In the middle of August 1934 William Beebe put a memorable capstone on roughly ten years of oceanographic research by entering a cast-iron bathysphere that was then lowered to the unprecedented depth of 3,028 feet in the waters south of Bermuda. Though he later disparaged the bathysphere dives as scientifically insignificant, the entire affair was widely chronicled in newspapers and magazines and was even the subject of a real-time "radio expedition" that broadcast Beebe's deep-sea observations to listeners in the United States and England. Throughout the 1920s Beebe was both a famous explorer and a nature writer of international fame. The bathysphere descents only increased his public image as a naturalist and a daring adventurer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the events that earned him untoward attention also brought his abilities and motivations as a writer and a naturalist into question. Reviewing The Arcturus Adventure (1926), a book that chronicled the similarly ballyhooed...