He worked at a succession of aquariums around the country, until the death of his first wife and his prompt remarriage in 1876 to wealthy Mary Ann Livesey opened the way for another promising career move. With financial backing from his new wife and support from the eminent zoologist Sir Richard Owen, William acquired a site on the island of Jersey in 1877, on which he intended to build a marine research station operating on the profits of an associated zoo, aquarium, and museum.
When this scheme collapsed through lack of government support, William decided to rejoin Thomas Huxley’s patronage train. He enrolled in the professor’s comparative anatomy course at Imperial College, dedicated the three-volume A Manual of the Infusoria to him, and in 1880 obtained a position working with the great man in the government’s Fisheries Department. A year later William tried again to set up an essentially government-funded marine research station, but this, too, failed when another of Huxley’s protégés was preferred. As a consolation, Huxley recommended William for a lesser but perhaps rather timely—given Constance’s imminent release—position in Tasmania, supervising the state’s fisheries.12
Whatever his other motives, the decision to go to Australia was partly a result of William’s inability to obtain a scientific position in Britain to match his aspirations. Since his patron Huxley was by then the leading titan of British science, William had expected more. His was probably a failure of personality rather than talent. He’d always struggled to make close male friends, partly because he had inherited something of his father’s tactlessness and arrogance, along with his obsession with money, status, and social advancement. William was prickly about his standing as “a gentleman,” a status that was uncertain for such self-made men. As a result he was quick to take umbrage, and to engage in public disputes whenever he felt his honor was being impugned. Thomas Huxley approved of such ambition in his disciples, but he expected it to be laced with a dash of social idealism that seemed absent in William. In short, William was respected but not liked. Having inherited sterility thanks to his father’s syphilis, he also lacked the children so important to life in Huxley’s inner circle. All in all, William Kent’s personality seemed repellently cold and calculating.13
These traits were revealed in his shameful treatment of Constance during her twenty-two years of miserable imprisonment. In all this time William wrote to her just twice, and then only for formal reasons. He also completely ignored her many pleas to visit. Throughout this long neglect, Constance battled with prison authorities over her harsh conditions and treatment, sending nearly forty petitions for early release, all of which were rejected. Though contrite about her crime, she felt an understandable bitterness at the extent of her sacrifice. As the completion of her sentence drew nearer, William thus had every reason to fear what his sister might say or do after her release. While she’d been serving her debt to society, he’d been chasing his career. If forced by circumstances, Constance could well decide she had little to lose by revealing the full truth of the murder.14
* * *
If William Saville-Kent, as he’d begun calling himself from around 1880, hoped that moving to Tasmania would fulfill his ambitions and eclipse the weight of the past, he was wrong. Feted by the government on arrival, he soon found the pay inadequate and the role unclear. This ambiguity entangled him in a vicious local squabble. The Salmon Commissioners, a powerful political lobby group with gentry pretensions, believed that his chief function was to confirm the acclimatization in Tasmania of British salmon. On investigating the evidence, however, William decided that the vaunted trophies of eminent figures like the governor weren’t examples of the royal sporting fish, Salmo salar, at all, but overgrown specimens of European and American trout. Genuine salmon had failed to acclimatize because of the warm local waters. William’s abrasiveness in publicizing this embarrassing opinion would, among other factors, eventually cost him his job.
As a disciple of Huxley, Saville-Kent had arrived in the colony with a scientific program that quickly proved too visionary for the faux-gentlemen of the Salmon Commission. After a systematic review of local fishery conditions, he immediately set about developing a research station to study and culture marine species. Built to his design on government land at Hobart’s Battery Point, it boasted a laboratory, saltwater hatcheries, and aquaculture facilities. Here he instituted methods for culturing oysters and lobsters, and encouraged local fishermen to develop markets for indigenous fish and crayfish. In his spare time he wrote zoological papers, expounding to Tasmania’s Royal Society his ideas about the state’s failure to produce genuine salmon, and fueling his enemies’ complaints that he was too academic for the superintendent’s job.
