One intriguing mystery lay almost at his back door in Brisbane. While inspecting oysters at Moreton Bay—the huge saltwater bay into which the Brisbane River flows—he noticed substantial remnants of dead corals belonging to the prolific reef-growing genera Madrepore and Favia. But why had these once-thriving corals died? A change in climate bringing colder temperatures was one possibility. Or perhaps a geological elevation of the seabed had lifted the corals out of reach of the tides. He thought it most likely, however, that sandbanks had shifted to obstruct the inflow of seawater into the bay at the same time as it was inundated by river floodwaters. This combination would subject the corals to toxic doses of fresh water.34
So little was known at that time about the character and behavior of the different coral types within the Reef. The celebrated HMS Challenger expedition of 1872 had collected sixty-one species of Australian reef corals, yet William, who made no claim to exhaustiveness, discovered more than seventy different species of Madrepore alone. Different reef locations also gave rise to distinct combinations of coral types. Madrepore corals, like the staghorn, dominated at some Port Denison reefs; luxuriant, bush-like clumps of Millepora at some Palm Island ones; mushroom corals off Adolphus Island; and leathery, bright-green Alcyonaria corals at many of Thursday Island’s reefs. Yet on reefs of the outer Barrier, such as Warrior Reef, he found no signs of the hummocky stony coral species then known as goniastrae, meandrina, and astraea, which were present on most inshore and fringing reefs.35
Reef corals also proved more protean than he’d expected. Colors often varied considerably among separate colonies of the same species, and even within what were clearly different growth epochs of the same colony. Though William did not say so explicitly, this seemed to imply environmental adaptation. Non-coral species, he noticed, also made a surprisingly large contribution to reef building. Scientists had long realized that other species with limestone structures were assimilated into coral reefs, because their skeletons were sometimes obvious in reef boulders. Now William gave an exhaustive list of the organisms that could be so absorbed. It included nullipore algae, whose tissues were lime-encrusted; minute protozoa from the class Foraminifera; sea urchins; starfish; and trepang, all of which appeared to contribute to the lime cement and conglomerate that made up the reefs.36
Knowing exactly how fast corals could grow suddenly assumed a dramatic significance, when on February 28, 1890, the pride of the British India and Australian Steam Navigation Company’s fleet, the Quetta, hit a submerged coral pinnacle in a well-charted area between the Albany Passage and Adolphus Island. The huge steamship sank in three minutes, with the loss of around half of its 182 passengers and crew. Asked to investigate the site, William concluded that the coral pinnacle responsible had grown to become an unmarked hazard during the thirty years since the last survey. Accurate studies of coral growth rates in different environments needed to be undertaken urgently.37
When it came to studying the prolific Reef order of Actiniaria, which includes anemones, William received unexpected help. Soon after arriving in the Torres Strait he met Alfred Cort Haddon, a younger Cambridge scientist with a reputation for his work on British anemones. Worryingly at first, Haddon’s mission on the Reef seemed identical to William’s own: “I propose to investigate the fauna, structure and mode of formation of the coral reefs in Torres Straits … to map the raised and submerged coral formations,… to investigate the fauna of the lagoons of the shore exposed at low tide and of the submarine slope … to endeavour to determine the zones of different species of coral and of associated invertebrates, and also what conditions of light, temperature and currents are favourable or otherwise for the different species.”38
As it turned out, the men did not in practice compete, because Haddon’s growing fascination with Islander culture eventually took him to anthropology. In the meantime the two Englishmen were delighted to pool their knowledge. Each named a new species of anemone after the other. William’s discovery, the giant twenty-four-inch Discosoma haddoni, had the additional attraction of a “commensal” relationship with a small colored fish and a pink-striped shrimp. He speculated that the fishy visitors paid for their safe haven by serving as lures to attract other marine creatures into the anemone’s mouth.39
William believed, too, that he’d acquired an advantage over most marine biologists by learning to use photography as a tool for the scientific study of reefs and their inhabitants. In a pre-scuba world, living corals were rarely seen because they grew under water. Even photographing them was possible only during fleeting periods of exposure at low spring tides. Then, and provided one worked with great speed, corals could, William boasted, “be reproduced with the fidelity that photography alone can compass,” and that no pencil could equal. Photography could reveal the geological structures of reefs, map the distribution and relationships of reef corals, and capture the exact likenesses of marine species while they were still brimming with life. Photographs could also serve as precise records of changes in coral growth and distribution over time.40
To achieve all this, a scientist-photographer needed great patience and physical stamina as well as technological virtuosity. Specialist equipment for scientific photography was nonexistent. William had to devise his own square lens frame, and he built an extra supporting leg on his tripod in order to take shots of corals and tiny crustaceans from a vertical position. He experimented endlessly with different lens types to find the most suitable focal lengths for capturing the true size of his specimens. Wherever possible he photographed marine creatures, other than living corals, in his portable giant-clamshell aquariums, taking care to replicate the original environmental conditions and retain true natural appearances.41
* * *
Capturing the physical exactitude of this marine world was not William’s only mission. The adventure, beauty, and romance of this “fairy land of fact” also struck deep chords in his personality. Thursday Island, his headquarters in the Torres Strait, was still a wild frontier pearling port with a population of only two thousand, made up of peoples “from every quarter of the globe.” The year before William arrived there, the Government Resident had listed twenty-four nationalities among the annual list of offenders in the jail book.42
One could not imagine, for example, a more swashbuckling character than William’s friend Frank Jardine, who was now living for periods on Thursday Island. Jardine had once herded his father’s cattle twelve hundred miles through unexplored Cape York bush, fighting Aboriginal warriors all the way, before reaching Somerset in a tattered emu-skin suit. There he’d married Sania Solia, a niece of the king of Samoa, and set himself up as a type of Reef baron. He was brutal in his suppression of local Aborigines, and liked to serve European guests their meals on silver plate made from coins looted from a nearby Spanish wreck.
