The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (14 page)

The sheltered lee side of the outer Barrier, where breaks—and thus passages for ships—were likely to be widest, was generally covered in living corals, but these corals could only survive to a depth of twenty or thirty fathoms because of their need for light. Jukes concluded that a coral reef was actually “a mass of brute matter, living only at its outer surface, and chiefly on its lateral slopes.” Alongside these linked linear reefs were a few detached reefs lying just outside the Barrier, as well as a further scattering of inner reefs between the Barrier and the shore. However, at its southern beginnings near Sandy Cape and at its northern edge in the Torres Strait, the lines of reefs were not “true barriers” rising up from deep water, but encrustations of corals growing on shoals or underwater banks and ridges.
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For the first time among European commentators, the term “barrier” also carried some positive connotations. Unlike Cook and Flinders and others, who’d seen the Reef solely as a terrible obstacle to navigation—something that prevented access to the shore or escape to the open sea—Jukes thought of it as a “bastion” that provided the Australian mainland and offshore islands with a protective shield against the massive forces of the ocean. Implicitly he was thinking about the Reef from the perspective of those who lived permanently on its coast, and who benefited from its protection. If laid out dry, he wrote, the Great Barrier Reef would resemble “a gigantic and irregular fortification, a steep glacis crowned with a broken parapet wall, and carried from one rising ground to another. The tower-like bastions, of projecting and detached reefs, would increase this resemblance.”
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But how did the Great Barrier Reef accord with Charles Darwin’s recently published and compelling explanation of how coral reefs came into being? Darwin argued that because reef-growing corals needed light, they could only live in relatively shallow waters. And the only way they could have produced such vast, submerged structures on the bottom of the ocean bed would be by living corals keeping pace with a slowly sinking ocean floor. Those corals enveloped in the deep, dark water would eventually die, leaving behind a mountainous pile of dead limestone rubble. New living corals still close enough to the surface to receive light would grow in a thin crust on top of this.

Darwin’s theory seemed at first glance to be incompatible with a local phenomenon that puzzled Jukes. All along the coastline opposite the Barrier Reef he noticed strips of flattened coral conglomerate and pumice stones that were situated behind the beaches, usually some ten feet or so above the highest possible tidemarks. This suggested to him that for a long period of time—say, two or three thousand years—the Australian coast had not undergone any subsidence; it must have remained virtually stationary, with occasional slight movements of elevation.

Yet far from thinking that this invalidated Darwin’s theory, Jukes had no doubt that a major subsidence had originally created the Great Barrier Reef, but at a much earlier time than these local elevations. In fact, everything he saw of the Reef and its lagoon convinced him that only Darwin’s theory could explain their peculiar topographical assortment of deep and shallow coral structures, shoals, channels, and islands.

He pointed out that the great sweeping curtain of the outer Barrier faithfully followed the curves and flexures of the existing northeastern coastline. To illustrate his point, Jukes offered his readers a compelling hypothetical example. Imagine, he wrote, that we cleared all the existing Barrier Reef corals and raised the intermediate land between the former Reef and the present coast to a height of around one hundred fathoms, so that this newly raised land emerged just within the line of the present Barrier. If we then allowed reef-growing corals to begin their work in the shallow coastal waters on the fringes of this land, and we then subjected the ocean floor underneath it to a gradual subsidence over a long period of time, we would have the present Barrier Reef.

The fair-minded
Fly
geologist claimed to have ransacked his mind for any alternative hypothesis, but he’d found none that would work. He could only conclude that Darwin’s idea “rises beyond a mere hypothesis into the true theory of coral reefs.”
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For Jukes’s own part, his scientific analysis of the geology of the Reef would remain unsurpassed in clarity, brilliance, and originality until the early twentieth century.

