Accordingly, when the pack that had been surrounding Mike swam toward me, my first reaction was one of extreme pleasure. “Now,” I said to myself, “you’ll be able to get some really good close-ups.” I waited until I was completely encircled—not that there was much else that I could do—and fired off my first shot. The silent but dazzling explosion of the flash bulb lit up the lean silver bodies that surrounded me like a living wall. It did not disturb them in the least; they continued to spiral inward, until they were no more than six feet away. It was then that I began to suspect, for the first time, that these barracuda might be very different from their innocuous Florida relatives. I felt like a tempting morsel surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves; it would only need one of these great fish to be a little bolder than the rest and it would all be over in a couple of seconds. Rather irrationally, I felt quite aggrieved at the prospect of being eaten by what were, after all, only overgrown pike. A shark—preferably not less than twenty feet long—would have been much more acceptable.
I surfaced long enough to yell for the dinghy, then dived under again so that I could keep an eye on the steadily encroaching fish. A second flash bulb produced as little reaction as the first—though it left me with an unanswered enigma. Between the two photographs, which were taken only seconds apart, the entire huge pack had reversed its direction of movement. In the first, it was moving clockwise—in the second, counter-clockwise. It is only now, months later, as I examine the still uncut strip of film, that I have realized that. I would have been prepared to swear on oath that the ’cuda had spiraled in towards me in one continuous sweep.
The photographs also correct another impression. I would have guessed that there were about a hundred barracuda in the pack—but no less than thirty are visible in the relatively small area covered by each photograph, so the total number surrounding me must have been at least two hundred. I could scarcely have provided an entree for so many ravening appetites.
Before I could take another photograph, the close-packed bodies began to disperse; the ’cuda were drifting slowly, reluctantly away. The dinghy was overhead; perhaps that had finally scared them off, or perhaps they had decided that I was inedible. This is a question to which I shall never know the answer, but I am quite certain of one thing—that from now on both Mike and I will take barracuda very seriously indeed. We may fool around with sharks, but not the giant sea pike—at least when they come in swarms of two hundred at a time.
We rowed the dinghy in a rather thoughtful silence for a hundred yards along the reef, then suddenly noticed the area that we had been looking for earlier but had failed to find. There was no sign of the barracuda, so I dived again and finished off the film in the camera. But I was careful to keep very, very close to the boat.
XIV
“Spike”
After devil rays, sharks, and barracuda, this chapter may seem something of an anticlimax. But the creature which is widely regarded as the most dangerous animal on the Great Barrier Reef is a lazy and completely inoffensive little fish which spends most of its life lying motionless on the bottom of coral pools, and seldom grows to a greater length than ten inches. The adjective “inoffensive” may seem surprising, but is perfectly accurate; the trouble with Synanceja horrida is not that it is offensive, but that it is highly defensive.
The stonefish—to give it what would be its popular name, if there were anything at all popular about it—also has the additional distinction of being one of the most hideous creatures which Nature has ever designed. Indeed, into its mere nine or ten inches of length have probably been packed more concentrated ugliness and venom than could be found anywhere else on Earth.
It is common all along the Great Barrier Reef—though just how common, nobody knows since it is so extremely difficult to see. Men have spent years on the Reef without ever encountering one, despite the fact that in that time they must have walked within a few feet of dozens. The stonefish is a supreme master of the art of camouflage, tucking itself in beside rocks and bending its squat body to conform to their shape with such skill that it looks exactly like a piece of rotten coral. To add to the resemblance, its warty skin is usually covered with a green scum of algae, and its body is humped and indented in such a manner that the usual smooth lines characteristic of most fishes are completely lost.
Having worried its way into the sandy bottom of a pool by wriggling the wing-shaped fins that run along the lower side of its body, the stonefish sits and waits. Two tiny eyes, looking like warts on the top of its head, survey the surrounding scene. Sooner or later, along comes some unsuspecting little fish, completely deceived by the camouflage expert. Then a semicircular mouth, hinged at the bottom, drops like a swiftly falling drawbridge, and dinner is served. As the mouth opens, it reveals for a moment a tongue and throat of a corpselike pallor, in quite surprising contrast to the creature’s dingy exterior.
If this summed up the appearance and habits of the stonefish, it would not be of much importance or interest. However, along its back the creature has a series of thirteen spines, which normally lie flat and are linked together with a band of skin. If stepped on or otherwise molested, the stonefish erects these spines, each of which can inject a poison of appalling virulence. The spines are sharp enough to go through thin shoe soles, such as those of light tennis shoes, and the venom is so potent that death may follow in a matter of seconds. The pain is so agonizing that even if the victim recovers he may have to be given sedatives for prolonged periods, and since it is usually impossible to get really swift medical attention to anyone injured out on the jagged assault course of the average exposed reef, the chances of survival after an encounter with a stonefish are rather small. Or so, at any rate, most authorities maintain with a certain macabre relish.
