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

by Iain McCalman

  But Alex was intrigued most by Murray’s revelation that billions of calcium skeletons from minute, single-celled plankton rained ceaselessly down onto the ocean floor. This suggested, said Murray, that Darwin’s subsidence theory was not needed to explain how atolls and barrier reefs had come into being. It was possible that, given a perpetual avalanche of dead plankton tumbling through the ocean depths faster than it could be dissolved by the carbonic acid in seawater, this massive detritus had settled on the numerous rocky mounds already pushed up from the ocean floor and then amalgamated into sedimentary platforms. Eventually these limestone platforms would have reached a height close enough to the surface light for corals to begin growing.

  Once these corals reached the ocean’s surface, the violence of the breakers would create a further base, or talus, of eroded rubble and broken corals. Toward the windward edges of these, a patina of living corals would flourish by feeding on the wave-carried plankton, but those corals sheltered to leeward would starve and die, their calcium skeletons gradually dissolved by seawater. Thus crescent-shaped atoll lagoons or canal-like barrier lagoons would be formed, depending on the original shape of the base.10

  Alex Agassiz returned to America barely able to contain his excitement: “It is the first time since the death of my father and my wife that I have felt in the least as if there were anything to live for,” he wrote to Wyville Thomson, the leader of the Challenger expedition. Up to this time he’d thought of himself as a marine zoologist, leaving issues like the origins of coral reefs to the geologists. But the scales had fallen from his eyes, and although he’d earlier agreed with Darwin’s coral reef theory, he now denied it. “I never really accepted the theories of Darwin,” he told John Murray. “It was all too mighty simple.”11

  What especially troubled Alex about Darwin’s theory was that subsidence hid the evidence of its operations, and seemed almost impossible to prove. Murray’s alternative explanation was both multifaceted and testable. Here was a wounded son suddenly offered the chance to revenge his late father’s humiliations, and Alex grabbed the opportunity with alacrity.12

  A further goad was awaiting him on his arrival in America, in the form of a new publication from Darwin’s most fervent German disciple, Ernst Haeckel. Alex had always thought of Haeckel as a close friend, one of the few people to whom he could confide his agonies of personal grief. What he now read shocked him to the core. Haeckel had written a jeering, sarcastic pamphlet called Goals and Paths, which libeled Louis Agassiz’s character and legacy under the guise of discussing recent biological trends. It accused Louis of having cringed to the creationists, of having stolen his only decent scientific idea from his colleagues, and of having being “the most ingenious and energetic racketeer in the entire domain of natural history.” Alex sent off a furious letter in reply, calling Haeckel “an unmitigated blackguard” and breaking off all future relations. He told his uncle that he’d like to take a horsewhip to the man.13

  Alex Agassiz was too fair-minded to blame Darwin directly for such a rogue disciple. Still, when undertaking a series of navy-sponsored oceanographic cruises in Florida and the Caribbean over the next few years, he began looking for evidence to support Murray’s new theory. In 1880 Murray presented his case against Darwin in Nature, claiming to have seen archipelagoes in Tahiti, the Maldives, and Fiji with no signs of subsidence, but strong evidence of elevated sedimentary platforms.

  Emboldened, Alex wrote to Darwin predicting that future reef expeditions would confirm Murray’s results. Darwin didn’t miss the note of challenge, and though tired and ailing he countered with one of his own: “If I am wrong,” he wrote wearily, “the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated the better … I wish that some doubly rich millionaire would take it into his head to have borings made in some of the Pacific and Indian atolls, and bring home cores for slicing from a depth of 500 or 600 feet.” If Darwin were indeed wrong, such cores would show a superficial crust of coral, underlain by extensive older submarine rock. If he were right, the cores would show a considerable depth of coralline limestone.14

  Darwin died less than a year later, which is probably why Alex didn’t at once take up the challenge, aside from making a short, inconclusive tour of reefs in Hawaii in 1884. The following year, however, he wrote to James Dana at Yale, endorsing Murray’s arguments and outlining a personal “dream” to hire a vessel to investigate Pacific islands and reefs “with modern methods,” so as to solve this compelling geological problem. Dana’s reply was less gentle than Darwin’s had been: he published a long paper pouring such scorn on Murray and his supporters that Alex immediately broke off all relations with the man.