The Jardines were just the type of friends needed to help finance a quixotic secret hobby that William had begun to develop while staying in the Torres Strait. He showed them the results of his experiments to introduce irritants into a living oyster so that it would create nacreous layers around them. By this means he’d created artificial “blister” pearls, which grew out of the pearl shell. But he also tantalized the Jardines “with hazy glimpses of a royal road to the rapid accumulation of untold wealth” by claiming to be on the way to achieving the holy grail of producing “freely detached” cultured pearls.43
Lean, bearded, and angular, wearing a solar hat and a trim-fitting suit, William cut a romantic South Seas figure and liked to photograph himself wading through lagoon shallows, camping on a beach in a grass hut, or working on his clam-shell aquariums. Thursday Island, with its reputation as a maritime badlands, suited William’s boyish self-image of a dashing adventurer. It probably also offered chances for adventures of a more amorous kind.
On William’s third visit there, in 1891, he formed an intimate friendship with the famous flower painter Ellis Rowan, when both were staying at the Grand Hotel. While she sketched flowers h
e strode “out on the rocks hunting for flowers of a different kind—sea blossoms.” They talked, walked, fished, sketched, sailed, and stayed with the Jardines at Somerset. “I have rarely left a place with greater regret…” she wrote wistfully. Perhaps they simply shared a love of art—the basis of William’s long friendship with elderly Tasmanian fish painter Louisa Ann Meredith.
Still, William did later, in 1894, create a scandal by running off to Melbourne with Louisa’s young granddaughter, an action that led to calls for the “seducer” to be shot for his “dastardly crime.” Perhaps these artistic women reminded William of his cloistered boyhood, when the conversation, painting, and poetry of his mother and older sisters had provided such solace. On the other hand, this may have been another instance where he took after his father.44
Saville-Kent’s corals. Figure 3 (upper right) is an illustration of Madrepora kenti. In The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities by William Saville-Kent, 1893
In any event there is no doubt that the land and seascapes of the Reef appealed powerfully to William’s artistic sensibilities. He thought of his photographs as both scientific records and reefscapes, imbued with aesthetic beauties of color, design, and poetic evocation. Skull Reef, on the outer Barrier, for example, reminded him—perhaps all too poignantly—of a decapitated human head with an “unevaporated tear in its eye.” It was the aesthetic principle of sublimity, too, that drew him to produce a brilliant matching pair of photos labeled “Flotsam” and “Jetsam.” One showed the stark, stranded hulk of the mission schooner Harrier, the other a series of colossal storm-stranded coral boulders.45
Flotsam and Jetsam, in The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, 1893
Mostly he sought to show “from an artistic viewpoint,” using chromolithography to hand-color his drawings, the stunning visual patterns of the Reef’s coral gardens and marine creatures. At Crescent Reef, also on the outer Barrier, he encountered:
the most luxuriant expanse of living coral [he] had the good fortune to photograph … [I]n some examples … the corallum was bright violet throughout, with a tendency to magenta towards the tips of each separate branchlet; in others a creamy hue predominated, with violet or crimson extremities and growing points; while in a third series, the ground colour varied from light to dark sage-green, all the growing points … being violet or crimson.46
In December 1891, at the urging of his homesick wife, William left Queensland to return to England. In the British autumn of 1893 he published a book that encapsulated his four magical years of work and pleasure on the Reef. Published by the elite press W. H. Allen, it was a large-size production in super-royal quarto, measuring 13½ inches by 10 inches, with forty-eight full-page, photomezzo-type black-and-white plates, and sixteen hand-drawn, hand-colored chromolithographic plates.
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities took its many reviewers in Britain and Australia by storm. They described it as “sumptuous,” an “edition de luxe,” with none complaining of the relatively expensive price of four guineas. They called it a unique kind of scientific work, one which covered its many themes in such multifaceted and compelling ways that every type of reader was satisfied. It was, we can now see, the first complete biography of the Reef. William Saville-Kent’s wounded sensibilities, diverse talents, and frustrated ambitions had come together to produce a masterpiece.
