The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (8 page)

Yet even while congratulating himself, Flinders was conscious of a new problem. The
Investigator
’s first encounter with the brisk winds and choppy swell of the open Pacific had produced leaking of around five inches per hour, but by the middle of the Torres Strait this had worsened to an alarming fourteen inches per hour. Hoping that the problem was localized, Flinders found a suitable site in the gulf to careen the hull and investigate the issue. The carpenters’ reports of November 17 were devastating: the hull was half rotten and worsening fast—planks, bends, timbers, and treenails on both the starboard and port sides were affected. The prognosis was stark: if caught in a strong gale the
Investigator
would founder; if grounded on a shoal it would fall to pieces. Only if cosseted in fine weather could it conceivably last a further eight to twelve months.
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The bitter implications of this news still reverberate in Flinders’s account many years later: “I had ever endeavoured to follow the land so closely, that the washing of the surf upon it should be visible, and no opening, nor any thing of interest escape notice … and with the blessing of God, nothing of importance should have been left for future discoverers but with a ship incapable of encountering bad weather—which could not be repaired if sustaining injury … I knew not how to accomplish the task.”
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With the northwest monsoon now blowing, any hope of sailing down the western shores of New Holland had to be shelved until the wind shifted back to the south. Thanks to Flinders’s hubristic resurvey of the area covered by Cook’s charts, they were now trapped inside the Gulf of Carpentaria, with no choice but to try to caulk the ship’s rotten seams and continue to inch along the broiling northern coasts until the monsoon season passed.

Meanwhile the sailors’ health was disintegrating faster than the ship’s planks. By the time they reached Arnhem Bay on March 5, 1803, scurvy, fever, and diarrhea were so rife that Flinders, himself crippled with scorbutic ulcers, had to make the agonizing decision to head the
Investigator
to the nearest East Indies port. As they turned toward Kupang in Timor, he asked his surgeon, Hugh Bell, for an overall report of the men’s health.

The written reply was blunt to the point of abrasiveness. It had been nineteen months since the crew sailed from England, during which time they’d been given no more than two or three fleeting opportunities to refresh themselves with “animal food,” fruit, and vegetables. Over the past eight months, moreover, they had “been exposed to almost incessant fatigue in an oppressively hot climate, as also to an exceedingly deleterious atmosphere since Dec. 16 when the weather became dark and cloudy with thunder, lightning, and rain. The ill effects of this alteration in the weather were perceptible in a short time among the ship’s company; a violent diarrhea being produced, attended with symptoms of fever…”

On top of this, there were no fewer than twenty-two men with scurvy symptoms, such as ulcerations, loose teeth, spongy gums, livid sores, foul breath, and lassitude. Five of these were already seriously ill.
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Simultaneously troubled and angered by the surgeon’s tone, Flinders secretly still hoped to resume the survey by procuring a new ship at Kupang. When this failed to materialize, he decided to fulfill his original orders to scout around the region for new harbors or sea lanes that could prove useful to the East India Company. Bell was appalled. Flinders’s dilemma, similar to that faced by Cook, of whether to continue surveying or sail straight back to Port Jackson had, in effect, brought his two philosophies into insoluble conflict. The man of feeling fretted about his ailing sailors; the scientific cartographer wanted to stick to his mission. Either way, he lacerated himself for failing to live up to the towering examples of his predecessors:

It may well be, that to leave such a coast as this without exploring it, when there is a possibility, nay perhaps a probability, that I may never again return to accomplish it, shews but little of that genuine spirit of discovery which contemns all danger and inconvenience when put in competition with its gratification! Upon that score of duty I might (it may be said) be forgiven, but must never again boast of a single spark of that ethereal fire with which the souls of Columbus and of Cook were wont to burn!—I am not indeed such a Quixote in discovery as this, although since I was able to read Robinson Crusoe, it has been within constant pursuit; but there is another reason remaining in aid of the first,—the debilitated state of my health, as well as of many others on the ship, and a lameness in both feet from incorrigible scorbutic ulcers, render me unable to go about any longer in boats, or to the masthead of the ship; both of which are absolutely necessary to any tolerable accuracy in this kind of surveying. I suppose it is unnecessary to state that the whole of this important part of our duty rests upon me: for Port Jackson, then, we now steered away, with a fresh and fair wind.
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Even with the arrival of the southeast trade winds, Flinders still could not bring himself to steer straight to Port Jackson. He continued to make several exploratory asides while they followed the west coast of New Holland homeward. These delays outraged Bell, who formally accused his captain of failing in his humane duty to his sick and dying men. While acknowledging Bell’s concern, Flinders savaged the surgeon for questioning his authority and attempting “to raise yourself a character of Humanity, by putting a malignant stigma on mine … [H]ad the health of the people been the great object of my duty as it is yours,” he thundered, “and had I been able to follow my own plan for their preservation, I should certainly have left them on shore in their native country, and not exposed them to the danger of the seas and enemies and to pernicious changes of climate, to all of which the execution of my orders makes it necessary.”
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Nevertheless, the realization that eighteen of his crew were stretched out on hammocks below deck, some “almost without hope,” eventually forced the man of feeling to sail quickly for Port Jackson. The
Investigator
reached Sydney Heads on June 9, 1803, but not before a succession of good men had been committed to the deep.

*   *   *

Matthew Flinders’s achievements were epic by any standards. He circumnavigated the coast of Australia; he discovered that no strait or sea separated New Holland from New South Wales, thereby showing these to be part of the one continent; he named this continent Terra Australis, or Australia; and he substantially enhanced Cook’s charts and discoveries on the northeast coast. Yet he cursed himself for failing to live up to his own expectations. The charting of the Torres Strait had been perfunctory, he’d had to abandon detailed surveys of large sections of the northern and northwest coasts, and he knew that the exacting botanist Robert Brown was disappointed at the paucity of their scientific finds. Finally, the death of excellent sailors like the quartermaster John Draper weighed heavily on his conscience.
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Later in 1803, while returning to England to report on this circumnavigation, Flinders was shipwrecked on Wreck Reef in the Coral Sea, and a few months later he found himself imprisoned on Mauritius by the island’s overbearing French governor, General Charles-Mathieu-Isidore Decaen. Three years later, still in lonely exile, he published an article in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
that contained the first ever use of the term “barrier reefs.” This denoted concealed coral reefs, separated from but growing parallel to the mainland. It seems likely that the deluge of obstacles he’d encountered over the previous five years inspired this most apt geographical coining.
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Flinders’s litany of setbacks did not cease even after his return to England after a six-year imprisonment. In 1812–14, as he wrote up his long-delayed journal,
A Voyage to Terra Australis
, his life and career were once again assailed. His health had disintegrated to the point where he was now caught in a race against death to complete his manuscript. He won by a whisker, and it was in this great creative work, published the day before he died, that he gave a name for the first time to the massive assemblage of submarine coral obstacles he’d encountered along the east coast of Australia. He called them “the Great Barrier Reefs.”

There is no doubt that this was the modern Reef’s foundation document. Matthew Flinders, not James Cook, was the true European father of the Reef, because he was the first person to infer its unified existence and to conceive of it as a whole.
Terra Australis
brought together the romantic and scientific sides of his personality in a brilliant fusion. Using imagination and intellect, Flinders contended that the Reef was a continuous, interconnected work of nature and a coherent geographical region.

The book’s summary revealed the reasoning processes, inferences, and speculation that conjured the Great Barrier Reef into being. Flinders argued that, though the portions of the outer reef sighted by the
Investigator
lay considerably eastward of those discovered by Campbell and Swain in the early 1790s, “there can be no doubt that they are connected.” If this was so, he suggested, the reefs probably began as far south as Breaksea Spit, for “[it] is a coral reef, and a connexion under water, between it and the barrier, seems not improbable.” At the point where the
Investigator
made its exit to the open sea, he thus estimated that the barrier reefs had already run continuously for some 350 miles.

