The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (31 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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…”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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*   *   *

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 thought, “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.”
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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.
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A week later, when viewing some exquisite coral formations at Turtle Reef, off Cooktown, Alfred was again moved to pen beachcomber-style reflections about the Reef’s blend of wonder and terror:

As one gazes down through the deep turquoise depths and sees the lovely play of color that the sunbeams revel in among the branches of the coral forest where shadow vies with sunshine to enchant the beholder’s eye, it seems another world far from this earthly realm of ours. A place far removed from the struggle of the upper world, and where sorrow is unknown and life goes on forever in listless, languid happiness and beauty. But how different the reality of it all, for the softest fringes of the tentacles of the sea anemones and polyps that seem so beautiful in richness of color and graceful delicacy of form, are deadly stings always waiting for the unwary fish that may swim carelessly within their reach. And the beautiful fish themselves … are many of them cannibals, and others are deadly poisonous.
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Cannibal struggles were not, however, confined to the Barrier Reef. Soon after returning from Australia, Alfred Mayor became engaged to the daughter of Alpheus Hyatt, his former Harvard paleontology professor. Harriet Hyatt was a feisty and talented artist with radical views on free thought, gender equality, and female suffrage. Alfred shared her ideas, but told her that Alex was an inveterate conservative: freedom of thought and social equality were entirely absent from the Harvard Museum. He even doubted that Agassiz would stomach their engagement. Alfred claimed he dared not show passion for anything other than coral reefs and medusae. As his love for Harriet bloomed, so did his paranoia. He warned Harriet never to send any letters care of Agassiz in case the latter should guess their relationship. Bitterly the couple decided they had no choice but to keep their engagement secret.

Alfred worried that his potential promotion was also at stake. Having recently been awarded his doctorate, he was hoping for a permanent position at the museum to improve his miserly pay of one thousand dollars per year. But on top of Alex supposedly being a “huffy” and avaricious “Old Moloch” who couldn’t be trusted, he was favoring another assistant at the MCZ, William Woodworth. On their Barrier Reef expedition “Little Billy” Woodworth had, Alfred claimed, fawned over Alex in a “clownish fashion,” in the hope of succeeding him as director of the museum. Of course, he told Harriet, “the aging autocrat” had lapped up the flattery.
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Harriet, furious at both the delayed marriage and her fiancé’s forced absences, blamed “Alex the Terrible” for everything, and she urged Alfred to sever ties with this tyrant who treated him like “a bondsman.” She warned him that the “spider-like” Agassiz would “absorb all the men who fall in his great web”: he was already gobbling up all the glory for Alfred’s work.

Privately Alfred thought his patron to be reasonably generous about work attributions, but he acceded to her wish by twice drafting letters of withdrawal from Alex’s relentless program of reef expeditions. Both times, though, he lost his nerve at the last minute. After all, he pleaded to Harriet, any job was better than none. But then, in August 1898, Harriet passed on the crushing news that Alex had indeed appointed the loathsome Woodworth as his successor at the MCZ. “He cares nothing for me personally,” Alfred responded bitterly, “… our relation is only a scientific alliance.”
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Even their scientific alliance was proving shaky. Alfred Mayor didn’t share Agassiz’s late-blooming antipathy to Darwin, and he disliked having to avoid mentioning the subject of Darwinian evolution in conversation. Alfred’s early work on butterflies had made him a strong and continuing proponent of natural selection. He was later to write that Darwin had done for the natural sciences what Newton had done for physics and mathematics. And though he occasionally criticized aspects of Darwin’s subsidence theory of coral reefs, he was privately even more skeptical about Agassiz’s alternative claims. He disagreed particularly with what would prove to be Alex’s most lasting contribution to reef theory—his claim that the dissolving of limestone by fresh water could create atoll lagoons.
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