Although they are so dangerous, and not at all rare, these unprepossessing little beasts actually cause remarkably few casualties. This is because it is physically impossible to walk over a coral reef without wearing good shoes, which give almost complete protection even if one steps directly on a stonefish. Moreover, the fish do not lie around in the middle of pools, where one would be likely to step on them, but nestle against rocks which the careful wader would tend to avoid in any event.
The stonefish, then, is one of those dangers which everyone on the Reef talks about but which few people have actually met. During my first few days on Heron Island, I could hardly walk a dozen yards through the coral pools without coming across something that looked like a stonefish to my ultra-cautious eye, but which on prodding with a spear turned out to be a perfectly ordinary lump of rock. After a while I ceased to see stonefish everywhere, and realized that my chances of coming across any were minute. Professor Younge, leader of the Great Barrier Reef Expedition in 1928, never found a stonefish during the entire year he spent on Low Isles—though the sharp-eyed native helpers did so. Professor Dakin, of Sydney University, author of one of the best books on the Reef, failed to find one in a lifetime of study.
I was lucky. One afternoon, during our last week on Heron Island, I was wading out from the beach toward the distant line of foam where the now almost exposed coral shelf dropped away into the sea. I had gone little more than a hundred yards, and was not paying much attention to the pools through which I was passing. The coral here was almost all dead, having been choked by sand swept out from the beach in a cyclone a few years before. I was in a hurry to get through this drab coral graveyard so that I could set up my cameras along the colorful living growths that the receding tide had just uncovered.
However, you cannot walk on the face of a reef, with its treacherous crumbling coral, its sudden, unexpectedly deep pools, and its possibilities of discovering interesting shells, without keeping a fairly watchful eye on the ground beneath you. I was just passing through one very dull and lifeless pool when I half-consciously noticed a dirty, oval object lying beside a larger rock. Automatically, I gave it a gentle jab with my spear. It didn’t move—but it seemed to be sligh
tly less than solid. I gave it a harder poke—and my first stonefish jerked itself spasmodically about six inches through the water, and once again tried to pretend that it wasn’t there.
In a surprisingly short time, a small crowd of tourists, photographers, and vacationing schoolboys had gathered around the pool. It says much for the stonefish’s powers of camouflage that, even though it had been disturbed from its chosen resting place and now lay out in the open, several of the spectators were quite unable to find it until it was pointed out to them.
After a brief photographic orgy, the problem now arose of carrying the creature back to land. Luckily, one of the schoolboys had with him a glass-bottomed viewing box, and we tipped the fish into that by prizing it cautiously off the bottom with a large knife. Throughout the proceedings it made no effort to escape, or even to move. It still seemed unable to believe that anyone could actually see it.
The ten-year-old who had contributed the viewing box then gallantly carried box and contents back to shore, while I followed with the cameras. This performance was criticized in some quarters, and I had to point out that two Leicas were more valuable than all stonefish and most small boys. The fish was then installed in a large tank, surrounded by blocks of broken coral, so that the way in which it merged into its background could be studied at leisure. It seemed incapable of swimming, but when disturbed merely flopped along the bottom for a few inches and tried to dig itself in with its fins. After a while, also, it no longer erected its frill of poisoned spines, having apparently realized that its standard operational procedure had ceased to be effective.
Because it seemed so improbable that the stonefish should have exactly thirteen spines, I made a special point of counting them carefully. (And no nuclear physicist manipulating two subcritical lumps of plutonium could have been more careful.) Rather to my surprise, thirteen was quite correct. The spines were normally retracted in a sheath of skin, so that the only sign of their presence was a series of warts. When extended, however, some of them were fully half an inch in length, and looked like needles of translucent glass.
“Spike,” as I christened him, lived for several days in one of the laboratory tanks and was visited by so many of the island’s tourists that I felt tempted to charge an admission fee. When lifted out of the water, Spike put up no resistance but lay morosely inactive until he returned to the tank, when he would start scuffling his way back into the sand. Stonefish can live completely out of water for several hours. They would hardly have survived otherwise, since so much of their time is spent in shallow pools which must often be drained as the tide recedes.
When I got back to the mainland, feeling that I now had a personal interest in stonefish, I started to make further inquiries about these creatures. Everything I read increased my respect, though hardly my affection, for them. In Professor Younge’s A Year on the Great Barrier Reef I found these cheerful words: “There have been many cases of human beings stepping on these creatures with their bare feet or in sand shoes—and suffering terrible agonies. Days of blinding pain and three or four months of illness have been the usual result, and death has been by no means infrequent.... Little can be done for the patient except to keep him unconscious by injections of opium until the pain becomes bearable.”
I also read that the aborigines have an extreme horror of this fish, and in their initiation ceremonies a man pretends to step on a wax model of one and falls to the ground uttering shrieks of agony—a very direct and effective object lesson. Now the aborigines are intelligent and practical people, only slightly more superstitious than the average white. (Anyone inclined to doubt this can look at the horoscope page of his Sunday newspaper.) The fact that they are afraid of the stonefish is proof enough that it should be taken seriously.
