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Updated: May 19, 2025
Dredging in 150 fathoms is very hard work, if it has to be carried on by manual labour; but by the use of the donkey-engine to supply power, and of the contrivances known as "accumulators," to diminish the risk of snapping the dredge rope by the rolling and pitching of the vessel, the dredge has been worked deeper and deeper, until at last, on the 22nd of July, 1869, H.M.S. Porcupine being in the Bay of Biscay, Captain Calver, her commander, performed the unprecedented feat of dredging in 2,435 fathoms, or 14,610 feet, a depth nearly equal to the height of Mont Blanc.
Carpenter and myself the gunboat Lightninq, under the command of Staff- Commander May, R.N., in the summer of 1868, for a trial cruise to the North of Scotland, and afterwards to the much wider surveys in H.M.S. Porcupine, Captain Calver, R.N., which were made with the additional association of Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, in the summers of the years 1869 and 1870."
To remedy this inconvenience Captain Calver devised an arrangement not unlike that employed by the coral- fishers. He fastened half a dozen swabs, such as are used for drying decks, to the dredge. A swab is something like what a birch-broom would be if its twigs were made of long, coarse, hempen yarns.
The first use of this plan on a large scale was in an instrument of thirty-six inches aperture, finished by Calver for Dr. Common in 1879. To its excellent qualities turned to account with rare skill, his triumphs in celestial photography are mainly due. A more daring experiment was the construction and mounting, by Dr. Common himself, of a 5-foot reflector.
Precipitous limestone scars fringe the browny-green heights in many places, and almost girdle the summit of Calver Hill, the great bare height that rises a thousand feet above Reeth. The farms and hamlets of these upper parts of Swaledale are of the same greys, greens, and browns as the moors and scars that surround them.
They were seen very perfectly with powers of 350 and 400 on an 8 1/2 inch Calver reflector at 8 h. on January 25, 1885, and have been observed, but less perfectly, on subsequent occasions. The most northerly is about 10 miles from the N.W. end of the formation, and the rest occur at nearly regular intervals between it and "the neck."
There is a central peak, which, though not an easy object, I once glimpsed with a 4 inch Cook achromatic, and have seen it two or three times since with an 8 1/2 inch Calver reflector. A small crater, detected by Schmidt, which I once saw very distinctly under evening illumination, stands on the floor at the foot of the W. wall.
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