The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (33 page)

So the young Charles Darwin had been right all along, and in different ways both Alex Agassiz and Alfred Mayor were too blinded by their personal obsessions to see it. Still, the Sturm und Drang of their scientific arguments wasn’t wasted. Because their quarrel thrust the Great Barrier Reef into the forefront of scientific attention, it fueled the study of coral reefs all over the world, initiating important new methods for investigating and understanding marine life. It was a legacy of which even squabbling Alex and Alfred might have been proud.

10

SYMBIOSIS

Cambridge Dons on a Coral Cay

T
HE PROGRAMS OF ACADEMIC SCIENTISTS
are rarely treated as tabloid fare, but an announcement on September 3, 1927, by the British Association for the Advancement of Science proved an exception. To the surprise of many scholars, news that a group of young Cambridge scientists would live for twelve months on a coral island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef made headlines among Britain’s mass newspapers. Perhaps the fact that Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s steamy, bestselling Pacific novel
The Blue Lagoon
had just been shown as a silent movie gave the story some extra juice.

The expedition was also seen as romantic in other ways. The leader, Charles Maurice Yonge (always known as Maurice), a shy, rangy Cambridge don of twenty-seven with an endearing stammer, was to take his new Scottish bride, Mattie, twenty-four, to live with him in “the lonely coral wastes” of the South Pacific. Evening papers vied to describe the ordeals that lay ahead for the brave Mattie. She would supposedly be “the first English woman ever to live on the reef,” spending the year “in a primitive hut on one of the low islands, with Queensland as the nearest civilized country.”

Omitting to mention that she was a qualified doctor with an Edinburgh University science degree, the London
Evening News
noted that this “smiling happy girl barely out of her teens” was prepared to follow her husband anywhere and to laugh in the face of exile. The nearest shopping was a day’s boat journey through shark-infested waters, but she would at least have a native “Man Friday” to help. Most versions of the syndicated story also left the purpose of the expedition until the last sentence—evidently they were going to study “the biological condition of the reef itself and the sea around.”
1

Serious newspapers recognized something odd about the expedition beyond its romance. It had come about at the suggestion of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Committee, made up of university and government scientists, and was to be half funded by Australian government money, yet it was to be led by a group of junior British marine scientists who’d never even seen a coral reef. Why were the Australians paying for such novices to study their Reef?
2

Maurice Yonge, an expert on oysters though not on corals, explained that his group would be applying new biological and environmental methods developed in Britain and Europe to the study of growth patterns of corals and reefs in all four seasons. “Curiously enough,” Yonge declared, “there are no Australians qualified for the task.” British scientists would thus set up a temporary marine laboratory and research station for this purpose on the Low Isles, about forty miles from the mainland, where they would also investigate for the Australian government the commercial potential of Barrier Reef marine industries.
3

The Cambridge expedition, as it became known, arrived in Australia in early July 1928, to be welcomed by state governors, politicians, and scientists at each major port on its procession from Melbourne to Cairns. Mattie Yonge was flattered that “our reception … was such that might have been given to royalty.” Her husband, however, was warier: he’d been warned to prepare for a possibly skeptical reception from a prickly Australian popular press and scientific community. At every opportunity he took pains to stress that the project was as much Australian as British, pointing out to journalists that a young Australian economic biologist, Frank Moorhouse, had just been appointed by the Queensland government to study the cultivation possibilities of the Reef’s marine resources, and would soon be joining them.
4

As soon as the ship reached Sydney on July 4, Yonge and his deputy, Dr. Frederick Russell, met with the director and trustees of the Australian Museum to assure them that, provided funding could be found, they’d be pleased to host research visits from up to five members of the museum’s scientific staff. Even so, that evening, at a dinner hosted by the local branch of the Royal Zoological Society, the Britons felt the frisson that their visit was causing among the museum’s zoologists, who were proud of their own expertise in collecting and classifying Australian marine species.
5

Talented, enthusiastic, and often self-taught, the museum scientists were a boisterous group. They included men like the American-born actor, dancer, and crab collector Charles Melbourne Ward, the self-proclaimed joker and ichthyologist Gilbert Whitley, and the rowdy zoologist’s clerk Frank McNeill, who’d distinguished himself at Gallipoli for both courage and insubordination.
6

When questioned about the absence of taxonomic zoologists in their ranks, Yonge conceded that such work was important and would be undertaken by Australian experts, but, within the specific context of the Cambridge expedition, it was necessarily “a side issue.” British marine scientists, he explained, “were turning more and more from systematic to experimental zoology,” which would be the main focus of their work on the Low Isles.

