The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (30 page)

Most of his son Alex’s troubled early childhood was spent either at boarding school or living with his artistic mother Cecile in Freiburg, Germany. She had taken her children there when she could no longer stand living with her narcissistic, work-obsessed husband. After a few years she died of tuberculosis. This forced Alex, at the age of thirteen, to join Louis and his new stepmother, Liz Cary, in Boston. Fortunately, Alex doted on them both. Alfred Mayor later claimed that the son’s “reverence for his father was almost a religion with him.”
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On graduating from Harvard in engineering, zoology, and natural history, Alex spent most of the 1860s trying to control his father’s feckless spending of the budget of Harvard’s new Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Deeply sensitive under a reserved exterior, Alex also had to undergo the anguish of witnessing his father’s successive scientific humiliations at the hands of Darwin and his prominent Harvard supporters, professors Asa Gray and James Dana. On top of this, Louis’s high-handed manner alienated a bright group of students, who seceded from the museum with much scandal after accusing him of plagiarizing their work.
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Alex Agassiz was no cipher, however. Louis’s opposite in personality, this shy, meticulous boy was determined to make his own way in life. Having fallen deeply in love with one of his students, the independent-minded Anna Russell, he married her in 1860. The devoted couple had three children in quick succession and forged a close-knit circle of half a dozen wealthy Boston relatives and friends. Six years later Alex surprised everyone by deciding to rescue a struggling Michigan copper mine, which he miraculously turned into one of the largest and most prosperous in America, making him a millionaire.

Continuing at the same time to exercise his passion for marine biology, Alex employed methods that were as thorough as his father’s were cavalier. During the 1860s and ’70s he produced an impressive list of publications on the taxonomy and embryology of echinoderms (the phylum which includes starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and others), all of which displayed a rigorous empirical approach to evidence. Privately he also admitted to a “general” acceptance of his father’s bête noire, Darwinian evolution. On a trip to England in 1869 Alex even took the trouble to meet and impress both Darwin and his disciple, Thomas Huxley.
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But in mid-December 1873 Alex Agassiz’s world collapsed. “The thunderbolts of God fall heavily upon us,” wrote his best friend and brother-in-law, Theo Lyman. The first shock was when Louis Agassiz died suddenly on December 14, after suffering a massive stroke. A few nights later Alex’s beloved wife, Anna, exhausted from tending to her father-in-law, was diagnosed with pneumonia. Aged only thirty-three, she died at midnight on the twenty-second and was buried on Christmas Eve. “Alex stood at the brink [of the grave],” Lyman recorded, “… with the tears rolling down his face, till I whispered to him to go.”
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All life washed out of Alex; he couldn’t even comfort his distraught sons. “I am utterly unable to get reconciled to an existence which is well-nigh intolerable,” he confessed to the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Six months later, while trying to cover his father’s teaching obligations, he broke down “and cried without control; and seemed like a man who’d lost much blood.”
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As months and then years passed, the grip of this depression showed no sign of lessening. Frenetic work and a series of overseas trips offered some distraction, but Alex’s close friends, with whom he was often melancholy and withdrawn, noticed permanent changes in his personality. He became gruff, surly, and prone to explosive bouts of anger with his students and employees. His young assistant Alfred Mayor commented that Agassiz “raised a wall between himself and the unsympathetic world … he held himself far and aloof.”
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In late 1876, still as fragile as ever, Alex accepted an invitation to visit Britain to help the celebrated Scottish marine scientist John Murray sort through some of the thousands of specimens of animals, plants, and seafloor deposits collected on the HMS
Challenger
’s three-year oceanographic expedition around the world. The meeting started awkwardly: Alex silenced Murray’s opening commiserations about Anna with the blurted cry, “I cannot bear it.” Yet working alongside Murray he grew animated for the first time in years, as he learned of the expedition’s startling results. These included the discovery of teeming life in the supposedly barren oceanic depths, and the mapping of vast gullies, canyons, and mountain peaks on the seabed.
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But Alex was intrigued most by Murray’s revelation that billions of calcium skeletons from minute, single-celled plankton rained ceaselessly down onto the ocean floor. This suggested, said Murray, that Darwin’s subsidence theory was not needed to explain how atolls and barrier reefs had come into being. It was possible that, given a perpetual avalanche of dead plankton tumbling through the ocean depths faster than it could be dissolved by the carbonic acid in seawater, this massive detritus had settled on the numerous rocky mounds already pushed up from the ocean floor and then amalgamated into sedimentary platforms. Eventually these limestone platforms would have reached a height close enough to the surface light for corals to begin growing.

