The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (13 page)

The mounting public outcry in Britain and the Australian colonies over the “cannibalistic massacre” of those onboard the
Charles Eaton
gave the new mission particular urgency. In preparation for it, the officers of the
Fly
, which was captained by the experienced Scotsman Francis Blackwood, were made to read a series of gruesome tracts outlining “the treacherous conduct of the natives of the small islands in the Torres Strait.” The Admiralty evidently intended this exercise to sharpen the vigilance of the voyagers within this dangerous region; that it might also prejudice the officers in advance of the expedition apparently didn’t matter.
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One man, however, was determined to resist stereotyped presumptions about the Barrier Reef and its people—the ship’s thirty-one-year-old naturalist, Joseph Beete Jukes. Born into an austere but fair-minded Nonconformist family from Birmingham, Jukes had gone to Cambridge to study for a clerical career but been seduced by the extracurricular fascinations of geology. Giving up his clerical ambitions, he worked for a time as a traveling lecturer at Mechanics’ Institutes in the industrial Midlands, where teaching hardnosed workers turned him into a religious doubter and a political radical. All his life he longed for “a democratic party that … shall come in and sweep away all the relics and dregs of feudalism…, reduce the army and navy to a skeleton, remodel the law, the Church, and the whole system of government, abolish all but direct taxation, and … commence a new era in the world’s history.”
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A two-year stint in 1839–40 as a geological surveyor in Newfoundland gave him a love of the sea and a respect for the courage and resourcefulness of the Native Americans. If anything, when Jukes left England on the
Fly
for the Barrier Reef in April 1842, he had a marked prejudice in favor of indigenous peoples. “I have always joined in reprobating the causeless injuries sometimes inflicted by civilized, or quasi-civilized man, upon the wild tribes of savage life; and many atrocities have doubtless been committed in mere wantonness, and from brutality or indifference. I have always looked, too, with a favourable eye on what are called savages, and held a kind of preconceived sentimental affection for them, that I believe is not uncommon.”
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Actually, such affectionate feelings were much less common than Jukes realized. On May 13, 1843, soon after arriving in Australian waters, Jukes was exploring the estuary and hinterland of Wickham’s River at Cape Upstart, north of the Whitsunday Islands, with a couple of seamen and the ship’s artist. The latter, Harden Sidney Melville, went by the nickname “Griffin” and had become Jukes’s close shipboard friend. The group rowed a mile or so up the shoaling river channel, taking potshots at ducks and curlews, when around a dozen native men and women suddenly materialized on the north bank and began trotting toward them along the sandy river plain. Melville later wrote (using the third person for himself):

[T]he men came on, and Griffin will never forget that group of savages as they advanced … To compare a man to a mad dog seems odd … but that foremost savage, that black, brawny, knotty-limbed man-machine, running like an emu, and flinging up the sand with his indiarubber-like toes, foaming at the mouth, and howling, much resembled what was Griffin’s idea of a mad dog. His upper jaw was denuded of the two front incisors; his nose was transfixed by a kangaroo’s thigh-bone; the shaggy hair of his shock head was tied up into a knot with twisted native cord; his rugged limbs were covered with raised cicatrices; and his body was besmeared and begreased with filthy pigments. He shone in the sun like a piece of bright metal, and his feet came down with a heavy thud on the sand. As he ran he belched out “Ugh, ugh, ugh!” and then uttered a howl. His adornments were a fillet of grass across what claimed to be called a forehead (it was an eye-case, not a brain-case), a red smear of ochre inclosed his eyes and crossed his nose … He had a belt around his waist, a bunch of white cockatoo-feathers stuck in his hair, and carried an ugly “waddy” in his fist … Murderous-looking were all of them, with fierce, bloodshot eyes rolling wildly.

With the foam literally falling from their mouths on they came, leaped into the boat like gibbering apes, and commenced overhauling the sail, and the oars, and even the persons of the crew, uttering their outlandish jabber …
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Griffin and the sailors raised their muskets to fire, but to the young artist’s chagrin Jukes defused the situation with an uninhibited performance of clowning and dancing. Soon the warriors were laughing and imitating his buffoonery. Griffin was unimpressed: “it was noticeable,” he commented darkly, “that between the acts … the rogues showed the cruel instincts of the savage mind, to be developed so soon as the white man’s weakness had been discovered.”
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Where Griffin had seen foaming savages, Jukes described “tall, athletic men, bold and confident in their manners, with energetic gestures and loud voices.” In fact, he said, the armed warriors, whom they’d actually met a few days earlier, could hardly have been more genial: “We saluted our old friends by dancing, on which they began dancing, laughing, and singing, the others sitting still and looking on. As soon as we had dined we went ashore again, and our friends rushed down to meet us. Thomas [a young man who’d taken a shine to Jukes] came up, and embraced me several times, making a purring noise; and whenever a new face came up, he put his arm round me again, and spoke to him; introducing me, I suppose, as his particular friend. Ince, Melville, and I went with them along a path-way down the river, and both tribes followed us. They were very gentle in their manners and careful of us…”
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Interview with Natives at Wickhams River
by Harden Sidney Melville. Published in
Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly
by J. B. Jukes, 1847
(National Library of Australia)

True, a subsequent incident, just over a month later, did test the limits of Jukes’s tolerance. On June 25, the
Fly
anchored off Night Island near Cape Direction, south of the present-day Lockhart River. Some sailors from their sister survey ship, the schooner HMS
Bramble
, were filing down a nearby hill, having taken magnetic observations from the summit, when Jukes suddenly noticed a warrior creeping up behind the coxswain, his throwing stick hoisted ready to hurl a spear. Jukes pulled the trigger of his borrowed gun, but it misfired twice and he failed to avert the tragedy.