By late 1887, William’s situation in Australia looked untenable. An application to renew his Tasmanian contract was rejected, some part-time oyster-protection work he’d been doing with the Victorian government was due to terminate, and an overture for a fisheries position with the New South Wales government was blocked by a rival.15
William’s other pressing mission, to acclimatize the scandal-haunted Kent family in Australia, had also hit some difficulties. True, his younger half sisters were doing well. Florence had arranged a position as a governess in Sydney before migrating, and was now trying to find a similar post for Mary Amelia. (Eveline later trumped them all, arriving in Australia in October 1889 as Mrs. Johnson, having married a Melbourne doctor in Europe.) But William’s younger half brother Acland, twenty-six, had pulmonary tuberculosis which hampered his efforts to find work. After spending six months in Hobart, he’d drifted to the Victorian goldfields, where he died in Bendigo in May 1887.16
William traveled alone to Melbourne to attend the funeral of this last surviving brother, who’d been born only one month after the death of Francis. Twenty-seven years earlier, at the age of fifteen, William had sat beside Francis’s tiny coffin on the way to the family graveyard at East Coulston, where a menacing headstone read: “Cruelly Murdered at Road/June 30th 1860/Aged 3 Years and 10 Months/Shall not God Search this Out/For He Knoweth the Secrets of the Heart?”17
At this moment in 1887, too, Constance must have loomed like a ticking bomb, being now virtually on his doorstep. So infamous was she back in Britain that her deeds had been sung in ballads through London’s streets, and her wax effigy displayed for two decades at Madame Tussaud’s. Her release from prison had been reported in metropolitan newspapers. Yet what William did to contact or help her after she arrived in Sydney, nobody knows; nothing certain has been established of Constance’s movements during her first three or four years in Australia. Perhaps William offered her money to support herself in Sydney, or perhaps he invited her to live in his home, first in Hobart and later in Brisbane, until she found work. Perhaps it was the strain of her presence that made Mary Ann decide to go back alone to England in October 1887, in order to take a “holiday.”18
* * *
In the year of Australia’s centenary, 1888, William’s luck suddenly changed. An unsolicited request from the Queensland government to report on the state’s main oyster sites in Moreton Bay was followed by an invitation to accompany Captain H. P. Foley Vereker of the HMS Myrmidon on a survey voyage of the Cambridge Gulf in northwest Australia. “With alacrity,” William grabbed at this chance to escape his troubles and explore a tropical region unknown to science.19
Even the transit voyage on the China Navigation Company’s steamer Tsinan proved life-changing. On the way to join the expedition in Darwin, the ship called for a few hours at the Cairncross Islets, around forty miles north of modern Mackay. William, who’d never seen a living coral reef, arrived at dusk, when the upper platform of the fringing reef was partially uncovered by the tide, to reveal corals “growing in their native seas and in their wonderful living tints.”20
William threw himself into a frenzy of collecting, theorizing, and drawing. He sketched black bêche-de-mer (Holothuria) pushing particles of sand and coral into their circular mouths, purple starfish thrusting their spinous arms
“in every direction apparently seeking for food,” and semitransparent pink Synapta floating ethereally in shallow tidal rock pools. “Unsolved mysteries” seemed to confront him wherever he looked: the unknown taxonomies and ecologies of the thousands of chambered spiral shells scattered on the reef, clusters of young stony Madrepore corals floating on chunks of pumice, hordes of tiny oysters clinging to mangroves and apparently new to science. In short, William Saville-Kent fell instantly and permanently in love with the wondrous marine world of the Great Barrier Reef.21
A stint of collecting in Darwin before embarking on the longer survey of the Cambridge Gulf saw him gather further biological riches. These, on William’s return, brought him introductions to several of Queensland’s most influential scientists. He donated sixty-seven specimens of molluscs to the Queensland Museum, care of its biologist, Charles Hedley, and a substantial collection of birds and reptiles via the museum’s zoology curator, Charles de Vis. Many proved new to science, including a bird that de Vis flatteringly named Natricidiae kentii. Reporting these discoveries in a paper to the Congress of the Australian Advancement of Science early in 1889 earned William an invitation to join the Queensland Royal Society, and, only a month later, nomination as the society’s next chairman.22
