The Coast of Coral

by Arthur C. Clarke

  From our point of view, the most interesting thing about Cairns was that here the Great Barrier Reef is scarcely ten miles away from the mainland. What is more, the visitor can meet its inhabitants under ideal conditions, at the Underwater Observatory on Green Island.

  Green Island, a ninety-minute launch trip from Cairns, is a true coral island about thirty acres in extent. Most of it is a national park, and consists of thickly grown jungle with occasional paths winding through it. The tourist set­tlement is on the western or mainland side of the island, and a long jetty extending out to the edge of the surround­ing reef makes it possible for goods and passengers to go ashore without having to be transshipped in small boats.

  The observatory is at the very end of the jetty, and is a large steel chamber anchored to the bottom by chains and weights. Visitors enter the observatory by walking down a narrow flight of steps, as if descending into the bowels of a ship. They then find themselves in a porthole-studded metal room, large enough to contain twenty or thirty peo­ple. Around them is what must be one of the world’s first—but certainly not last—examples of underwater rock gar­dening. Admittedly the term is not accurate, since corals are not plants, but it will serve until a better one comes along.

  Living corals from various parts of the island’s fringing reef have been gathered here, together with giant clams which lie with their serrated jaws gaping wide. Anyone who wants to go underwater without getting wet could have no better introduction to the creatures of the Reef, for countless small fish gather round the portholes to stare at the strange animals inside the tank. An underwater ob­servatory of this sort must run a close second to a plane­tarium as a means of combining education and profit. As Mike and I left Green Island, we both wished that we had some shares in this submarine gold mine.

  Flying up to Cairns we had traveled in DC-4 comfort; for the last five hundred miles of Australia we were in DC-3 territory, and as we climbed aboard the faithful old war horse, Mike, who has done much of his jumping from DC-3’s, seemed a little unhappy without his parachute. We took off in the bleary hour before the dawn, and the light slowly strengthened around us until the hills above Cook-town began to climb into the first rays of the sun.

  Cooktown, a hundred miles north of Cairns, is famous as the involuntary landing place of Captain Cook, the first European navigator to sail the length of the Great Barrier Reef. Keeping as close as possible to the mainland, Cook had sailed north for a thousand miles along the Queensland coast without ever suspecting the existence of the vast wall of reefs fifty or a hundred miles to the east—a wall which was closing in upon him, and becoming more continuous, as he proceeded into the north. Cook named many of the capes and islands, and his men made several landings in the quest for water and food. Though they encountered aborigines, they were lucky enough to have little trouble with them, being much more fortunate in this respect than many later voyagers.

  Trouble enough, however, was to come. On June 11, 1770—a clear, moonlit night—the little Endeavour was pro­ceeding northward about ten miles from the coast when she struck hard upon the reef which is now named after her. A great hole was breached in her side, but she was kept afloat by dint of continuous pumping and by throw­ing overboard all guns and ballast. A temporary repair was made by stretching a sail over the breach, and after six desperate days, during two of which the Endeavour was kept at anchor by a gale, Cook brought his damaged craft to shore. The ship was beached on the banks of a river (now named the Endeavour River) and repaired after six weeks’ hard work by the carpenters.

  Though Cook was to tangle with the Great Barrier Reef again before he escaped from these treacherous waters, he was never to know its full magnitude and complexity. Later navigators—including the much-maligned Bligh—were to fill in the details, often at the cost of their lives.

  A hundred years after Cook had extricated himself from the dangers of the Reef, the town named after him became a thriving seaport through which the wealth of the Austra­lian gold fields flowed out to the world. But with the collapse of the gold boom, Cooktown collapsed also, and the settlement we flew over during the first light of dawn was little more than a village.