As payback for such donnish superiority, the fresh-faced young Britons then had to endure a succession of jocular speeches from the Australians, listing the perils that lay in wait for them on the Reef. These ranged from sharks, groupers, and giant clams to sandflies, mosquitoes, malaria, and sunburn. Next morning the tabloid
Sun
relished “Welcoming the Expedition” with the opening words: “Tiger-sharks, with great triangular teeth, slipping silently along; stone-fishes, with 13 poison-spines along the back, looking exactly like the rocks which they lie in waiting to be trodden upon.”
7

*   *   *

Sharks and stonefish were the least of Maurice Yonge’s worries. As a biologist briefed to investigate the mysteries of symbiosis in reef-growing corals, he was aware that his expedition was a fragile coalition. It had been tacked together by two academic titans situated on opposite sides of the globe, who held opposing ideas about the priorities and methods of reef science.

Henry Caselli Richards, a professor of geology at the University of Queensland, who’d initiated the idea of inviting British biologists to undertake the expedition, had spent the previous decade doing his best to sideline biological studies of the Reef. It was thanks to the genial charm and energy of this scientific Machiavelli that the Great Barrier Reef Committee (GBRC) had been founded in 1922, in collaboration with the Queensland government, and its mandate was to focus on the Reef’s geological origins. A networker with extensive academic, business, and government connections, Richards’s ambition had been to insert himself and his geology colleagues at the forefront of international debates over the validity of Darwin’s theory of reef origins. More specifically, he hoped to make himself famous by proving Darwin right and contrarians like Alex Agassiz and John Murray wrong.

To this end he’d circulated an influential paper, “The Problems of the Great Barrier Reef” (1922), which favored Darwin’s interpretation and cited six future scientific imperatives in order of priority. Geological surveys and reef drillings were listed first; biological experiments on corals came sixth. As chairman of the GBRC, Richards had also assiduously blocked the efforts of some members—including its secretary, mollusc scientist Charles Hedley—to establish a marine biological research station on the Reef. Instead, Richards diverted the bulk of the committee’s money into an expedition to drill Oyster Cay, twenty-five miles northeast of Cairns. When the popular Hedley threatened to resign over this colossal waste of money, Richards somehow persuaded him to take charge of the drilling.
8

The Oyster Cay expedition of 1926 proved as farcical as Hedley feared. Until the drill failed at 580 feet, it brought up only loose coral and sand. Bedrock was nowhere to be seen. Though Richards managed to fob off a threatened backlash from frustrated committee members, he soon found himself experiencing pressure from less pliable quarters. At the Third Pan-Pacific Science Congress in Tokyo that year, the doyens of international reef science were preoccupied with biological and ecological, not geological, issues. The final plenary session declared that “coral reefs are symbiotic entities whose origin and growth relations have received too little attention,” and resolved to promote a “comprehensive investigation of the coral reefs of the Pacific.”
9

Sniffing the wind, Richards decided he should change direction and lead the charge to mount a biological expedition in Australia. But he was chagrined to find that the climate of discouragement he’d so carefully fostered had deterred Australian university graduates from working on marine biology. A search of the universities produced nobody. Hedley’s death from an asthma attack on the way home from the congress further thinned the biologists’ numbers. Still, this did provide a convenient scapegoat: Richards unhesitatingly blamed his lieutenant for having spent too much time working on Oyster Cay when he should have been undertaking a biological survey of the Reef.
10

