HALF PASS SIX

Lockhart delves into her father’s experiences during a famous oceanographic expedition in this biography.

In 1925, 16-year-old Willi Rohrbein, an undocumented German immigrant to the United States, joined the crew of the ship Arcturus out of New York City. He knew very little English, so he had little idea of the purpose of the voyage: a six-month scientific expedition led by the naturalist William Beebe to study ocean life—first in the Sargasso Sea, and then off the coast of the Galápagos Islands. After the voyage ended, Beebe, with co-author Ruth Rose, published a bestselling account of the journey. Rohrbein was aware of this fact, but it wasn’t until more than 30 years later, when his teenage daughter gave him a handsome hardcover edition of the book, that he gave it much thought. “He was not the kind to read books,” his now-adult daughter, Lockhart, writes. “The Daily News was enough.” Rohrbein had watched Beebe excitedly dredge specimens from the depths of the ocean, but he’d never understood the meaning of the work. In this blend of history and biography, Lockhart records her father’s firsthand experiences of the expedition, informed by the written account of Beebe, whom the young Rohrbein saw as a sort of parental figure; Rohrbein’s father died years before the expedition. The narrative proves to be an investigation not only into Beebe’s revolutionary nautical discoveries aboard the Arcturus but also into the author’s family history, as Lockhart seeks to understand her taciturn parent, who, in turn, plumbs the depths of his younger years. Lockhart, a novelist, writes with measured lyricism: “Maybe all his life he’s wanted to be back at sea and not be connected to any land at all,” she wonders about her father. “The sea was a new beginning, an introduction to the world between the lands, the world with depths so infinite that it stayed hidden from view.” With its ruminations on migration and finding life in unlikely places, this is a book that will sink deep into the reader’s consciousness.

A moving account of discoveries under the sea and across time.