H.M.S. Sulphur, the other Beagle

Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams continues to delight with interesting vignettes. I recently read the sections on sulphur and phosphorus. I did not know that the H.M.S. Sulphur was sort-of the sister ship of the much more famous H.M.S. Beagle. Instead of Charles Darwin as the resident botanist, the samples were collected by a surgeon named Richard Brinsley Hinds. The Sulphur set sail for its circumnavigation shortly before the Beagle returned to England.

Aldersey-Williams begins his section with references to brimstone in the books of Genesis and Revelation in the Bible. I’d always wondered about the pairing of “fire and brimstone” – turns out that in ancient times sulphur was used as a disinfectant and a cleanser. One example comes from Odysseus of Ithaca, who upon returning home the long way around after the sacking of Troy, and killing the suitors of his wife Penelope, gives instructions to “bring some sulphur to clean the pollution, and make a fire so that I can purify the house”. I didn’t know this, but apparently sulphur is still sold today for cleansing purposes although the target is greenhouses. The author adds: “Sulphur fires were used to combat cholera in the twentieth century, and sulphur was taken internally for digestive and other complaints.”

The H.M.S. Sulphur was formerly a battleship, hence its terror-invoking name to match its guns, but was then recomissioned as a survey ship. The ship’s captain, Edward Belcher, was an adventurous man who visited sulphur-spewing volcanoes and hot sulphur springs in the Americas. However, when they reached Asia, he was instructed to sail to Canton as part of the British naval force in the First Opium War where the ship’s guns were brought into play.

Sulphur was one of the key ingredients in the quest for the philosopher’s stone. Every year when I teach General Chemistry, I query the students to see if they can figure out what the popular ingredients might be. This year, no one guessed sulphur, even though I tried to prompt them to think about colours that might be related to gold, since among other things, the stone was supposed to turn base metals into gold. Students are being exposed to less and less these days, perhaps. At least when we covered the mole (Avogadro’s number, not the creature), I had a clear vial of sulphur that was passed around the class – 32 grams of it! So at least now they’ve all seen the elemental substance.

Aldersey-Williams ends his section on sulphur with a great final sentence worth quoting. It refers to the H.M.S. Sulphur’s return to England after its voyage. “The ship returned to a country where the inventor Thomas Hancock had just obtained a patent for the use of sulphur in the vulcanization of rubber, and the brimstone terrors of the book of Revelation had been sufficiently tamed that the name of Lucifer could be tolerated as a brand of matches.”

[For previous posts on Periodic Tales, see here and here.]