Hedley, however, had some posthumous vengeance when a journalist friend of his, S. Elliott Napier, had pungent things to say about the neglect of biological studies of the Reef. Napier’s critique was published in a series of newspaper articles in December 1927, which arose from a “nature-study and holiday” expedition he had just undertaken to Bunker and Capricorn islands at the southern end of the Reef. His subsequent book incorporating the articles,
On the Barrier Reef
, was a bestseller, and reprinted every year for the next decade. In it he berated Australian scientists for having failed to study the sublime treasure that lay at their doorstep. “As a field for investigation,” he thundered, “… the Great Barrier Reef affords the rarest of opportunities. The marine fauna, in particular, though in richness unequaled anywhere on the globe, has been but poorly studied.” The outside world, he suggested, valued the Barrier Reef more than Australians did.
11

Richards, the target of Napier’s spleen, thought he’d better do something about this vacuum of Reef biologists. With the help of an energetic ex-governor of Queensland, Sir Matthew Nathan, he appealed to Britain for help in providing biology graduates and in raising additional funding for a proposed Barrier Reef expedition. To succeed, though, Richards needed to win over the acerbic titan of British marine science, J. Stanley Gardiner, professor of Zoology at Cambridge and head of the country’s Fisheries Department.

Gardiner shared Richards’s enthusiasm for marine economic development, but little else. He’d built his fame on biological investigations of marine flora and fauna among the reefs and islands of the Indian Ocean, where he’d become an expert on the physiology of coral nutrition and growth. On the question of reef origins, however, he was a fierce anti-Darwinist and thought all efforts to prove subsidence by drilling to be imbecilic. At a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1925, he’d ventured the blunt opinion that “It is the greatest pity in the world [that] there is a Great Barrier Reef. Its existence is really a tragedy so far as the people of Queensland are concerned. It is a great nuisance to navigation. It is also a curse because it destroys 70,000 to 80,000 square miles of most admirable trawling ground.”
12

Even so, Gardiner knew a bargain when he saw one. Australia’s offer to co-fund a twelve-month biological investigation of a Barrier Reef coral island offered an irresistible chance for British marine science to solve what he believed to be marine biology’s foremost mystery: What was the exact role of the minute algae (zooxanthellae) known to be living within the cells of tropical reef-growing corals? Betting on youth, Gardiner engineered a lucrative Balfour Fellowship at Cambridge for Maurice Yonge, a bright young oyster physiology graduate from Edinburgh University, whom he then persuaded to lead the expedition.
13

This was a stroke of organizational genius. A ferocious worker with a quiet charm, Yonge had served as a second lieutenant in the First World War, where he’d proven himself an excellent leader. Furthermore, though an expert marine physiologist, he was willing to learn experimental methods at Cambridge for a full term before being dispatched to Australia. Gardiner encouraged his new protégé to recruit like-minded young biologists—women included—who were likely to enjoy the adventure of working rough on a coral island for little money. In doing so, Yonge presumably took the advice of one Cambridge academic who told him, “Everyone thinks this expedition will be a very big thing, so don’t invite any rotter.”
14

Rotters aside, both Gardiner and Yonge knew they were taking a big risk sending an expedition of young British scientific “experimenters” to a country renowned for its prickly nationalism, its suspicion of intellectuals, and active neglect of marine biological science.

*   *   *

On July 16, 1928, Maurice Yonge’s cryptic daily notes reported that the Cambridge scientific party departed the Queensland port of Cairns for the Low Isles at noon, sailing in perfect weather and a calm sea on their motor launch, the
Daintree
. At 3:00 p.m. they sighted their home for the next year. It was low tide and a large area of fringing reef lay exposed. Adjacent to the flat stood “a circular mound of sand about 250 yd. diameter, surmounted by [a] lighthouse in centre and crescent-shaped mangrove about half a mile to west.” Mattie Yonge thought this “one of the most beautiful sights I think I have ever seen.” Two days later Maurice recorded the arrival of an expected visitor, a Mr. Charles Barrett of the Melbourne
Herald
.
15