And yet—I cannot help wondering if here is another case of a creature whose appearance has given it a worse reputation than it deserves. Some months later, in Cairns, I was discussing the stonefish with Dr. Hugo Flecker, a wellknown Queensland naturalist. He stated categorically that in twenty years he had never heard of a single death caused by these creatures.
Since then, I have come across several cases of people who have heard of people who were killed by stonefish—but firsthand evidence, never.
So the case against the stonefish must still be regarded as “not proven.” Most people, after taking one look at the beast, will probably decide that no further proof is necessary.
XV
North to the Sun
We had twelve hundred miles of reef to look at and six months to do it in; we could not remain on Heron Island forever. Besides, disquieting rumors of Hans Hass’s imminent arrival continued to reach us, though no one was ever able to substantiate them. There was also another rumor, equally persistent—that Hans had been eaten by a shark. Everywhere we went we kept hearing this report, which we did our best to ridicule. We did not deny that sharks might exist sufficiently ill-mannered to eat Hans; what we did deny was the possibility of it happening without our hearing all about it through our excellent information channels. In one case I was able to point out that, after the date of his reported demise, I had seen Hans with my own eyes, as he sat listening to Captain Cousteau address an enormous audience at the Royal Festival Hall, London. He looked a little envious, I thought, but if he was a ghost he was a very substantial one.
The long string of islands and sand keys which constitutes the Great Barrier Reef has a general uniformity which makes it possible to judge the Reef as a whole by a few representative samples. We had agreed on a general policy of spending all the time we could on one island, in the hope of getting to know it thoroughly, and making quick “spot checks” of any others we were able to fit into our program. Ideally, we would have liked to sail the length of the Reef, stopping at any place that looked interesting. (One day, perhaps, we may be able to do just that.) Since we were short of time and of millionaire yacht owners, this plan had to be abandoned. Instead, we decided to see what we could by flying the length of the Reef and spending a few weeks exploring its extreme northern end among the maze of islands in the Torres Straits. We were encouraged to do this because Thursday Island—the administrative center of the islands off the north tip of Queensland—is also the center of the pearling trade; and much of the Reef’s history is bound up with the quest for pearl.
The plane from Brisbane skirts the coast for most of its journey into the north. Less than two hours after take-off we were crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, which it had taken us almost two days to reach by road. The first islands of the Reef began to appear as dark smudges on the eastern horizon, and everywhere beneath us were the telltale shadows of barely submerged shoals and reefs. Each island had the same characteristic pattern; there would be the vast fringe of coral around the tiny pin point of exposed land, and on the weather side a crescent of white water, often many miles in length, would show where the waves were breaking against the Reef.
Further north, the high or mainland islands began to make their appearance. Between the little towns of Mackay and Bowen lies the picturesque Whitsunday Passage, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful spots on the Queensland coast. Here the land has subsided—or the sea has risen—so that a chain of mountain peaks has been cut off from the mainland. Many of these islands are covered with rain forests and tower more than a thousand feet above the sea, and it is not surprising that an area of such great beauty has the largest concentration of holiday resorts of the entire Reef. Brampton, Lindeman, Long, South Molle and Hayman Islands all have tourist centers on them; as we flew above the heavily wooded peaks we could see below us the little huts and clearings and beaches basking in the sun. But for all their loveliness, these islands were of less interest to us than the sandy flats of the Capricorn group. They were so near the mainland that the chance of finding really clear water there was much less than on the outer islands of the Reef.
As we flew steadily into the north, the land below became more and more empty
. It was not desolate or barren—indeed, far from it, for much of it was heavily wooded and obviously very fertile. In places the trees were so dense that they had almost obliterated the rivers winding through the landscape; the watercourses were visible merely as ribbons of lusher green. Here were endless acres of rich land with never a road—not even a solitary footpath—hinting at the presence of man. One day, no doubt, all this wilderness will be tamed and cultivated, parceled out into sugar farms or sheep and cattle holdings. Yet though Queensland is primarily an agricultural state, with two million acres under crops, most of it must still look as it did when Captain Cook first set eyes on it in 1770.
Late in the evening we touched down at Cairns, the last town of any size along the coast. We were a thousand miles from Brisbane, but five hundred miles of almost completely uninhabited coast still lay between us and our destination. Cairns is the gateway to the far north of Queensland, and is important both as a harbor and as a center of agriculture. Though it is a place where winter never comes, we saw little of the tropical sun during the ten days we stayed there. Indeed, for almost the whole of that time the town was blanketed by clouds which occasionally disgorged their contents on the sodden land beneath. One cannot have it both ways, I suppose; much of the area’s prosperity depends on its rainfall, which sometimes exceeds a hundred inches a year. As usual, we were assured by the locals that this rain was all concentrated in the wet season, that never before had this sort of thing happened in June, that we should have been here last week, and so on and so forth.
The Coast of Coral Page 11