  A few miles north of Cooktown, we had a reminder that these waters, despite all the charts and navigational aids which modern science can provide, still take their toll of shipping. Our plane began weaving over the Reef and de­scending to within a few hundred feet of the surface to inspect a couple of luggers sailing toward the south. One of the local boats was overdue at Cairns by several days, and our pilot was trying to identify the craft beneath him, so that he could radio to land if either was the missing lugger. Very few of these small boats carry radio trans­mitters—though many of them have receivers—and the reg­ular airliners perform a valuable service by keeping an eye on the scattered shipping of the Reef.

  The whole region north of Cooktown—five hundred miles of peninsula stretching to Cape York—is almost com­pletely empty of human life. Beneath us, thickly wooded hills stretched as far as the horizon, and the eye looked in vain for roads or clearings. We touched down twice at tiny airstrips linking remote mining settlements with the outer world, then flew on again over the endless wilderness. As we neared the ultimate tip of Australia, we came across proof that Cooktown was not the only spot in the north that had once been the scene of vast enterprises, now aban­doned by Man. Suddenly there appeared below us the im­mense rectangle of a great airfield, with all its intricate network of perimeter tracks and dispersal sites. It must have cost millions to have carved this remote base out of the jungle, and to have kept its voracious machines supplied with everything they needed. Now the jungle was winning back the mile-long runways which such a little while ago had hurled their bombers into the Battle of the Coral Sea.

  At last there appeared below us the maze of islands scattered across the Torres Straits. After traveling steadily for two thousand miles from Sydney, we had finally run out of Australia.

  Thursday Island is too small, and too hilly, for aircraft to land on it. But it is surrounded by considerably larger islands, and on one of them—Horn Island—is another of the airstrips brought into existence by the war. This airfield is still serving a useful purpose, though the great radar an­tenna on the hill overlooking it ceased to search the sky a decade ago.

  We landed on Horn Island, exchanged greetings with the southbound passengers who had been waiting for our plane to take them back to the mainland, and half an hour later (with our two hundred pounds of excess baggage) were in the launch heading across the narrow channel to T.I.—as Thursday Island is usually called by Queenslanders.

  T.I. is so completely surrounded by other islands that only in a few directions is the open sea visible on the ho­rizon. It thus provides an ideal harbor for the pearling fleet, which can ride safely at anchor even when cyclones are raging the Torres Straits. When we drew up to the battered jetty, about a dozen luggers were in port, preparing to set sail on the next favorable tide. Also at her moorings, and looking much smarter than her rather dingy companions, was the Fisheries Research Vessel Gahleru, which was to be our home for most of our visit to the Torres Straits.

  F.R.V. Gahleru is the property of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, which maintains a laboratory on Thursday Island specializing in the study of the pearl oyster. We had made contact with the C.S.I.R.O. while in Sydney, and it had been agreed that we could go out on the Gahleru if we could fit our plans into her program. This appealed to us much more than the prospect of setting to sea in a commercial pearling lugger—an experience which Mike had already undergone and which he had described to me in all its horrid details. He had expressed grave doubts (which I fully shared) as to whether I would survive for a week at a time on a diet of rice and turtle eggs, with an occasional dugong steak to break the monotony. And he had made a special point of emphasizing the giant cockroaches, a good two inches in length, which emerge at night from their hiding places and nibble hungrily at yo
ur toes until they have succeeded in drawing blood. I was only too glad to discover that the Gahleru could take us out within the next couple of days, and that I should thus be able to forego these pleasures.

  Meanwhile, we had T.I. to explore. Though it is no longer the great—and wealthy—pearling center that it was fifty years ago, the island still handles about $850,000 worth of shell a year. As to the value of the actual pearls, that, as we shall see later, is something that nobody knows.

  The population of the island must be one of the most mixed and colorful for any place of its size in the world. On a speck of land a couple of miles across may be found some two thousand Europeans, Chinese, Torres Straits islanders, mainland aborigines, Polynesians, Malays, Indians, Japanese, and every conceivable intermediate gradation of race and color. Since no particular nationality predomi­nates (the whites are outnumbered about five to one) there is no serious interracial friction, apart from occasional fights between mainlanders and islanders, which are effec­tively dealt with by a minute corps of excessively large policemen.

