The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change

by Iain McCalman

  Flinders’s susceptible heart melted at what followed: “finding they did not understand his language, the poor fellow, in the simplicity of his heart, addressed them in broken English, hoping to succeed better.” Though Bungaree’s words might have been opaque, his fearless and open demeanor did its work. The warriors allowed him to approach and accepted his proffered gifts with pleasure. Shrewdly, Flinders followed these overtures by hosting a feast of dugong.9

  Boongaree by Pavel Mikhaylov (© 2013, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg)

  Thanks to Bungaree, Flinders’s methods of establishing good relations with Aboriginal warriors always went beyond the formal proprieties suggested in his sailing orders. In stark contrast to Cook’s experience at Endeavour River, the goodwill instilled by Bungaree’s courage and dexterous displays of spear throwing, accompanied by prolific gifts of hatchets, woolen caps, and mirrors, usually gave rise to a spirit of reciprocation. At adjacent Keppel Bay, for example, the sailors met another band of initially hostile warriors, whom they similarly befriended.

  A few days later, on August 15, two sailors strayed from the rest of their party at dusk, and with the sudden plunge of darkness became lost in a morass of muddy shoals and tangled mangroves. The following morning their worried shipmates spied a group of twenty-five Aborigines walking along the beach in the company of two ludicrously muddy figures, “with clothes all rags without shoes and stockings.” The warriors had rescued the two sailors, warmed them by a fire, fed them with broiled ducks, and led them at daybreak to the boat. Reflecting later on the character of the region’s Aborigines, Flinders was unequivocally positive: “Of their dispositions we had every reason to speak highly.”10

  On their many excursions together, we may guess that Bungaree confided to Flinders something of his own customs, ideas, and practices. Flinders certainly showed an unusually keen understanding of the environmental skills and cultures of Aboriginal people. At Wide Bay, for example, noticing denser than usual Aboriginal populations, he “inferred … that the piece of water at the head of Wide Bay was extensive and shallow; for in such places the natives drew much subsistence from the fish which there abound and are more easily caught than in deep water.” Such population density also suggested the presence of ample fresh water. He further speculated that the fleshier, stronger appearance of these northern peoples was “a result of being able to obtain a better supply of food with the scoop nets, which are not known on the southern parts of the coast.”11

  When the European sailors’ own seine nets proved inadequate, Bungaree showed them other highly effective ways of obtaining fish. His skill at spearing and his unselfishness in sharing his catch filled Flinders with admiration: “it was with much difficulty that his modesty and forbearance could be overcome, for these qualities, so seldom expressed in a savage, formed leading features in my humble friend.”12

  * * *

  For most of the early part of their voyage, however, it was Flinders’s towering ambition to eclipse Cook’s achievements as an explorer and surveyor that predominated. Strictly speaking, the Investigator and Lady Nelson shouldn’t have entered the southern end of the Reef at all, let alone attempted to resurvey Cook’s original route. Flinders deliberately defied his orders from the Admiralty to focus on the charting of the Torres Strait and Gulf of Carpentaria, because he believed his superior cartographic skills would show up Cook’s. In fact, he wanted to survey the Australian coastline so comprehensively that it would never need doing again. Along the way, he intended to find a safer passage through Cook’s “labyrinth,” and to discover new inland river routes, new animals and minerals, and new sites for settlement. All this had to be done quickly enough to also enable the charting of the Torres Strait and Gulf of Carpentaria before the onset of the northwest monsoon in early November.13

  The first weeks of the passage seemed to justify his hubris. Cook’s rough running survey had been undertaken at speed and without the use of Harrison chronometers, which now enabled the estimation of longitude with far greater accuracy. Instead of taking lunar distances, one need only compare the local time at noon to that of Greenwich and then apply standard mathematical formulas. New sophisticated theodolites also enabled angular distances to be measured along both vertical and horizontal planes. Flinders thus saw himself as one of a new breed of professional navigators who’d turned the art of surveying into a science.