  One last inducement pushed Alex Agassiz into a crusade to prove Darwin wrong: a public attack against the Darwinists mounted by the Duke of Argyll and a trio of eloquent English bishops. They accused “the Darwin faction” of mounting “a conspiracy of silence” and “reign of terror” to stifle recognition of Murray’s theory of coral reefs, and to mask the fact that Darwin’s own “errors [were] as profound as the abysses of the Pacific.” Huxley, famed for writing with vitriol rather than ink, seared the group with his customary brilliance, but the Argyllites were not easily quelled.15

  Their tactic of diverting attacks away from On the Origin of Species and onto Darwin’s theory of coral reefs was a shrewd one. There were obviously close links between the two theories: Darwin’s The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842) had anticipated its famous successor in both form and content, and it had launched Darwin’s arc of scientific fame. Disproving the coral reef theory, thereby discrediting Darwin and his disciples, would weaken the whole case for evolution by natural selection. And the fact that the reef theory was so difficult to prove made it vulnerable to demolition. In effect, Argyll and his supporters were elevating the coral reef problem into “one of the most prominent and explicitly controversial in science.”16

  The controversy over Darwin’s reef theory revived the torrid evolutionary debates of the 1860s. This time, however, Alex Agassiz would not remain silent. His banner would be scientific empiricism, his field the coral reefs of the world. In 1896, quiet Alex Agassiz put to sea to revenge his father, conquer Darwin, vindicate Murray, and unlock the secrets of the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific.

  * * *

  Alex Agassiz would later admit privately that his Great Barrier Reef expedition of 1896 was something of a flop, because he’d followed the advice of William Saville-Kent to visit northern Australia in April–May, which proved an unsuitable time of year. Others had recommended waiting until September–October, when the still conditions would have been ideal for reef viewing. As it was, Alex, his son Maximilian, and two young Harvard museum zoological assistants, William Woodworth and Alfred Mayor, faced almost two months of buffeting southeasterly trade winds that whipped up a choppy sea and forced their ship to remain in harbor for all but three days of their two-month visit.

  Alex Agassiz (far right), Alfred Mayor (second from right), and William Woodworth (third from right) on board the Croydon, 1896 (Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University)

  The Croydon was also, Mayor wrote in his journal, “a plebean [sic] little tramp steamer only 180 feet long and she floats so low in the water that the waves wash over her deck in a most disrespectful manner.” The American scientists were confined to inspecting the southern inner portion of the Barrier Reef region, between Breaksea Spit and Lizard Island. Mayor reported that they managed only two fleeting glimpses of the outer Barrier—“the grandest coral structure in the world”—and even these were from “a respectful distance.”17

  This was all the more frustrating because of the care with which Agassiz had planned the expedition. The Croydon carried “a complete photographic apparatus and an extensive outfit for pelagic fishing,” as well as deep-sea nets and a sophisticated sounding apparatus built specially by a U.S. naval engineer. Before setting off, Agassiz had studied every available Barrie
r Reef chart, explorer’s account, and scientific paper. These ranged from the pioneering works of Flinders and Jukes, to Saville-Kent’s great work of 1893, The Great Barrier Reef, and several recent geological analyses by Australian scientists Charles Hedley, Thomas Griffith Taylor, Ernest Andrews, and Edgeworth David.18

  Reading Jukes and Saville-Kent was particularly important because they’d produced the most comprehensive Reef surveys, and, still more, because both had endorsed Darwinian subsidence. Alex conceded that Saville-Kent’s “superb” photographic plates were unique in giving “an idea of the appearance of a coral reef,” but he thought the man’s conclusions were weakened by his “writing in the popular manner.” Jukes’s analysis was so good, he admitted, that little could be added to it. Yet Alex thought that Jukes had ultimately come to “erroneous conclusions” because he’d allowed “his admiration for the simplicity of the explanation of the theory of coral reefs by Darwin to blind him.”19