*   *   *

Had Joseph Beete Jukes been simply the factual scientist he claimed to be, he might not have appealed so strongly to the mercurial Griffin. Despite Jukes’s commitment to plain geological reason, more romantic impulses also jostled within his makeup. In a letter written from Hobart in November 1843, he told his brother-in-law that he’d become a geologist essentially in order “to wander at my own wild will … [and] to sigh for the freedom of the open seas or trackless woods of a wild country.” So much did he enjoy sailing on the
Fly
that he several times regretted in his letters home that he hadn’t gone to sea as a boy to make a career in the navy. Perhaps he saw in Melville the enthusiastic sailor he might have been, for unlike most seagoing naturalists, Jukes loved the life of action and adventure that voyaging offered. Time and again he volunteered to lead shore parties to explore new habitats or to defuse potential skirmishes.
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One such near-disaster, on February 15, 1845, arose from Griffin’s reckless violation of the captain’s orders never to plunder Aboriginal sacred relics. On entering an empty hut at Evans Bay, the northernmost bay on Cape York, the young artist couldn’t resist stealing a beautiful emu-feather ornament lying beside mortuary remains, which took the form of wrapped bundles of human bones. It was an action that immediately brought thirty armed warriors rushing to within fifty yards of the hut, “accusing Griffin of desecration of their hearths and homes.” By leveling his musket at the leader, Griffin managed to scuttle back to the ship, where he had to apologize to an angry Captain Blackwood for creating a diplomatic crisis.

Jukes soon redeemed his friend’s disgrace with an act of considerable bravery. Leading a water-seeking party to the same beach, he was confronted by a large group of irate warriors. “Upon observing this,” Griffin recorded, “the geologist, laying down his gun, advanced with open hands, having previously arranged that, should an attack be made upon him, he should throw himself on his face, so that the supporting party might fire upon his assailants. This system of negotiation was successful, and peaceful relations were established.” Within a few hours Griffin was able to sketch portraits of the now “friendly and communicative” warriors.
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The athletic geologist, tools in hand, cut a dashing figure and he knew how to play to it. He asked his sister in a letter to imagine the
Fly
and the
Bramble
meandering through the Reef’s blue waters, and “in the stern-sheets … you may put me, with a white shooting jacket, panama hat, luxuriant beard and mustache, gun, and collecting-basket.” Griffin soon came to view his older friend as a figure of high romance, like the famous German naturalist-adventurer Alexander von Humboldt. Adjacent to a small drawing of Jukes at work in the coral shallows of the Percy Islands, Griffin penned a lyrical description:

At low water the reefs about the island afforded a grand field for research to the geologist, who luxuriated amongst them knee-deep and hammer in hand. There were fields of divers kinds of marine vegetation of many colours, some having the appearance of a plateau of variegated penwipers with fancy fringes; corals and corallines branching out into noble terraces, with tints of rose and violet-blue; acres of orange-red brain-stone glittering in the sun, and lying in beds of green sea moss; clamp shells (the
Calme giga
) gaping open with the fish spread out like a velvet cushion, and spotted like a leopard; starfish blue and starfish grey, lying in sandy beds; dogfish and tiger sharks darting about in the channels; crabs and crawfish; and millions of things of life, seen and unseen.
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Griffin actually adapted this passage from a long rhapsody to Reef corals and biota in Jukes’s journal, which was published in 1847 as the
Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly
, and which the young painter confessed to having open beside him as he wrote his own book. Jukes was certainly worth plagiarizing. He’d concluded his own description of the same underwater “garden” with a fine example of his supple prose: “All these [corals], seen through the clear crystal water, the ripple of which gave motion and quick play of light and shadow to the whole, formed a scene of the rarest beauty, and left nothing to be desired by the eye, either in elegance of form, or brilliancy and harmony of colouring.”
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As this suggests, Jukes’s romanticism ran deeper than the sporting of Panama hats and shaggy beards—in fact, it gradually began to inform his views of the Reef’s seascapes and landscapes. When younger, he’d felt a “passion” for poetry, both as reader and writer, being especially fond of Shelley’s natural imagery even after he’d outgrown the poet’s fuzzy mysticism. Jukes’s letters home showed a keen appreciation of romantic aesthetics, and particularly of the fashionable landscape-art theories of the picturesque and sublime. This is not to say that romantic ideas inflected his geological theory, but he admitted privately, if not in his official Admiralty journal, that he also possessed “a poetic temperament.” He admired Shakespeare above all other writers, and he favored what he called a “Saxon style” of writing: “nervous, strong, picturesque, and expressive.”
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Using this “picturesque” style, Joseph Beete Jukes became the first explorer-writer to try to persuade his readers that the Great Barrier Reef possessed a distinctive type of beauty and sublimity. He penned moments of rapture that transcended the everyday hardships of being in Reef country—the baking heat, ferocious green ants, swarming three-inch cockroaches, incessant sandflies, and fever-bringing mosquitoes. “[F]or all these discomforts…” he wrote to his sister, “how glorious is a tropical night, or a morning before sunrise!—a cool clear sky, with a gentle breeze fanning your temples, and a delicious dew falling around you; the stars sparkling like gems through the liquid air, and the moonbeams glancing and flickering on the rippling water; and this not occasionally only, but night after night for months together.”
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During much of their voyage, Griffin, in contrast, grumbled relentlessly about the “intense oppressive heat”; the monotonous “russet-brown and semi-baked foliage”; the dry, barren hills, and tedious swampy mangroves. Yet when reading over Jukes’s
Narrative
several decades later, in preparation for writing his own, extremely retrospective account, Griffin was clearly so beset by nostalgia that he included several of his friend’s finest epiphanies.
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On June 5, 1843, for example, Jukes had climbed a steep hill on Lizard Island, following in the footsteps of his hero Captain Cook, and empathizing with him when he’d stood on the summit “to cast a look on the dangers that yet surrounded him.” Griffin, though, was moved more by his friend’s description of the ravishing view he’d seen on waking up next morning, when the island was covered in cool mist:

