Remembered Lives

Description

Remembered Lives gives voice to the sailors who have vanished from the history of the long-famed Challenger expedition (1872­–1876). The voyage transformed our understanding of the oceans. The ship’s elite, the scientists and officers, found fame and fortune denied to the ordinary men. One such was my great–grandfather, one of a dozen stokers on board. I first learned about the Challenger voyage from my mother, Stella, and her siblings, Edith and George. Their grandfather, Charlie Collins, had run away to sea, defying his father’s wishes, adopted his mother’s surname and sailed on the ‘Nares-Thomson expedition to the South Pole’. In the 1920s, the elderly Charlie and his wife Mary lived with their son George, his wife and three children in Brighton, Sussex. Turns out that the cantankerous grandfather was one of the 211 seaman aboard Challenger’s celebrated quest for scientific discovery.