  While in bays and harbors, he established a baseline with a theodolite and used the shallow-drafted Lady Nelson or the whaleboat to crisscross the waters in a triangular pattern, taking angular measurements of the whole area. When forced to use running surveys he would sail as close as possible to the shoreline—and always closer than Cook—plotting the ship’s track between fixed points along an estimated course. Wherever possible, too, he would take extra compass bearings of notable shore features. Finally, Flinders believed his specialized knowledge of the burgeoning science of magnetism would enable him to reduce magnetic variations in compass readings caused by the presence of iron.14

  As he surveyed the bays and harbors north of Fraser Island during July and August of 1802, Flinders confirmed a succession of corrections to Cook’s observations and charts made by subsequent explorers. He also made some satisfying new discoveries. Cook’s estimate of the size of Hervey Bay proved to be out by some sixteen miles. At Bustard Bay there were “considerable disparities in their two positions, and the form of the bay did not correspond with Cook’s chart.” On August 15 Flinders discovered a new port (later named Port Curtis, present-day Gladstone) that Cook had missed while sailing at night.15

  A little farther on, at Cape Keppel, he found a prospective new settlement site, complete with fertile-looking grass for cattle, “pleasant looking vallies, at the bottom of which are ponds, of fresh water frequented by flocks of ducks,” plenty of wood, and excellent fishing. Then, on August 21, he approached what he thought was a deep bight, only to discover another substantial port of “romantic appearance” that had also “escaped the observation of captain Cook.” He later named it Port Bowen, and noted that it seemed to have the most abundant fish stock that they’d yet seen. Here, too, the ship’s painter William Westall at last found a landscape of towering cliffs and woods sufficiently picturesque to please his Eurocentric eye. And when on September 7 they reached Thirsty Sound, one of the few landfalls Cook had made within the Reef lagoon, Flinders was pleased to report a steadily widening eastward gap between his and Cook’s longitude readings.16

  Yet these achievements came at a heavy cost. By the time the expedition reached Shoalwater Bay in late August, after some ninety miles of arduous coastal and harbor surveying, Flinders had an inkling of the weariness that had pervaded Cook’s men. His own officers and crew were exhausted from the endless sail changes and triangulations in choking heat. The ambitious captain began to chafe at the many barriers slowing his progress. His discovery of inland river routes was hampered by endless mudflats and impenetrable mangroves. Outbreaks of fever and diarrhea strained the sailors’ tempers and led to a drink-fueled melee in which one sailor struck an officer and had to be flogged. Flinders was himself so weak that he couldn’t even match Cook’s feat of climbing a nearby hill to take bearings. A new hazard emerged, too, in the torrential currents that swamped several of their boats and carried away the cutter. When leaving Shoalwater Bay on August 27, Flinders wrote in his journal a warning to future navigators to avoid the entranceway he’d named “Strong-tide Passage”: currents ripped through it at more than five miles an hour.17

  At Broad Sound they were stuck for a further twenty days under similar conditions while charting a morass of shoals. Here both Flinders and Murray also had to contend with stupendous ebb tides that varied thirty-two feet or more, often forcing their ships’ hulls, when deep channels disappeared, to corkscrew helplessly on the mud shallows. The Investigator narrowly escaped capsizing on one quicksand bank, and the Lady Nelson grounded on a stretch of muddy gray seabed that cracked its movable keels, fr
ont and rear.