As the sun rose, the morning mists began to creep up the sides of the hill, at first in light curls, but shortly after in dense folds of vapor, that gathering and sweeping round the summit of the hill, opening and closing here and there, greatly enhanced the beauty of the view, both of our own island and the neighbouring rocky islets, but effectually hindered all surveying operations. Soon after the sun rose, and while his beams were nearly horizontal, we observed a very curious and interesting phenomenon. Whenever a bank of mist rested on the western brow of the hill, and the eastern one was clear, we could see our own shadows on the mist, surrounded as to the head and shoulders by a faint iris or rainbow. By watching attentively, all our movements could be discerned in these spectral figures. On extending the arm, I found its shadow reached beyond the halo that surrounded the head. By getting on a rock, the whole figure was perceptible, and each person thus saw his shadow standing in the air, apparently at a distance of about fifty yards from him, with its head surrounded by a halo of glory.
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Though an ardent romantic himself, Griffin didn’t realize that his friend had witnessed a Southern Hemisphere version of an eerie optical effect known among European artists and poets as “the Specter of the Brocken.” Similar natural projections caused by the sun playing on mist were often seen from the summits of the Brocken, in the Harz Mountains of Germany. By the early nineteenth century the phenomenon had mutated into a favorite romantic metaphor for describing the mysterious operations of the creative imagination. Goethe had used the Brocken as the setting for his “night of the witches” in
Faust
, and the Brocken specter had moved Coleridge to produce his famous definition of the sublime as something so awe-inspiring that it negated all powers of comparison. For the first time ever the specter of the Reef had supplanted the beauties of the Brocken.
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Jukes also evoked the sublime during another of his visionary moments on the Reef, this time when standing on its outer edge near Raine Island, just south of the Torres Strait. Gazing down from the hull of a recently wrecked merchant vessel, the
Martha Ridgway
, he was entranced by the “the unbroken roar of the surf, with its regular pulsation of thunder.” The wild July night on the decks of the wounded ship evidently reminded him of Edmund Burke’s famous definition of the sublime as a feeling that “operates in a manner analogous to terror.”
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A bright fire was blazing cheerfully in the galley forward, lighting up the spectral-looking foremast with its bleached and broken rigging, and the fragments of spars lying about it. A few of our men were crouched in their flannel-jackets under the weather bulwarks, as a protection from the spray which every now and then flew over us. The wind was blowing strongly, drifting a few dark clouds occasionally over the starlit sky, and howling round the wreck with a shrill tone that made itself heard above the dull, continuous roar of the surf. Just ahead of us was the broad white band of foam which stretched away on either hand into the dark horizon. Now and then some higher wave than usual would burst against the bows of the wreck, shaking all her timbers, sending a spurt of spray over the forecastle, and, travelling along her sides, would lash the rudder backwards and forwards with a slow creaking groan, as if the old ship complained of the protracted agony she endured.
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