After this, he admits the
Investigator
sailed too far northward to sight the Reef again until the Torres Strait. Yet since Cook had reported sailing in protected water all the way northward from Cape Tribulation, “I therefore assume … that with the exception of this [the Flinders Entrance], and perhaps several small openings, our Barrier Reefs are connected with the Labyrinth of captain Cook; and that they reach to Torres’ Strait and to New Guinea … through fourteen degrees of latitude and 9 degrees of longitude; which is not to be equalled in any other known part of the world.” In short, Flinders was the first person to see that coral stretched in a single connected train from Breaksea Spit almost to the coast of New Guinea, in what we now know to be the world’s largest reef.
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From this, Flinders also derived an appreciation of the geographical character and significance of what we today call the Barrier Reef lagoon:

An arm of the sea is inclosed between the barrier and the coast, which is at first 25 or 30 leagues wide; but is contracted to 20, abreast of Broad Sound, and to 9 leagues at Cape Grenville; from whence it seems to go on diminishing, till, a little beyond Cape Tribulation, reefs are found close to shore. Numerous islands lie scattered in this inclosed space; but so far as we are acquainted, there are no other coral banks in it than those by which some of the islands are surrounded; so that being sheltered from the deep waves of the ocean, it is particularly well adapted to the purposes of a coasting trade. The reader will be struck with the analogy which this arm of the sea presents to one in nearly the same latitude of the northern hemisphere. The Gulph of Florida is formed by the coast of America on the west, and by a great mass of islands and shoals on the east; which shoals are also of coral.
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Even so, he didn’t gloss over the navigational challenges of coasting through this great basin of water. The lagoon’s depths were irregular, unpredictable, and often excessively shallow, so that continual soundings had to be made. Tides were more varied in incidence and intensity, as well as larger and stronger, than most navigators would expect. Even the wide Flinders Passage out of the Barrier required vigilance because it contained “many small unconnected banks [of coral].” Flinders recommended that future sailors make a lagoon entry at Breaksea Spit and an exit through his passage, but cautioned that “the commander who proposes to make the experiment, must not … be one who throws his ship’s head round in a hurry, so soon as breakers are announced from aloft; if he do not feel his nerves strong enough to thread the needle … amongst the reefs, whilst he directs the steerage from the mast head, I would strongly recommend him not to approach this part of New South Wales.”
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Flinders’s cartographic overview of the Great Barrier Reef was matched by his equally original, but often overlooked, series of scientific observations on coral reefs, which he made in the Torres Strait section of
A Voyage to Terra Australis
. Here he speculated, as a scientist rather than a navigator, about what we would today call the geomorphological origins, structures, and ecologies of coral reefs and cays. Exploring a small cay a day’s sailing from Murray Island had moved him to reflect:

It seems to me, that when the animalcules which form the corals at the bottom of the ocean, cease to live, their structures adhere to each other, by virtue either of the glutinous remains within, or of some property in salt water; and the interstices being gradually filled up with sand and broken pieces of coral washed by the sea, which also adhere, a mass of rock is at length formed. Future races of these animalcules erect their habitations upon the rising bank, and die in their turn to increase, but principally to elevate, this monument of their wonderful labors. The care taken to work perpendicularly in the early stages, would mark a surprising instinct in these diminutive creatures. Their wall of coral, for the most part in situations where the winds are constant, being arrived at the surface, affords a shelter, to leeward of which their infant colonies may be safely sent forth; and to this their instinctive foresight it seems to be owing, that the windward side of a reef exposed to the open sea, is generally, if not always the highest part, and rises almost perpendicular, sometimes from the depth of 200, and perhaps many more fathoms.
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