  Such morale-sapping conditions were exacerbated by episodes of devastating slackness. Twice Flinders returned from inland excursions to find that his brother Samuel had forgotten to wind the chronometers, nullifying ratings that needed to be taken on seven consecutive days. This dereliction of duty threatened “to cripple the accuracy of all our longitudes.” Unable to delay longer, Flinders combined what ratings they had and set a course past the distant Northumberland Islands, with the intention of hunting for a passage through the outer reef to the open sea.18

  Today the wooded islands in this chain are a cruiser’s delight, but in September and early October 1802 Flinders knew them only as the start of Cook’s notorious labyrinth. Having charts made by Cook, Campbell, and Swain didn’t actually speed progress. Flinders was still forced to adopt Cook’s painstaking sailing regime of anchoring at night, taking continual soundings, and positioning lookouts on the forecastle and topmast. Several attempts to thread the Investigator through narrow channels in the coral saw the ship driven back by tides, whirlpools, and currents that swirled in the funnel-like entrances. A frustrated Flinders found himself echoing his predecessor’s complaints: “for by this time I was weary of them [reefs], not only from the danger to which the vessels were thereby exposed, but from fear of the contrary monsoon setting in upon the North Coast, before we should get into the Gulph of Carpentaria.”19

  By October 9 the vessels were so hemmed in by coral that Flinders had to resort to a further Cook expedient. Anchoring until low tide, he set out in a whaleboat to explore the line of exposed reefs in the hope of finding navigable channels. Clambering for the first time onto one of these reefs, he couldn’t refrain, even in his present predicament, from expressing a surge of romantic delight at the sight that met his eyes:

  … the water being very clear round the edges, a new creation, as it was to us, but imitative of the old, was there presented to our view. We had wheat sheaves, mushrooms, stags horns, cabbage leaves, and a variety of other forms, glowing under water with vivid tints of every shade betwixt green, purple, brown, and white; equalling in beauty and excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the curious florist. These were different species of coral and fungus, growing, as it were, out of the solid rock, and each had its peculiar form and shade of colouring; but whilst contemplating the richness of the scene, we could not long forget with what destruction it was pregnant.20

  As well as avoiding these beautiful hazards, the two captains had to prevent their ships from being sucked at night into tidal vortices created by the narrow reef channels. The resultant tussles with the ebb tides produced a succession of snapped cables and lost anchors. When the Lady Nelson severed both its kedge and bower, Flinders was reduced to sending Lieutenant Murray two grapnels to bind together into a makeshift anchor. These alarming losses finally convinced the stubborn commander that he was wrong “to persevere amongst these intricate passages beyond what prudence could approve; for had the wind come to blow strong, no anchors, in such deep water and upon loose sand, could have held the ship … I therefore formed the determination, in our future search for a passage out, to avoid all narrow channels, and run along, within the inside of the larger reefs, until a good and safe opening should present itself.”21

  Two nights later, in illustration of the wisdom of Flinders’s new resolve, the Investigator’s anchor lifted during the middle watch, allowing the ship to drift unnoticed for two miles before the anchor recaught on the verge of a line of reefs. His fury at how easily this “might have been attended with fatal consequences” redoubled on discovering that Samuel was again responsible.22

  Still, Samuel was not the only Flinders family member to flout orders. On October 17, after threading through a maze of inner and outer reefs near the Cumberland Islands, the two ships at last experienced an afternoon of clear sailing in deep water. Believing they’d finally found a passage through the outer reef, Flinders abruptly ordered the Lady Nelson to return to Sydney. His accompanying letters to Governor King explained that the converted sloop was a poor sailer, ponderously slow and liable to drift to leeward because of its flat bottom and paltry movable keels. Lacking adequate anchors, it threatened to become more a hindrance than a help. In actuality, because Flinders now had little time to reach the Torres Strait before the monsoon, he was ruthlessly removing another potential barrier to his success. The Investigator couldn’t afford to be slowed by Murray’s sluggish little brig.

  Sure enough, having rid themselves of the encumbrance, they weathered a few more jagged banks of reef to find themselves again in clear water. By October 21, 1802, the Investigator was making brisk time toward the Torres Strait with a comforting sixty-six fathoms beneath its hull. After fourteen days and more than five hundred miles of painful searching, they had discovered a new way through the Reef—later to be named Flinders Passage—which its discoverer estimated to vary between twelve and sixty miles in width.