Such triumphs added weight to a proposal for a full-time job that William had dashed off to the Premier of Queensland, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, just before joining the survey on the Myrmidon. His timing proved perfect: Queensland’s two rival conservative leaders, McIlwraith and Sir Samuel Griffith, wanted to join political forces and both were worried about the depletion of the state’s marine resources. All of the Reef’s marine industries, including the lucrative pearl-shell trade, had been showing falling returns because of overfishing and the incursion of Japanese luggers. New licensing regulations passed in 1881 had not worked. By March 1889, even the Torres Strait pearlers were pressing for restrictions to be placed on the harvesting of immature pearl shell.23
In that same month, William received an offer from the Queensland government for a three-year, full-time position as Commissioner of North Australian Fisheries on a substantial salary. He immediately traveled to Brisbane by train, accompanied by his wife, Mary Ann, and another unnamed member of his family, probably Constance. The three moved into “Ellan Yannin,” a comfortable Queenslander house high off the ground with wide verandas and trellises of climbing vines. Set in bushland at Kangaroo Point, overlooking the Brisbane River, it was soon filled with genteel objects, including a piano, stylish furniture, and a handmade shotgun for hunting birds.24
A well-paid job was not the only by-product of William’s voyage north. While waiting for repairs to the ship in Darwin, he had gathered and recorded local fish species with the help of a policeman, Paul Foelsche, who was also a noted photographer. Mary Ann, on hearing William’s subsequent account of the man’s photographic achievements, seems to have been inspired to give her husband a “modest form of camera.” This in turn prompted him to buy two baby fern owls from a local bird salesman to use as photographic subjects. Both actions proved portentous, the camera because it brought William’s disparate artistic, scientific, and technological talents into a single unified focus, and the two baby owls because they liberated repressed feelings of love and whimsy in his wounded personality.25
William loved his camera and his birds, recording every antic, posture, and vocal acquisition of the two “balls of fluff” with the besotted delight of a new father. As brother and sister, the owls displayed the same bonds of affection that he and Constance had shown each other long ago at Road House. Like the two children during that terrible time, the owls played “with delightful abandon” in the presence of those they loved, but shrank and froze into sticklike immobility in the threatening presence of others. So deeply did William identify with the little creatures that he even visited the local zoo to chirrup greetings to its collection of downcast fern owls. He admitted also to a strong urge to “open their prison doors” and let them fly free, a feeling his sister would have understood only too well.26
If, as seems likely, Constance did share William and Mary Ann’s Brisbane home for part of 1889, it would have been a chance for the two siblings to restore something of the broken trust between them. In the winter of that year, Mary Ann and a female relative traveled down to Sydney by rail on an unspecified errand. Soon after this, Constance’s movements can be tracked with some certainty. The year 1890 marked the beginning of her new career in Australia. Starting as a volunteer in Melbourne’s typhoid tents, “Ruth Emilie Kaye,” as she was now known, went on to enroll at the Alfred Hospital, embarking on what would turn out to be a long and distinguished nursing career.27
* * *
Released suddenly from the strain of unemployment and potential exposure as a murderer, William also discovered a refuge from worldly cares and his past at the remote marine frontier of the Torres Strait, a place where he could exercise his full range of talents and ease the shackles on his stiff personality. After the setback in Tasmania, he was eager to show off his practical usefulness and economic value as a marine scientist and resource manager. A review of Queensland’s fishing industries, plus conversations with McIlwraith and Griffith, suggested an urgent need for what he called “a redemption” of the edible oyster and pearl-shell industries, especially the latter. The Torres Strait pearling industry, normally one of Queensland’s leading revenue producers at around $350,000 a year, had become so exhausted that much of the harvested shell was now too small for button manufacturers to use.28
Ever since his time as an aquarium biologist, William had championed artificial cultivation as a means of developing sustainable fishing industries. But nobody had yet come up with a way of doing this for pearl shell. Most of the region’s shallow pearl-shell beds were exhausted, and deep-sea beds could not be protected from plunderers. Veteran pearlers also denied the viability of transferring immature oysters to shallow pools because this would mean severing their “abysses” (anchor cables), which would cause them to die or drift away on the currents. Moreover, luggermen believed that young oysters would perish in transit even before this.
