A British photography student is asking Bermudians to help with a project first started more than 130 years ago.

Gary McLeod of Portsmouth, Hampshire, is an artist and PhD student at University of Arts, London, and is working on a photo project based on the voyage of the HMS Challenger that visited Bermuda in 1873.

HMS Challenger was a British research vessel that carried out a combined marine biology, botanical and ocean physics expedition in the 1870s.

Before it sailed, organisers decided to add the objective of photographing "native races to one scale".

The voyage was carried out between 1872 and 1876 and it became one of the first ocean bound scientific expeditions to have an on board photographer. In the end, three photographers took approximately 500 photographs of the places the ship visited, including Bermuda, which it first visited Bermuda on April 4, 1873, after visiting St. Thomas

"For all the people on board the ship, the voyage was a unique experience which stayed with them for the rest of their lives," Mr. McLeod said.

The ship carried out experiments at each port not unlike the experiments carried out regularly today during Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences (BIOS) plankton tows.

At this time though, their work was state of the art. They took water samples from the bottom of the ocean, took temperature readings, did depth soundings and dredged up the bottom from as deep as 3,875 fathoms.

When she arrived, the Bermuda Royal Gazette took a tour and it was reported that Bermudians were fascinated by all the equipment on ship.

It carried, dredges, hundreds of miles of rope, trawls, trammels and seines (large fishing nets), shrimp nets, lobster pots, harpoons and fishing tackle of all sorts, deep sea sounding instruments, hydraulic machines, pressure gauges and more.

The scientific team was led by scientist Dr. Wycliffe Thomas, known for expeditions in the Arctic. They were typical of naturalists of the day, believing "shoot first" figure out what it is, later.

The Bermuda Royal Gazette reported: "The laboratory is the next object worthy of attention, a very museum of itself, with all the choicest deep sea forms snugly laid in their alcoholic graves, most certainly proclaiming the truth of the poetic sentiment 'still beautiful in death'.

"Here may be seen bottled up in glass jars raked up from the dark recesses of the mighty deep: crustatceans without eyes, for what use would eyes be where there is no light. How these eyeless creatures get their food is a mystery."

On this leg of the voyage, Caleb Newbold took photographs, and the scientific team visited various dignitaries. The team was particularly interested in a hill of shifting sand that had reportedly swallowed up a house. The Governor of Bermuda spent about three hours touring the ship.

It was not the HMS Challenger's only visit to Bermuda. They left Bermuda, went to New York and returned to Bermuda before going on to the Azores.

Now, 137 years later, Mr. McLeod's goal is to collectively and remotely re-photograph the locations photographed in the 1870s, from the same places today.

He is piecing together information about the voyage through crew journals, letters, logs and published accounts.

"In the journals there is an interesting record of capturing an octopus in Bermuda," he said in an interview with The Royal Gazette. "They got it out of a cave. They were invited to the ambassadors house and they went on a picnic. They went to a particular cove. There was a hole and this octopus had been causing problems. They caught it on a hook."

Mr. McLeod is carrying out the project as part of a PhD project at the University of Arts, London, although he might eventually turn it into a book.

He said so far, the has had some success in Japan and Gibraltar, where the ship also visited. He is now looking for Bermuda volunteers to help him.

Some of the photographs of Bermuda he is trying to match include the shifting sand hill mentioned in the ship diary.

There are also several pictures of Dockyard, including a three masted ship in the floating dock. Some of them are pretty non-descript such as a rocky outcrop.

Mr. McLeod is hoping there is some Bermudian who knows well the exact outcrop.

"Participants can be anyone with a camera, and or an interest in history, photo-graphy and or art," he said. "The process is fairly simple: members need only join 'SNS Challenger', a social network site set up for the project.

"They have to look at the original photographs, find where they were taken, re-photograph them, and then upload them to the SNS for discussion."

People who send photographs contribute their pictures under the creative commons license which means it can be used by anyone in the group as long as long as it isn't being used for personal gain.

The original pictures belong to the Museum of Natural History in London.

They were taken by three different photographers on the voyage. Mr. Newbold, the photographer who took pictures in Bermuda, "absconded" in South Africa after a year. The second photographer also took off after about a year.

According to Mr. McLeod this may have been partly because photographers weren't treated very well on the ship.

"The photographers were not very well respected," said Mr. McLeod. "They were among the lowest paid people on board.

"They also had an artist on board. To have both seemed to cancel each other out. The artist was also the secretary to the scientist on board. The artist was the second highest paid person on board."

Mr. McLeod is currently working on his PhD remotely from Japan. He moved to Japan to teach English as a second language. He has a masters degree in digital arts from Camberwell College of Arts.

"What I know is that my practice has a unique trajectory, and along it, I have gathered "samples" which have in turn become my projects," he said. "I am interested in journeys, quests and voyages and my practice is my way of locating myself in the 'grid'.

"My direction? Keep going straight and I will eventually hit land. Columbus' mistake was saying where he was headed."

Further information about the project can be found at his website: www.snschallenger.org. There is also a book by Gary McLeod called 'Silent Landscape' written by Richard Corfield.

For more information about Mr. McLeod, go to his website at www.garymcleod.co.uk .

The HMS Challenger produced valuable scientific data as well as photographs. All 90 zoological and Botany reports are available for perusal at http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/#H.M.S._Challenger_Library.