The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (25 page)

To achieve all this, a scientist-photographer needed great patience and physical stamina as well as technological virtuosity. Specialist equipment for scientific photography was nonexistent. William had to devise his own square lens frame, and he built an extra supporting leg on his tripod in order to take shots of corals and tiny crustaceans from a vertical position. He experimented endlessly with different lens types to find the most suitable focal lengths for capturing the true size of his specimens. Wherever possible he photographed marine creatures, other than living corals, in his portable giant-clamshell aquariums, taking care to replicate the original environmental conditions and retain true natural appearances.
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Capturing the physical exactitude of this marine world was not William’s only mission. The adventure, beauty, and romance of this “fairy land of fact” also struck deep chords in his personality. Thursday Island, his headquarters in the Torres Strait, was still a wild frontier pearling port with a population of only two thousand, made up of peoples “from every quarter of the globe.” The year before William arrived there, the Government Resident had listed twenty-four nationalities among the annual list of offenders in the jail book.
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One could not imagine, for example, a more swashbuckling character than William’s friend Frank Jardine, who was now living for periods on Thursday Island. Jardine had once herded his father’s cattle twelve hundred miles through unexplored Cape York bush, fighting Aboriginal warriors all the way, before reaching Somerset in a tattered emu-skin suit. There he’d married Sania Solia, a niece of the king of Samoa, and set himself up as a type of Reef baron. He was brutal in his suppression of local Aborigines, and liked to serve European guests their meals on silver plate made from coins looted from a nearby Spanish wreck.

The Jardines were just the type of friends needed to help finance a quixotic secret hobby that William had begun to develop while staying in the Torres Strait. He showed them the results of his experiments to introduce irritants into a living oyster so that it would create nacreous layers around them. By this means he’d created artificial “blister” pearls, which grew out of the pearl shell. But he also tantalized the Jardines “with hazy glimpses of a royal road to the rapid accumulation of untold wealth” by claiming to be on the way to achieving the holy grail of producing “freely detached” cultured pearls.
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Lean, bearded, and angular, wearing a solar hat and a trim-fitting suit, William cut a romantic South Seas figure and liked to photograph himself wading through lagoon shallows, camping on a beach in a grass hut, or working on his clam-shell aquariums. Thursday Island, with its reputation as a maritime badlands, suited William’s boyish self-image of a dashing adventurer. It probably also offered chances for adventures of a more amorous kind.

On William’s third visit there, in 1891, he formed an intimate friendship with the famous flower painter Ellis Rowan, when both were staying at the Grand Hotel. While she sketched flowers he strode “out on the rocks hunting for flowers of a different kind—sea blossoms.” They talked, walked, fished, sketched, sailed, and stayed with the Jardines at Somerset. “I have rarely left a place with greater regret…” she wrote wistfully. Perhaps they simply shared a love of art—the basis of William’s long friendship with elderly Tasmanian fish painter Louisa Ann Meredith.

Still, William did later, in 1894, create a scandal by running off to Melbourne with Louisa’s young granddaughter, an action that led to calls for the “seducer” to be shot for his “dastardly crime.” Perhaps these artistic women reminded William of his cloistered boyhood, when the conversation, painting, and poetry of his mother and older sisters had provided such solace. On the other hand, this may have been another instance where he took after his father.
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Saville-Kent’s corals. Figure 3 (upper right) is an illustration of
Madrepora kenti
.
In
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
by William Saville-Kent, 1893

In any event there is no doubt that the land and seascapes of the Reef appealed powerfully to William’s artistic sensibilities. He thought of his photographs as both scientific records and reefscapes, imbued with aesthetic beauties of color, design, and poetic evocation. Skull Reef, on the outer Barrier, for example, reminded him—perhaps all too poignantly—of a decapitated human head with an “unevaporated tear in its eye.” It was the aesthetic principle of sublimity, too, that drew him to produce a brilliant matching pair of photos labeled “Flotsam” and “Jetsam.” One showed the stark, stranded hulk of the mission schooner
Harrier
, the other a series of colossal storm-stranded coral boulders.
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Flotsam
and
Jetsam
, in
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
, 1893

