Below is an extract from an article in the Times, Friday November 12 2004

An album containing 40 full-plate black & white photographs of HMS Challenger's round-the-world scientific voyage setting off in 1872 was sold at a Dorset auction for £20,000 (November 2004).

Some facts:

• The Challenger voyage took place 41 years after Charles Darwin's famous expedition in the Beagle in 1831. (Incidentally, it took Darwin nearly 30 years to publish his Origin of Species, in which he promoted the idea of evolution.)
  
• The Challenger was the first true oceanographic research vessel specifically designed to investigate the biology, geology and chemistry of the oceans and seafloor. According to John Shepherd, past president of the Challenger Society, HMS Challenger "was the successor to Beagle and most of the results are still valid."
  
• Funded by the Admiralty, HMS Challenger, with a compliment of 20 officers and a team of scientists, set off from Portsmouth on its four-year 68,890-mile voyage, surveying all the world's oceans.
  
• The Royal Naval vessel was refitted with laboratories, together with the latest scientific equipment and 249 miles of rope.
  
• The expedition made the first deep-ocean soundings at a record 26,850ft in a section (still known as Challenger Deep) of the Pacific's Mariana Trench. The extensive soundings made overturned many ideas about the deep ocean, and showed the existence of huge underwater ridges.
  
• The team also discovered a vast array of sea creatures.