  The builtup area of the island consists of a few score bungalows (some of them, particularly those in “Pearlers’ Row,” very large and well appointed), three or four hotels, a dozen shops, a cinema, several churches, a power station, the post office, a couple of banks, and a hospital. Facing the harbor are the sheds where the pearl shell is sorted and packed for dispatch to London or New York. There are no properly surfaced roads, only the usual dirt tracks with which the Queensland motorist is all too familiar. The taxi and jeep population is fairly large, and the speed limit of five miles an hour in the main street is frequently re­spected.

  On the whole—and I hope my many friends there will not take it amiss—T.I. often made me feel that I was in the middle of a western movie. The hot sun, the dirt roads, the wooden buildings—only the hotels boasting a second floor—yes, it was all very familiar. At any moment I ex­pected Shane to come riding around the corner, and even the abrupt appearance of a battered truck driven by a dusky islander failed to destroy the illusion completely.

  All my memories of T.I. are pleasant, perhaps because I was not there long enough for boredom to set in. But there was one minor incident that I am not likely to forget, and which might have had unhappy consequences.

  The house in which we were staying, like many Aus­tralian homes, had an outside shed which was fitted up as a laundry, complete with washtub and sinks. Needless to say, we had annexed this for photographic purposes, and one morning when I went out to check some of our equipment I noticed a large spider clinging to the wall at waist level. It was about three inches across—nothing outstanding for the tropics, of course—and I took no notice of it, but walked back into the house without giving it a sec­ond thought.

  At least five minutes later, I decided to have a belated shave and went into the bedroom. I picked up my shaver, walked over to the mirror—and swallowed hard. The spider was sitting on my shoulder, right beside my neck.

  If it had been an English spider I would have carried it carefully back to its home, but I knew that this one was probably poisonous. I stood completely still and shouted for Mike, who came up behind me and then swept the crea­ture away with his hand. It was, he told me cheerfully, one of the jumping spiders, and could have made me very sick if it had bitten me. As I had not passed closer than two feet from it, it must have been quite an athlete, and I would still like to know what its intentions were. Perhaps it merely wanted a free ride into the house, but I am afraid we could not afford to give it the benefit of the doubt.

  The entire economy of T.I. is based on the pearl oyster, and it is not generally realized that the Australian pearling industry is concerned with the gathering of shell, not the collection of pearls. Despite heavy and increasing compe­tition from plastics, pearl shell is still extensively used for the production of buttons, knife handles, and a whole range of similar goods. Yet the knowledge that any single shell may contain a fortune transforms what would otherwise be merely a tough, squalid, and dangerous occupation into one of the most romantic in the world.

  Two types of pearl shell are found in the Great Barrier Reef, but only the large “gold lip” is of commercial importance. These shells may grow up to a foot in diameter and a pair may weigh as much as fifteen pounds, being worth about five dollars if of the best quality. Since a pearling lugger may collect several hundred shells on a single day’s working, if it is lucky enough to strike a good patch, it will be understood why the pearling masters are more interested in shell production than in the occasional bonuses provided by the pearls themselves.

  Moreover, there is absolutely no way of guaranteeing that any pearls discovered will ever reach the lugger own­ers. The boats are entirely manned by native crews, the shells are opened on deck—and any pearls found are promptly popped into little bags or bottles whose accu­mulated contents will be disposed of in some shady corner of a T.I. bar.

  By far the majority of the pearls discovered are small and irregular, often attached to the shell itself. Sometimes several small pearls will be joined together to form odd shapes; in 1886 a group of nine pearls in the form of a cross was discovered, though it has never been decided how far the natural formation was assisted by a little dex­terous “touching up.”

  The really perfect pearls are found loose in the actual body of the mollusc, and not attached to its shell. They may be spherical or drop-shaped, and the largest ever dis­covered was about the size of a sparrow’s egg. The value of a large pearl varies rather widely according to whether one is talking to the owner or the potential purchaser; it may run to as high as ten or twenty thousand dollars, though such a monster will turn up only once in a decade. The average good pearl will change hands on T.I. for a few hundred dollars. What happens to it when it gets to Fifth Avenue or New Bond Street is quite another matter.

