The HMS Challenger expedition set sail from Portsmouth, England, on December 21, 1872, on a four-year voyage of oceanographic discovery. This pioneering scientific expedition laid the foundations of modern oceanography, systematically surveying and exploring the world's oceans and discovering thousands of new marine species.

The Challenger expedition, a monumental exercise in scientific exploration, transformed humanity's understanding of the ocean and its depths. The expedition's discoveries, including the first systematic soundings of the deep, influenced poets and writers who grappled with the concept of the sublime and the unknown, from the late Victorian poets to the modernists, who found in the ocean's vastness a metaphor for the depths of the human psyche.