The Beagle was an incredible vessel, but most impressive to me were the people aboard. They were drawn from all over the world: American, British like myself, Germans, Chinese, Russians, Japanese. They were nearly all scientists, except for the staff who operated the submarine and me and my three security personnel. I must say, we non-scientists felt a bit out of place at first; on the mess deck, all the talk was of the experiments. I had expected there to be just one experiment. On that point, I was very wrong.

The Beagle was in some ways a floating university with multiple departments, each with specialists in the field, all of them conducting different research. We took ice core samples in Antarctica, collected soil samples from the ocean floor, and took on animals from all over the world. Human test subjects were common—people from all nations and races—and were taken to labs that were off-limits to non-essential personnel. All this activity baffled me. How could all of this be related to one project?

Of course, nothing inspires curiosity like a secret. Like the sailors, I did my share of speculating and prodding the scientists about what they were researching. I knew the vessel’s namesake, the HMS Beagle, had carried a young Charles Darwin on the voyage around the world that helped him form his theory of natural selection. I wondered if the scientists on this vessel were testing a theory as groundbreaking.

I have never been claustrophobic, but my time on the Beagle tested my comfort level with confinement. The crew quarters were small and separated by gender. The bunks were stacked three tall, with twelve of us to a berth. We shared a shower the sailors called a rain locker (they called the bunks racks or bunkies). Indeed, the men who ran the sub seemed to have a language all their own, mostly comprised of curse words. Sailors not pulling their weight were called bent shitcans. Sailors who only looked out for themselves were check valves. Surface ships and sailors were skimmers (a derogatory term, apparently). Passageways were p-ways. Radiation was zoomies. Marine life spotted on sonar—dolphins and whales—were called biologics. Clear your baffles meant to look behind you. Poking holes in the ocean meant we were underway. There was a locker dedicated to holding porn, known as the smut locker.

On the whole, I felt more of a connection to the sailors than to the scientists. That changed when I got to know my bunkmate, Yuri Pachenko. Yuri was thirty-three, about two years older than me, and smaller. But his size belied his strength, which lay mostly in his mind. He was the most intense person I’d ever met. His story revealed why.