Mostly he sought to show “from an artistic viewpoint,” using chromolithography to hand-color his drawings, the stunning visual patterns of the Reef’s coral gardens and marine creatures. At Crescent Reef, also on the outer Barrier, he encountered:

the most luxuriant expanse of living coral [he] had the good fortune to photograph … [I]n some examples … the corallum was bright violet throughout, with a tendency to magenta towards the tips of each separate branchlet; in others a creamy hue predominated, with violet or crimson extremities and growing points; while in a third series, the ground colour varied from light to dark sage-green, all the growing points … being violet or crimson.
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In December 1891, at the urging of his homesick wife, William left Queensland to return to England. In the British autumn of 1893 he published a book that encapsulated his four magical years of work and pleasure on the Reef. Published by the elite press W. H. Allen, it was a large-size production in super-royal quarto, measuring 13½ inches by 10 inches, with forty-eight full-page, photomezzo-type black-and-white plates, and sixteen hand-drawn, hand-colored chromolithographic plates.

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
took its many reviewers in Britain and Australia by storm. They described it as “sumptuous,” an “
edition de luxe
,” with none complaining of the relatively expensive price of four guineas. They called it a unique kind of scientific work, one which covered its many themes in such multifaceted and compelling ways that every type of reader was satisfied. It was, we can now see, the first complete biography of the Reef. William Saville-Kent’s wounded sensibilities, diverse talents, and frustrated ambitions had come together to produce a masterpiece.

At a time when Thomas Huxley and the poet Matthew Arnold were arguing about the emergence of a gulf between the two cultures of art and science, William had shown how to bridge this divide. The
West Australian
proclaimed the book was enough “to make the scientific man an artist and the artist a scientist, and to inspire the ordinary reader with a desire to be both.” William’s photographic illustrations, wrote
The Field
, showed “the beauties of the corals and other animals constituting these marvellous structures with a degree of accuracy which has never been even attempted.”
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Giant anemone, named
Discosoma kenti
after William Saville-Kent. In
The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities
,
1893

William had at last attained his twenty-five-year ambition to become a famous scientist. The
Saturday Review
echoed other reviewers in asserting that such a complete study of a coral reef had not been published before.
The Scotsman
declared it the most original book on coral reefs since Darwin’s publications in 1836, and one destined to be always the “first authority on its subject.”
Nature
, already on its way to becoming the most prestigious scientific journal of the Anglophone world, suggested that Saville-Kent’s photographic methods had added something entirely new to the methodology of the scientist: “[his] book contains a series of nature-pictures of the corals such as has never before been submitted to the scientific world, and a glance at his illustrations does more to familiarise one with the phases and aspects of the reef and its life than pages of written description.”

Australian journalists, and especially Queensland’s leading newspaper,
The Courier
, hailed in particular the book’s promotion of the Reef’s economic products and potentialities.
The Argus
in Melbourne had no doubt that the publication of “such a magnum opus in the mother country” would advertise “the marvels of the Great Barrier Reef and … the magnitude and variety of resources … awaiting development.” British newspapers like
The Times
and
Saturday Review
were especially impressed that William’s lively writing style had managed to make the dismal science of economics read like “a veritable romance of the sea.”
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And every reviewer, without exception, singled out the photographs and chromolithographs, hand-drawn and hand-colored, as the book’s chief attraction, noting that most people in the Northern Hemisphere could have had no conception until now of the indescribable beauty and riotous colors of a coral reef and its marine inhabitants. “It almost takes our breath away to be suddenly shown one of these plates,” wrote the
Cambridge Review
, “we feel we are looking at the thing itself, and we are lost in admiration at the skill of the photographer and the care of the publisher which have combined to produce these results.” The
West Australian
thought William’s artistry to be nothing short of genius: “Unless one has … seen for oneself the submarine chromatic effects which are more brilliant than the most gorgeous transformation scene conceived, it would be almost difficult to believe that the bright greens, reds, pinks, blues and yellows are the actual colour of forms … Scarce a flower upon earth can vie in brilliancy of tint with many of the anemones of the oceans, while the birds of the tropics find their plumage dulled besides the remarkable fishes which are found in these coasts.”
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