Between 1889 and 1891 William made three extended stays in the Torres Strait to tackle these problems. Enthusiastic support from two of the region’s most influential Europeans made his task a good deal easier. Frank Jardine was a pearler-adventurer from Somerset, near the Albany Passage, and John Douglas was Government Resident and Police Magistrate at Thursday Island: both helped William to visit the deepwater Old Fields near Badu Island, where, using boats and diving equipment, he was able to collect abundant samples of immature shell.
Jardine, his wife, Sania, and son, Bootles, also offered William hospitality in their cliff-top house at Somerset, and provided sites for the giant clamshells filled with seawater that he used for his oyster-transplantation experiments. Having successfully transported young pearl oysters from the deep beds in these portable aquariums, William also discovered that a series of shallow coral rock pools near John Douglas’s Thursday Island residence offered current-washed environments perfectly suited to oyster growth. To his delight, the young pearl oysters “adapted themselves with alacrity to the novel environment.” They grew new abysses until their shells were heavy enough to resist the currents by their own weight. In one six-week period most of William’s young oysters added an astonishing half an inch to their shells.29
After canvassing opinions from both small- and large-scale pearlers, William recommended a program of industry reforms. In order to replenish oyster stock, he contended, Endeavour Strait needed to be closed to pearling for three years, and no pearl shell should be sold before reaching an interior measurement of six inches—a size enforceable by inspection. At the same time, accessible banks, foreshores, reefs, and shore stations around the strait could be leased to luggermen for the transfer and “cultivation” of immature shell. Such a measure would also reduce dangerous and expensive deep-sea diving, enable owners to stop their divers
stealing pearls, and deter poaching by foreigners. In 1891 the Pearl Shell and Bêche-de-Mer Fisheries Act of 1881 was amended to include all William’s suggestions.30
Investigating a variety of edible oyster beds at the southern end of the Reef, around Wide Bay, Mackay, and Cooktown, also buoyed William’s spirits. He became convinced, half wistfully, that there was no more “perfect elysium” than the life of a north Queensland oyster farmer. “In no other country in the world,” he wrote, “is so healthy, congenial and non-laborious a means of earning a substantial competency open to … all classes.” He helped these farmers combat the problem of losing a high percentage of free-swimming oyster embryos (spat) at sea by building cheap, split-paling collectors on which the spat could cling. He also urged the industry to develop advanced culturing processes whereby ova could be matured into viable embryos within hatcheries.31
Taken overall, William concluded, the twelve-hundred-mile extent of the Great Barrier Reef represented “a vast harvest-field ripe for the sickle, wherein, as yet skilled biological labour is all but unknown.” Much could still be done, he suggested, to exploit lucrative and potentially sustainable marine resources such as edible fish, dugong oil, turtle meat, tortoiseshell, and black coral.32
Yet it was as a scientific rather than an economic biologist that William grew to love the Reef. He thought the region’s intertidal areas and “lime saturated” coral seas to be “one of the most active and visibly effective of Nature’s petrological laboratories.” And Thursday Island, he believed, offered a site “unequaled” in the world for the study of tropical biology. To prove his point he threw himself into a breathless research program, drafting scores of scientific papers, collecting specimens for London’s Natural History Museum, investigating new species with his dissecting knife and microscope, and sketching and photographing varieties of corals for a projected book on reefs.33
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 17