According to Griffin:

… poor Baily’s shriek of agony awakened the whole party to a knowledge of the murderous act. The savage, drawing himself up to his full height, exulted for a moment over the fiendish deed. The geologist, having recapped the piece, again pulled the trigger, and the charge exploded; but it was too late: a fatal destiny had demanded the sad sacrifice. The murderer escaped … Poor Baily, hapless victim of a barbarian’s spleen! It was a cruel fate. They broke the spear short off, for it could not be extracted. The barbed head had imbedded itself in one of the processes of the dorsal vertebra … The poor fellow lingered for a day and then died. Luckily the vessels lay too far off the coast to afford an opportunity of summary vengeance being taken on the kinsmen or countrymen of the murderer …
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Jukes himself admitted to feeling an outburst of “mixed rage and grief” against the perpetrator, as well as a suppressed impulse to exact vengeance on the whole tribe. He’d never before seen a death inflicted “in any kind of strife,” and he was shaken to the core. He was baffled, too, by the seeming irrationality of the act. Like Cook before him, and so many European travelers after, Jukes failed to associate this sudden display of Aboriginal hostility with the fact that the
Fly
’s sailors had just caught a swag of fish off the beaches of the clan’s estate without asking permission. Jukes’s anger over the incident lasted “many days or weeks after,” but it did eventually fade as he realized that all Aborigines could not be blamed for the act of one “cowardly” villain.
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*   *   *

Joseph Jukes, whom Griffin nicknamed “the geologist,” was officially charged with investigating the geological character of the Great Barrier Reef and the structure, origins, and behavior of reef-growing corals—the first scientist ever to be specifically assigned such a task.

Naturally the Admiralty’s concern was more practical than scholarly. By the 1840s it was widely recognized that corals were not inert rocks but living organisms, although little was known about the cause, extent, and speed of their development. It was thought that dangerous new reefs might suddenly appear in places where previous surveys had shown nothing. The Admiralty hydrographer Francis Beaufort urged the
Fly
’s Captain Blackwood to remember that he would be dealing with submarine obstacles “which lurk and even
grow
.”
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It was also expected that a geologist would offer expert advice on suitable sites for future harbors and settlements, and when Captain Blackwood gave Jukes responsibility for producing the official journal of the voyage, the geologist stressed that he would approach the task as a down-to-earth scientist, conveying “plain fact” and “simplicity and fidelity.” He claimed he would eschew any selecting “for effect,” or “heightened recollections,” or “brilliancy, elegance, or graces of style.”
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Still, in early January 1843, even this man of plain fact admitted being disappointed on his first inspection of living coral reefs. The fringing reefs off the coral cay Heron Island “looked simply like a half drowned mass of dirty brown sandstone, on which a few stunted corals had taken root.” Yet as soon as he broke open some coral boulders that had detached themselves from the main reef and saw their calcareous inner structure, his interest was fired. Jukes decided to throw all his powers of observation and inference into unlocking the mysteries of corals.

The first and most obvious question he needed to answer was how the calcareous fragments of sand, shells, and corals had become “hardened into solid stone,” with a regular bedding and a jointed structure like the blocks making up a rough wall. After considering a variety of hypotheses he tentatively concluded that the core structure of these blocks must have been produced inside a mass of loose sand and corals, and that the latter’s calcium skeletons had dissolved to make a liquid limestone binding agent. Having then been pounded by waves, the loose exterior of the blocks must have washed away, leaving the solid inner rock exposed.
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On undertaking a minute examination of a smaller coral block raised from underwater on a fishhook, Jukes made another important discovery about the character of this strange organic rock—the property that we would today call biodiversity. The surface was studded with a mosaic of tropical coral types: “brown, crimson, and yellow
nulliporae
, many small
actiniae
, and soft branching
corrallines
, sheets of
flustra
and
eschara
, and delicate
reteporae
, looking like beautiful lacework carved in ivory.” Interspersed with these were numerous species of small sponges, seaweeds, feather stars, brittle stars, and flat, round corals that he’d not seen before.

Breaking open the block, he found, honeycombed inside, several species of boring shells, bristle worms in tubes that ran in all directions, two or three species of tiny transparent marine worms twisted in the block’s recesses, and three small species of crab. This single chunk of limestone rock was, he concluded, “a perfect museum in itself.” For the first time he allowed a note of excited wonder to creep into his observations, as he reflected on “what an inconceivable amount of animal life must be here scattered over the bottom of the sea, to say nothing of moving through its waters, and this through spaces of hundreds of miles. Every corner and crevice, every point occupied by living beings, which, as they become more minute, increase in tenfold abundance.”
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Jukes summarized his conclusions for the benefit of Admiralty planners and fellow naturalists, estimating that the Great Barrier Reef extended, with relatively few internal breaks, from Sandy Cape in the south for some eleven hundred miles north, to the coast of New Guinea. It was made up mainly of individual coral reefs, lying side by side in a linear form and running roughly parallel with the coastline, though at distances that varied between ten and several hundred miles. The reefs of “the true” Barrier rose on the outer side in a sheer wall from the great depths of the ocean floor, while on the inner side lay a shallow lagoon scooped out of the coral that had grown up on a subsided landform. The outer reef sections were usually between three and ten miles long and around one hundred yards to a mile wide. They took the form of jagged submarine mounds made up of corals and shells compacted into a soft, spongy limestone rock; this was flat and exposed near the lagoon wall’s low-water mark, and higher at the windward edge where the surf broke fiercely and the reef plunged down to the ocean floor.