  As everybody knows, pearls are produced when the an­imal secretes some of its nacre to seal off a source of ir­ritation, such as a grain of sand or, more usually, a parasite. Once formed, the pearl continues to grow in concentric layers as long as the animal lives, and only if this growth is regular and undisturbed will a perfect pearl be formed. Minor irregularities can sometimes be removed by “skinning”—i.e., filing off the outer layers of the pearl. This is something of a gamble, even in the hands of an expert. It may result in a smaller but flawless and therefore more valuable pearl—or it may reveal worse defects which the outer skins had partly concealed.

  The pearl oysters seem peculiarly liable to infection by parasites, and almost every one houses a small crab which has found a safe home inside the shell. The only pearl oys­ter I have seen opened contained not only a crab but also a tiny, brilliantly colored crayfish. If these crabs die while still inside the oyster, their corpses may be found outlined perfectly in a mother-of-pearl tomb attached to the shell.

  When the shell is brought back to land (after having been opened and cleaned on board the luggers) it is then sorted into the various grades, weighed, and packed into wooden crates to be dispatched to the manufacturers of mother-of-pearl articles. There is nothing in the least ro­mantic about the land-based side of the pearling business, since the pearls themselves never go near the sheds where the shell is sorted and packed. All the danger, the drudgery, and the rare excitement takes place out at sea, or in the wide channels between the mangrove-covered islands of the Torres Straits. It was to these islands that the Gahleru was to carry us, so that we could see how the divers earned their living, and also how the scientists studied the life cycle of the pearl oyster.

  On the afternoon before we sailed from T.I., I had a sudden vivid reminder that the most awe-inspiring of all natural phenomena was taking place a thousand miles to the north. I had walked out under the trees, which were tossing their branches incessantly in the perpetual wind which blew across the island all the time that we were there. Countless images of the sun, projected pinhole-camera fashion through the gaps between the moving leaves, were dancing restlessly
to and fro across the sandy ground. And all these images were crescents, not the nor­mal circles. The moon was moving across the face of the sun; in an hour there would be the longest total eclipse for more than a thousand years. We should miss it, being outside the zone of totality, but in a narrow band across the Pacific night would fall for as long as seven minutes in the middle of the day.

  Almost a year ago I had seen the last total eclipse on the other side of the world, under conditions which could hardly have been more different from those in which I was living now. Then I had left a hotel on Broadway to catch an American Airlines DC-4 at LaGuardia, and had flown up to the southern tip of Hudson Bay with my friends from the Hayden Planetarium. Fifteen thousand feet above the barren Canadian wastes, with the cold, thin air roaring through the gaps in the cabin wall where the emergency hatches had been removed, we had watched the sun shrink to a glimmering thread of light, while darkness fell from the air upon the rolling cloudscape a mile below. At the moment of totality, a brilliant silver ring had flashed forth against the midnight blue of the now magically darkened sky, and I had seen the sun’s corona for the first time in my life. That glowing ring had hung poised there for sixty seconds that raced past all too quickly. Then the moon’s disc—the invisible shield that held back the sun’s overwhelming glare and permitted us to see the millionfold fainter fires of the corona—slipped aside, and day returned in an explosion of light.

  That had been a year ago and half a world away. Now I stood on Thursday Island—a place of whose existence I had never heard when I was flying through the moon’s shadow above Hudson Bay—and looked at the shrinking images of the sun dancing at my feet. Here the eclipse was only partial, and even at its maximum a third of the sun would remain unobscured. The weakening of heat and light was no more than would have been caused by a passing cloud, and probably not more than a few people on the island even knew that an eclipse was in progress. I felt very envious of those astronomers—my erstwhile colleagues, I hoped, among them—who would soon be feasting their eyes upon the beauty of the corona for longer than any men had done in the last twelve hundred years.