  Specifically, according to Alex, Jukes had failed to see the significance of “the mass of islands that crop out nearly all along [the Reef].” He had assumed that these were originally mountains on a fragment of the mainland that had then subsided under the sea, but Alex believed the islands had been elevated from the seabed and eroded by waves, wind, and rain until they were leveled into rocky flats. Corals had subsequently grown on top of them in a thin veneer, which Alex guessed would be no more than ten to twelve fathoms thick.20

  Alex also had to deal with a strong consensus among Australian geologists that extensive ocean-floor subsidence had taken place during the Cretaceous period, some sixty-five million years earlier, breaking up a larger Pacific continent and leaving Australia behind. Alex didn’t dispute this idea, but he did think it ludicrous that there could be any connection between the present-day Barrier Reef, which he believed a relatively modern production, and this ancient subsidence. If Australia’s Barrier Reef had begun growing in that remote period, the corals would “have a thickness which should correspond to a depression of at least 2,000 feet.” Such an unimaginable thickness of coral was, he believed, too absurd to need refuting.21

  Alex claimed publicly that even his abbreviated investigation of the Great Barrier Reef had proved the essential correctness of Murray’s theory. “I began to have my eyes opened, and to get an explanation of the formation of the coral flat reefs,” he wrote after surveying two reef patches at Lark Passage near Cooktown on May 5. Confirmation, he thought, came a week later when he was exploring reefs at Hope Island, not far from Cairns. “Here,” Mayor recorded, “greatly to Mr. Agassiz’s joy he found the reefs so thin that he actually obtained specimens of the granite rock under which the coral grows. This settles the question that the reef is formed in the Murray manner and not in that suggested by Darwin…”22

  Persuading himself that he had, despite the Reef trip’s vagaries, essentially confirmed his hypothesis, Alex next decided to take on Fiji, using much the same team as before. This time he arrived in mid-October, when conditions suited reef viewing. Just before reaching Suva, however, he heard disturbing news. Britain’s Royal Society had commissioned a party of Australian scientists and technicians, led by the University of Sydney’s Edgeworth David, to undertake a deep drilling of the coral reef at Funafuti, north of Fiji. They’d driven down through six hundred feet of limestone before the drill gave out. Although by no means conclusive, this appeared to favor Darwin’s idea that the coral had thickened as the ocean bed sank.

  Pushing this uncomfortable news aside, Alex’s team proceeded again to fight against the Darwinists. Everywhere in Fiji that James Dana had seen subsidence, Alex saw elevation “of at least eight hundred feet.” Most of the corals, he said, were growing on beds of elevated volcanic lava, although a few reef platforms were composed of what he called “old marine limestone.” This, he stressed, was not coralline limestone as predicted by Darwin, but a more ancient, finer-grained “marine … sedimentary rock composed of the remains of zillions of tiny sea animals,” and elevated from the bottom of the seabed.23

  To his delight, Alex later received some encouraging news from Edgeworth David, with whom he was corresponding. After drilling through forty feet of coralline crust, the Funafuti scientists had also noticed a different type of limestone in their cores, which Alex took as evidence of elevation. His confidence swelled: “I shall give them [the Darwinists] a dose they do not expect,” he wrote to Murray in triumph, “and the theory of subsidence will, I think, be dead as a doornail and subside forever hereafter.” Darwin’s Fiji observations, he told another friend, had come from studying charts in his house: “a very poor way of doing, and that’s the way all his coral reef work has been done.” It seemed absurd to him that the subsidence theory had “got such a hold with so little holding ground.”24

  Alex’s subsequent explorations of other Pacific Island groups in 1899–1900 added incremental confirmations to what was now his entrenched interpretation. Niue, Tonga, and the island groups of the Marquesas, Paumotu, Society, Cook, Ellice (Tuvalu), Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline, and Ladrones all became a roll call of victories over Darwin and Dana. On January 18, 1902, after an expedition to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Alex’s report to Murray bristled with contempt for Darwin: “Such a lot of twaddle as has been written about the Maldives. It’s all wrong what Darwin has said, and the charts ought to have shown him that he was talking nonsense.” Having by now visited all the reefs of the Pacific and Indian oceans, Alex seemed in a position to deliver Darwin a killer blow.25