Once these corals reached the ocean’s surface, the violence of the breakers would create a further base, or talus, of eroded rubble and broken corals. Toward the windward edges of these, a patina of living corals would flourish by feeding on the wave-carried plankton, but those corals sheltered to leeward would starve and die, their calcium skeletons gradually dissolved by seawater. Thus crescent-shaped atoll lagoons or canal-like barrier lagoons would be formed, depending on the original shape of the base.
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Alex Agassiz returned to America barely able to contain his excitement: “It is the first time since the death of my father and my wife that I have felt in the least as if there were anything to live for,” he wrote to Wyville Thomson, the leader of the
Challenger
expedition. Up to this time he’d thought of himself as a marine zoologist, leaving issues like the origins of coral reefs to the geologists. But the scales had fallen from his eyes, and although he’d earlier agreed with Darwin’s coral reef theory, he now denied it. “I never really accepted the theories of Darwin,” he told John Murray. “It was all too mighty simple.”
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What especially troubled Alex about Darwin’s theory was that subsidence hid the evidence of its operations, and seemed almost impossible to prove. Murray’s alternative explanation was both multifaceted and testable. Here was a wounded son suddenly offered the chance to revenge his late father’s humiliations, and Alex grabbed the opportunity with alacrity.
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A further goad was awaiting him on his arrival in America, in the form of a new publication from Darwin’s most fervent German disciple, Ernst Haeckel. Alex had always thought of Haeckel as a close friend, one of the few people to whom he could confide his agonies of personal grief. What he now read shocked him to the core. Haeckel had written a jeering, sarcastic pamphlet called
Goals and Paths
, which libeled Louis Agassiz’s character and legacy under the guise of discussing recent biological trends. It accused Louis of having cringed to the creationists, of having stolen his only decent scientific idea from his colleagues, and of having being “the most ingenious and energetic racketeer in the entire domain of natural history.” Alex sent off a furious letter in reply, calling Haeckel “an unmitigated blackguard” and breaking off all future relations. He told his uncle that he’d like to take a horsewhip to the man.
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Alex Agassiz was too fair-minded to blame Darwin directly for such a rogue disciple. Still, when undertaking a series of navy-sponsored oceanographic cruises in Florida and the Caribbean over the next few years, he began looking for evidence to support Murray’s new theory. In 1880 Murray presented his case against Darwin in
Nature
, claiming to have seen archipelagoes in Tahiti, the Maldives, and Fiji with no signs of subsidence, but strong evidence of elevated sedimentary platforms.

Emboldened, Alex wrote to Darwin predicting that future reef expeditions would confirm Murray’s results. Darwin didn’t miss the note of challenge, and though tired and ailing he countered with one of his own: “If I am wrong,” he wrote wearily, “the sooner I am knocked on the head and annihilated the better … I wish that some doubly rich millionaire would take it into his head to have borings made in some of the Pacific and Indian atolls, and bring home cores for slicing from a depth of 500 or 600 feet.” If Darwin were indeed wrong, such cores would show a superficial crust of coral, underlain by extensive older submarine rock. If he were right, the cores would show a considerable depth of coralline limestone.
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Darwin died less than a year later, which is probably why Alex didn’t at once take up the challenge, aside from making a short, inconclusive tour of reefs in Hawaii in 1884. The following year, however, he wrote to James Dana at Yale, endorsing Murray’s arguments and outlining a personal “dream” to hire a vessel to investigate Pacific islands and reefs “with modern methods,” so as to solve this compelling geological problem. Dana’s reply was less gentle than Darwin’s had been: he published a long paper pouring such scorn on Murray and his supporters that Alex immediately broke off all relations with the man.

One last inducement pushed Alex Agassiz into a crusade to prove Darwin wrong: a public attack against the Darwinists mounted by the Duke of Argyll and a trio of eloquent English bishops. They accused “the Darwin faction” of mounting “a conspiracy of silence” and “reign of terror” to stifle recognition of Murray’s theory of coral reefs, and to mask the fact that Darwin’s own “errors [were] as profound as the abysses of the Pacific.” Huxley, famed for writing with vitriol rather than ink, seared the group with his customary brilliance, but the Argyllites were not easily quelled.
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Their tactic of diverting attacks away from
On the Origin of Species
and onto Darwin’s theory of coral reefs was a shrewd one. There were obviously close links between the two theories: Darwin’s
The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
(1842) had anticipated its famous successor in both form and content, and it had launched Darwin’s arc of scientific fame. Disproving the coral reef theory, thereby discrediting Darwin and his disciples, would weaken the whole case for evolution by natural selection. And the fact that the reef theory was so difficult to prove made it vulnerable to demolition. In effect, Argyll and his supporters were elevating the coral reef problem into “one of the most prominent and explicitly controversial in science.”
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The controversy over Darwin’s reef theory revived the torrid evolutionary debates of the 1860s. This time, however, Alex Agassiz would not remain silent. His banner would be scientific empiricism, his field the coral reefs of the world. In 1896, quiet Alex Agassiz put to sea to revenge his father, conquer Darwin, vindicate Murray, and unlock the secrets of the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific.

*   *   *

Alex Agassiz would later admit privately that his Great Barrier Reef expedition of 1896 was something of a flop, because he’d followed the advice of William Saville-Kent to visit northern Australia in April–May, which proved an unsuitable time of year. Others had recommended waiting until September–October, when the still conditions would have been ideal for reef viewing. As it was, Alex, his son Maximilian, and two young Harvard museum zoological assistants, William Woodworth and Alfred Mayor, faced almost two months of buffeting southeasterly trade winds that whipped up a choppy sea and forced their ship to remain in harbor for all but three days of their two-month visit.

Alex Agassiz (far right), Alfred Mayor (second from right), and William Woodworth (third from right) on board the
Croydon
, 1896
(Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University)

The
Croydon
was also, Mayor wrote in his journal, “a plebean [sic] little tramp steamer only 180 feet long and she floats so low in the water that the waves wash over her deck in a most disrespectful manner.” The American scientists were confined to inspecting the southern inner portion of the Barrier Reef region, between Breaksea Spit and Lizard Island. Mayor reported that they managed only two fleeting glimpses of the outer Barrier—“the grandest coral structure in the world”—and even these were from “a respectful distance.”
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This was all the more frustrating because of the care with which Agassiz had planned the expedition. The
Croydon
carried “a complete photographic apparatus and an extensive outfit for pelagic fishing,” as well as deep-sea nets and a sophisticated sounding apparatus built specially by a U.S. naval engineer. Before setting off, Agassiz had studied every available Barrier Reef chart, explorer’s account, and scientific paper. These ranged from the pioneering works of Flinders and Jukes, to Saville-Kent’s great work of 1893,
The Great Barrier Reef
, and several recent geological analyses by Australian scientists Charles Hedley, Thomas Griffith Taylor, Ernest Andrews, and Edgeworth David.
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