At a time when Thomas Huxley and the poet Matthew Arnold were arguing about the emergence of a gulf between the two cultures of art and science, William had shown how to bridge this divide. The West Australian proclaimed the book was enough “to make the scientific man an artist and the artist a scientist, and to inspire the ordinary reader with a desire to be both.” William’s photographic illustrations, wrote The Field, showed “the beauties of the corals and other animals constituting these marvellous structures with a degree of accuracy which has never been even attempted.”47
Giant anemone, named Discosoma kenti after William Saville-Kent. In The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, 1893
William had at last attained his twenty-five-year ambition to become a famous scientist. The Saturday Review echoed other reviewers in asserting that such a complete study of a coral reef had not been published before. The Scotsman declared it the most original book on coral reefs since Darwin’s publications in 1836, and one destined to be always the “first authority on its subject.” Nature, already on its way to becoming the most prestigious scientific journal of the Anglophone world, suggested that Saville-Kent’s photographic methods had added something entirely new to the methodology of the scientist: “[his] book contains a series of nature-pictures of the corals such as has never before been submitted to the scientific world, and a glance at his illustrations does more to familiarise one with the phases and aspects of the reef and its life than pages of written description.”
Australian journalists, and especially Queensland’s leading newspaper, The Courier, hailed in particular the book’s promotion of the Reef’s economic products and potentialities. The Argus in Melbourne had no doubt that the publication of “such a magnum opus in the mother country” would advertise “the marvels of the Great Barrier Reef and … the magnitude and variety of resources … awaiting development.” British newspapers like The Times and Saturday Review were especially impressed that William’s lively writing style had managed to make the dismal science of economics read like “a veritable romance of the sea.”48
And every reviewer, without exception, singled out the photographs and chromolithographs, hand-drawn and hand-colored, as the book’s chief attraction, noting that most people in the Northern Hemisphere could have had no conception until now of the indescribable beauty and riotous colors of a coral reef and its marine inhabitants. “It almost takes our breath away to be suddenly shown one of these plates,” wrote the Cambridge Review, “we feel we are looking at the thing itself, and we are lost in admiration at the skill of the photographer and the care of the publisher which have combined to produce these results.” The West Australian thought William’s artistry to be nothing short of genius: “Unless one has … seen for oneself the submarine chromatic effects which are more brilliant than the most gorgeous transformation scene conceived, it would be almost difficult to believe that the bright greens, reds, pinks, blues and yellows are the actual colour of forms … Scarce a flower upon earth can vie in brilliancy of tint with many of the anemones of the oceans, while the birds of the tropics find their plumage dulled besides the remarkable fishes which are found in these coasts.”49
Saville-Kent captures the color and multiplicity of Barrier Reef fish in The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, 1893.
As many reviewers predicted, William’s book made the Great Barrier Reef a place of celebration rather than notoriety, revealing its astonishing beauty and diversity to people with no idea of the existence of this tropical underwater world, and countering the negative perceptions arising from the stories of Eliza Fraser, Curtis, and de Rougemont. William’s photography also helped make coral biology an intriguing subject, and when Maurice Yonge and his Cambridge expedition went to the Reef (the story of which is to come in chapter 10), Saville-Kent’s was the only scientific book about the Reef they’d ever seen.
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While completing the book, William had been offered a three-year contract by the West Australian government to work as a Commissioner of Fisheries. Leaving homesick-prone Mary Ann behind in England, he replicated his scientific and economic successes there, including publishing a pioneering study of the ecology of the Abrolhos Reef system, to the west of Geraldton. That Constance was working in Perth as a nursing sister for part of this time was possibly an additional attraction. On returning to Britain in 1895, William produced a similarly sumptuous record of his West Australian experience called The Naturalist in Australia (1897).
Great Barrier Reef Fishes, in The Gre
at Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, 1893
Settling down to retire in Britain wasn’t easy after those years of tropical adventure and glamour. He and Mary Ann moved through a succession of houses in Chiswick, Croydon, and coastal Hampshire. For a time William also haunted the musty clubs of retired Anglo-colonial gentlemen, and lectured to amateur buffs at the Bournemouth Natural Science Society. But this all felt too superannuated for someone still harboring unfulfilled dreams and a fierce nostalgia. “Is [it] to be wondered,” he asked in the conclusion to his Naturalist in Australia, “that emigrants of … but a few year’s standing only … [in] Australia’s prolific soil and sunny clime, find it difficult to rehabilitate themselves contentedly amidst the grudgingly responsive fallows, predominating fogs and murky skies of their native land?”50
His hints in the pages of The Great Barrier Reef about the potential riches of pearl cultivation eventually found some takers. In 1904 William returned to Thursday Island in the employ of the Lever Pacific Plantations Company, to transport fifteen hundred pearl oysters to the Cook Islands for cultivation. Although this experiment failed, his secret work on artificial pearls apparently made better progress. Returning to Queensland in 1906, he formed a pearl-culturing company with British and Australian financial backing, and leased a section of the Albany Passage adjacent to the Jardines. Bootles, who assisted with the new experiments, would later claim that William did actually succeed in culturing freestanding artificial pearls, but if he did he never reaped the rewards, which went to Japanese rivals.51
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 18