  * * *

  If Alex Agassiz’s campaign against Darwin had something of a mythic element to it, he failed to notice that his assistant Alfred Mayor was starting to become similarly obsessed: about Alex.26

  Though Agassiz was fifty-seven and Mayor twenty-four when they first met, they shared some deep affinities. Both had grown to adulthood in the shadow of domineering fathers, both had lost their mothers at an early age and been brought up by devoted stepmothers. Oddly, both had also trained as engineers as well as zoologists. Mayer senior (his son changed his last name to Mayor) forced Alfred to graduate in engineering and physics before eventually allowing him to study zoology at Harvard. Unusually, too, both Alex and Alfred were talented marine illustrators. Alex had inherited his artistic leanings from his German painter mother, while young Alfred’s were said to have come from the Mayers’ French lineage.27

  While still a PhD student, Alfred Mayor had stunned Alex with a beautiful sketch of a jellyfish done in Agassiz’s Newport marine laboratory during a Harvard summer school session in 1892. Alex was so impressed by the drawing that he invited the young man to collaborate on an illustrated work on Atlantic-American medusae, and soon after, he offered Mayor a temporary position as a curatorial assistant of marine radiates at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  Alex liked the ambitious spirit of this boy with a square, determined face and an artistic eye, and Alfred, for his part, was awed by the patronage of the millionaire scientist, who not only looked like Count von Bismarck, but also exuded the same gruff authority. Throughout the hot summer of 1892, Alfred and a small group of students traveled each day by stagecoach to work at Alex’s private laboratory, from early morning until five o’clock. The rustic, vine-covered building was set on the slope of the shore and overlooked a private cove, from which the students could see Newport Bay to the north and the ocean to the south. “The laboratory,” Alfred later wrote, “was excellently equipped with reagents, glassware, and large tanks provided with running salt or fresh water. The microscope tables were set upon stone foundations to avoid vibration, and a good little steam launch lay at her moorings … ready to dredge in the service of science.” Afternoon swims and evening boat tows in search of jellyfish completed his pleasure.28

  Yet despite the similarities in the two scientists’ backgrounds, differences of personality, age, and circumstance began to oppress the younger man. Though he had opted for a scientific career, Alfred Mayor was, a later colleague thou
ght, “of a distinctly artistic and poetic temperament.” He nursed a vein of romanticism, a love of solitude, a Thoreau-like intoxication with the natural world, and a tendency to engage in self-conscious literary introspection, traits which had been nurtured by wandering as a boy in the woods of Maplewood, New Jersey, with his butterfly net. “I threw myself heart and soul into a world of the imagination wherein I lived apart from man, and sought my playmates among the creatures of the woods and fields. I literally loved individual butterflies I had raised from early larval stages, and exulted in their imagined joy as they flew from my hand to flutter over the clover-laden fields.”29

  The latent clash of sensibility between Alfred Mayor and his employer first surfaced on the 1896 Barrier Reef expedition. While Alex chafed and fumed at the way the trade winds were hampering his exposé of Darwin’s faulty geology, Alfred fell in love with the Reef’s wildlife. He’d been reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s accounts of butterfly hunting in the forest clearings of Malaya, and thought himself a modern counterpart of that great explorer-naturalist.

  On April 25, for example, while the Croydon was anchored off Dunk Island, Alfred caught a whaleboat to the beach. It was exactly six months before Ted Banfield would visit the same spot, to be smitten by the clouds of gorgeous butterflies and the bird-filled glades of native forest. Mayor anticipated the beachcomber’s sentiments exactly.

  Surely nothing can exceed the luxuriant beauty of this great tropical forest and nowhere upon the Earth can we find so many shades of green in the foliage as one finds here … Tree ferns with their dark trunks and graceful spraying crown of leaves, all emerald green … Dark green deeply cleft-leaved Breadfruit trees. Palm leaves that rustled as if alive … Acacias, ironwood and mangroves, and giant Eucalyptus trees with their sombre slaty-green foliage standing out in sharp contrast to the rich dark-greens and yellow-green of other trees. Grass waist high covered the ground and long thin rope-like creepers hung in festoons from haunches of the ancient trees or twined in snake-like folds among boughs above.30