’s weaker novels, and is extremely short, but is a fun read and is one of the last truly ‘speculative’ novels about the undersea world.

The novel follows the adventures of three men, led by the obsessive Professor Maracot, as they descend into one of the deepest parts of the ocean, southwest of the Canary Islands, into an area that Maracot is convinced will later be named “The Maracot Deep” after himself.  Maracot’s companions are a gruff American mechanic named Bill Scanlan and a young zoologist named Cyrus Headley, who narrates most of the story.

The novel begins in the form of letters from Headley, one of which was sent prior to his descent and one of which was recovered mysteriously after Headley and the others were presumed lost at sea.  His first letter describes his meeting with Maracot, “an animated mummy,” who “lives on some mental mountaintop, out of reach of ordinary mortals.”  Headley, who is told very little about the purpose of the trip from the mysterious Maracot, assumes that they will be trawling for new deep-sea specimens.  Much to his surprise, he finds that Maracot intends to descend to the bottom of the Atlantic, in his newly-designed submersible.  Headly, on first viewing the device, describes it:

I had a most unpleasant impression that it was my own coffin at which I was gazing, but, even so, I had to admit that it was a very adequate mausoleum.  The floor had been clamped to the four steel walls, and the porthole windows screwed into the centre of each.  A small trap-door at the top gave admission, and there was a second one at the base. The steel cage was supported by a thin but very powerful steel hawser, which ran over a drum, and was paid out or rolled in by the strong engine which we used for our deep-sea trawls.  The hawser, as I understood, was nearly half a mile in length, the slack of it coiled round bollards on the deck.  The rubber breathing-tubes were of the same length, and the telephone wire was connected with them, and also the wire by which the electric lights within could be operated from the ship’s batteries, though we had an independent installment as well.

It is easy and natural to jump to the conclusion that Doyle was inspired by the bathysphere of Beebe and Barton, but The Maracot Deep was published in 1929 — and the bathysphere would not be used on a manned dive until 1930.  In fact, Doyle’s inspiration seems to have come from an earlier pioneer: as Maracot himself states, his device is “an extension of the experiment of the Williamson Brothers at Nassau.”

John Ernest Williamson (1881-1966) was a pioneer of undersea photography, and in 1914 he and his brother George filmed the first underwater motion pictures in a submarine chamber dubbed the “Williamson photosphere”:

Williamson’s films captured the imagination of the public and a number of famous figures, including, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Williamson’s chamber was not designed for deep water dives, but it was not a great leap of the imagination to envision the concept being extended to explore the depths.

In the story, Maracot and Headley descend successfully into the Atlantic along with their plucky American engineer (“Well, well, you are sure bughouse, the two of you, to think of such a thing.  But I’d feel a cheap skate if I let you go alone.”).  Things go smoothly until a monstrous crayfish sets its sights on the chamber, and its attack snaps the support cable and sends the explorers careening to the deepest parts of the ocean, at 25 thousand feet.

Seemingly doomed to a slow death by suffocation, they are astounded to first recognize man-made structures outside their porthole — the remains of fabled Atlantis — and then to have one of the inhabitants of the city peek back in through the window at them!  The Atlanteans rescue them and bring the adventurers into their society, where they are gradually made welcome.  Soon the surface-dwellers are embarking on numerous explorations of the undersea world, and avoid a number of horrible fates at the hands of monstrous deep-sea fauna.

As I’ve noted already, Doyle’s work is truly speculative in that nobody in his time had any knowledge of the deep oceans, other than random creatures dredged up by nets.  He was therefore free to concoct whatever conditions suited his storyline.

We know now that the deepest parts of the ocean are regions of great darkness and crushing pressure.  Doyle speculated that some unknown force actually makes the pressure lessen as one gets below a certain depth, a conceit which allows his characters to wander around relatively freely once they acquire Atlantean breathing apparati.  (Doyle was well aware that the scientific consensus was crushing pressure, though, and Maracot addresses this in the book, albeit unconvincingly.)  As for illumination, Doyle envisioned a sea floor which is covered with the decaying remains of all the sea creatures from the upper reaches, and these  remains luminesce as they rot.  We now know that the only sources of fluorescence in the deepest waters are the denizens of those regions.

The fanciful Atlantean technology was also clearly chosen to smooth over some of the rough patches in the story.  Maracot and friends communicate with the Atlanteans by a device which allows the projection of thoughts as images.  The Atlanteans travel along the ocean floor in suits made of a hard crystalline material possessing a built-in rebreather:

The man, if indeed he was of the same humanity as ourselves, had a transparent envelope all round him which enveloped his head and body, while his arms and legs were free.  So translucent was it that no one could detect it in the water, but now that he was in the air beside us it glistened like silver, though it remained as clear as the finest glass.  On either shoulder he had a curious rounded projection beneath the clear protective sheath.  It looked like an oblong box pierced with many holes, and gave him an appearance as if he were wearing epaulettes.

The natural fauna of the undersea world are mainly large and aggressive versions of things found in the shallower waters.  Doyle, however, is no stranger to horror, as his excellent story Lot No. 249 demonstrates, and some truly clever and nasty creatures are encountered in the water.  At one point, when all the Atlanteans flee indoors in terror, Headley peeks out the window to see what has frightened them so:

All that we could see was a couple of greenish wisplike clouds, luminous in the centre and ragged at the edges, which were drifting rather than moving in our direction.  At the clear sight of them, though they were quite half a mile away, my companions were filled with panic and beat at the door so as to get in the sooner… I saw the strange shimmering green circles of light pause before the door.  As they did so the Atlanteans on either side of me simply gibbered with fear.  Then one of the shadowy creatures outside came flickering up through the water and made for our crystal window.  Instantly my companions pulled me down below the level of vision, but it seems that in my carelessness some of my hair did not get clear from whatever the maleficent influence may be which these strange creatures send forth.  There is a patch there which is withered and white to this day.

The ultimate horror arrives, however, at the end of the novel, when the surface explorers venture into an area feared and shunned by the Atlanteans.  Without giving too much away, let me note that the explorers encounter something quite unexpected, and the meeting sets the stage for a battle of good versus evil as the climax of the story.  This shift, which is somewhat jarring, is not surprising considering the character of Doyle, who grew increasingly spiritual later in life, and even wrote a book arguing for the existence of fairies in 1921.  The Maracot Deep was his last novel, and it is not surprising to see his spiritual views reflected within.

It is interesting to note that this tale shares much in common with Dennis Wheatley’s They Found Atlantis: a scientist takes a crew to the bottom of the Atlantic, something goes wrong, the explorers are rescued from certain death by the remnants of the Atlantean civilization.  It would not surprise me if Wheatley had been inspired by Doyle’s short novel.

As I’ve said, The Maracot Deep is certainly not one of Doyle’s best works: the characters are rather undeveloped, and a number of ideas seem rather incomplete in the telling of the tale.  However, it is a fun undersea adventure, and unique as perhaps the last story speculating on the nature of the depths before science brought eyewitness accounts to the world’s attention.