The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (23 page)

William, like it or not, could never forget the debt he’d incurred to his sister. He owed Constance everything: his freedom, his reputation, his career, his comfort. The shrewd Scotland Yard detective who had led the murder inquiry, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, had been unable to find enough evidence to make a charge against the boy stand, but he remained convinced that Constance had carried out the murder in collaboration with William. Their motive, Whicher believed, was to exact revenge on their stepmother for blighting both their own and their mother’s lives—an assessment backed by the most authoritative modern analysts of this famous Victorian crime.
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In the summer of 1865, five years after the death of Francis, Constance confirmed at least half of Inspector Whicher’s suspicions by confessing to the murder. A bout of intense religious indoctrination had aroused her conscience, and she seems to have been moved by a martyr’s determination “to absolve her family, especially William.” Yet her overinsistence on having done the deed alone rang false with many of her interviewers. Inconsistencies and evasions in her account suggested she was protecting someone in the family, and she compounded this impression by refusing to take her counsel’s advice to plead a family history of mental instability. To do so, she said, would damage her brother’s future career. And so she stuck to her confession, even though she risked execution as a result—a sentence she did in fact incur, but which was later commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment.
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Constance had always encouraged William’s ambition to be a scientist. Samuel Kent and other family members wanted the boy to go into business in his maternal grandfather’s coach-making company, but William’s heart lay elsewhere. He was talented at drawing and he loved nature rambles, the seaside, and stories of science, exploration, and adventure. In 1859 Constance introduced him to the most important scientific work of the century. She read, and probably brought home, a copy of Charles Darwin’s newly published
On the Origin of Species
, and then announced to her horrified parents that she was a convert to evolution. At the time of her sentencing in 1865, she knew, too, that William was shortly due to inherit money from his mother’s estate, which could fund his education. A taint of family insanity might cast this legacy into doubt. Constance had thus performed an act of martyrdom to protect her beloved younger brother.
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*   *   *

In opting for a scientific career, William had not chosen an easy path. Clergymen steeped in the creationist tenets of the Church of England still monopolized most paid scientific positions in England at that time. Luckily, though, William’s desire for a science education coincided with a social revolution that was beginning to pave the way for a new brand of professionalism in the field. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s ideas and led by his pugnacious disciple Thomas Huxley, scores of young men from the insecure lower-middle class began to storm the traditional bastions of science and engineering, in the expectation of making a living. Huxley urged them to overthrow clerical and aristocratic privilege and bring about a “New Reformation,” by forging useful, secular, and morally uplifting scientific careers.
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With the help of his recent inheritance William Kent was well placed to join these aspirants, even though his earlier education had been spotty and erratic. After his stepmother died in 1866 and his father moved to rural Wales to escape the murder scandal, timid William began to reveal abilities and ambitions few had suspected. Enrolling in evening classes at King’s College, London, he attended Huxley’s inspirational lectures on marine biology and decided to follow in his footsteps. Probably at his teacher’s urging, he joined the Microscopical Society and began investigating minute marine organisms called infusoria. After this he worked for a period with Huxley’s great friend William Flower at the Royal College of Surgeons, cataloging coral collections and becoming “smitten” with these mysterious creatures.
10

By 1870 William, aged twenty-five, was a published authority on corals and sponges, and was working as a junior assistant at the British Museum. But he shared his father’s restless ambition and chafed at the poor pay and lack of promotion opportunities. Three years on, the added financial burden of marriage to a London barrister’s daughter, Elizabeth Bennett, goaded him into taking a better paid position as resident biologist at a new commercial aquarium in Brighton. It was an inspired decision for someone with both artistic and technological talents. William used the profits from the entertainment attractions of the aquarium to subsidize his scientific work—culturing lobsters and oysters, studying marine behavior and reproduction, and designing artificial marine environments.
11

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.
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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.
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*   *   *

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.
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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?”
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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.”
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*   *   *

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.
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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.
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