  * * *

  Despite the need for haste the Investigator anchored each night, because of the continued danger of “straggling reefs” in an expanse of water that Flinders called “the Corallian Sea.” Nine days of coral-free sailing followed, before they were forced to divert around a large cluster of reefs that lay east of those sighted by two previous British mariners: Captain William Bligh on the Providence in 1792, and Captain Edward Edwards on the Pandora in 1791. Naming these new coral banks the Eastern Fields, Flinders on October 28 entered an opening in the reefs discovered by Edwards. But heavy banks of monsoonal cloud overhead suggested there would be no time to carry out orders for “a careful and accurate survey” of the Torres Strait.

  After another bout of reef dodging, the Investigator anchored off the largest of the islands in the Murray group the following day. The crew warily eyed around fifty “Indians” who dashed out to greet them in a fleet of canoes. For most of the previous week Flinders had instructed the hands in cannon and arms drills, but the warriors’ eagerness to obtain iron goods in return for bananas, coconuts, plantains, shells, and ornaments suggested that commerce was supplanting head-hunting. Though his vigilance never slackened, Flinders admitted to being impressed by these muscular, ornamented Islanders with intelligent countenances, palisaded houses, cultivated gardens, and swift seagoing canoes.23

  Departing a day later, they steered as far to the south toward Cape York as the many reef clusters would allow, before eventually coming to anchor near a small island. The initially puzzling sight of scores of giant, one-hundred-pound cockleshells, each positioned under a pandanus tree, proved to be an ingenious method used by visiting Islanders to overcome the lack of water. Flinders noted that “long slips of bark are tied round the smooth stems of the pandanus, and the loose ends are led into the shells … underneath. By these slips, the rain which runs down the branches and stem of the tree, is conducted into the shells, and fills them at every considerable shower; and as each shell will contain two or three pints, forty or fifty thus placed under different trees will supply a good number of men.”24

  Naming the cay Halfway Island, they sailed in a southwesterly direction before anchoring on October 31 beside a cluster of islands in sight of what Flinders presumed to be Cape York. Steering carefully among the many fringing reefs for a further few days, he eventually cut through, between Bligh’s Wednesday Island and a northwest reef, and entered the Indian Ocean on November 3, 1802. At dusk the same day the Investigator reached the Gulf of Carpentaria.25

  Matthew Flinders had found and charted the present-day Prince of Wales passage through the Torres Strait, which is still favored by most shipping traffic. Conscious of his Admiralty orders to focus on a close survey of the strait, he wrote to explain that “apprehension” of the impending monsoon had prevented this, but he still felt reason to be pleased. He’d beaten the weather and sailed through this coral minefield in only six days, which, allowing for stops, meant that he’d “demonstrated that this most direct passage, from the southern Pacific, or Great Ocean to th
e Indian Seas, may be accomplished in three days.” Sailing between the two great oceans by the usual route around the north of New Guinea took most ships at least five to six weeks.26

  Yet even while congratulating himself, Flinders was conscious of a new problem. The Investigator’s first encounter with the brisk winds and choppy swell of the open Pacific had produced leaking of around five inches per hour, but by the middle of the Torres Strait this had worsened to an alarming fourteen inches per hour. Hoping that the problem was localized, Flinders found a suitable site in the gulf to careen the hull and investigate the issue. The carpenters’ reports of November 17 were devastating: the hull was half rotten and worsening fast—planks, bends, timbers, and treenails on both the starboard and port sides were affected. The prognosis was stark: if caught in a strong gale the Investigator would founder; if grounded on a shoal it would fall to pieces. Only if cosseted in fine weather could it conceivably last a further eight to twelve months.27

  The bitter implications of this news still reverberate in Flinders’s account many years later: “I had ever endeavoured to follow the land so closely, that the washing of the surf upon it should be visible, and no opening, nor any thing of interest escape notice … and with the blessing of God, nothing of importance should have been left for future discoverers but with a ship incapable of encountering bad weather—which could not be repaired if sustaining injury … I knew not how to accomplish the task.”28