Until now all our landings had been on islands—but this was Australia itself, stretching for two thousand miles to the south, and even further to the west. The nearest settlement of any size—Cooktown—was five hundred miles on the other side of this jungle; the nearest city was a thousand miles still further to the south. It was with almost the sensations of explorers landing on an unknown planet that we began to walk along this remote and virtually unvisited shore.
There were occasional gaps in the wall of mangroves where sluggish streams flowed from the interior out to sea. Mike and I went a little way up one of these gloomy creeks, but were glad enough to get back to the beach. At one spot we came across some planks from a wrecked lugger, the rusted exhaust pipe of the engine that had not been able to bring it to safety still protruding through them.
That night, as soon as it became dark, Mike and a couple of the boys went back to the mainland with rifle and torches. Mike was determined to secure a pair of crocodile-skin shoes; we were all asleep by the time he got back, and were disappointed to know next morning that he had had no luck. Several times the hunting party had heard crocs barking in the distance, but the torches had never illumined their red, reptilian eyes.
The Gahleru had now completed the mission she had set out to perform, and it was time to go back to T.I. We were glad enough to have a chance of processing the film we had taken—not to mention washing ourselves in fresh water for the first time in almost a week. Though we had not yet seen any pearl shell actually brought up to the surface, the ship was going out again in two days’ time. So we left all our gear aboard, hoping that the cockroaches would keep out of the sleeping bags—and that the weather would be kinder to us on the next trip.
XVII
Drifting for Shell
Our second trip on the Gahleru was shorter, but much more fruitful. The steady wind which had been blowing continuously for several weeks had abated somewhat, and as we drew away from Thursday Island it seemed to us that the water was clearer. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it appeared more blue, and the waves through which we were cutting were no longer that dirty and depressing green which tells the underwater photographer that he will be wasting his time.
On our first voyage we had steered northeast; now we were heading west, toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was a short trip this time; only two hours after leaving T.I. we stopped our engine off Crab Island, another typical low, wooded coral island a few miles from the mainland. Horace and Gordon put on their helmets and dropped down to the bottom; a little later, Mike, wearing the Hookah, followed them. With three life lines and three air hoses over the same side the situation was now a little complicated, and the possibilities of entanglement considerable. But the Gahleru had no provision for working a diver over the stern, as could be done on a regular pearling lugger, so we had to make the best of it.
A marker buoy carrying a flag had been thrown out to locate the commencement of our drift, and the Gahleru, with only the mizzen sail aloft, slowly proceeded downwind at a couple of knots. Though this seemed slow to us on deck, it meant that the divers on the bottom had to keep moving at a brisk pace, and as each could see only a few feet it was a matter of luck whether they bumped into each other and got their lines crossed. Eventually, after drifting for about a mile, we decided to pull Mike up; he was doing quite nicely, but it was simply asking for trouble to have three divers working simultaneously over the same side, and we were anxious not to worry the regular divers.
Mike had found a couple of shells, but the bottom was rather bare and there was no chance of a good haul.
We drifted two or three miles, until the marker buoy was a mere dot on the horizon. Then we pulled up Horace and Gordon, who between them had found about ten shells—a very poor bag. On a really good drift, a diver may send up several baskets of shell before he ascends himself. Although Crab Island did not seem a very profitable place to work, we decided to stick to it and the Gahleru started her engine again and chugged upwind back to the marker buoy while the divers took a rest on deck. Then they went overboard again, and we started another drift.
Working on a flat, sandy bottom, only sixty feet down, and in calm weather, there was little possibility of anything going wrong. A diver’s life, I decided, was rather like a private soldier’s in time of war—long periods of monotony, punctuated by acute danger. Perhaps even more monotonous was the job of the tender, who had to stand for hours holding the life line, responsive at once to any signal that might come up from the depth. It is very hard to keep alert indefinitely—and many divers have been killed by mistakes on the part of their tenders. There can be few occupations in the world where one man places his life so completely in the hands of another.
We continued drifting, then coming back upwind under power, for most of the afternoon. A modest pile of shell was accumulated, placed in a sack, and hung over the side. The plans we had for our oysters were very different from those of the commercial pearlers, though our ultimate interests were the same. We wanted to keep these specimens alive and healthy.
In the evening, about an hour before sunset, we went ashore in the dinghy. The beach of Crab Island was like none I had ever met before on the Reef; the sand was so soft and fine that it squeaked underfoot. What was more, it was covered with countless millions of most beautiful shells. The commonest were auger shells, which I had never encountered at the southern end of the Reef; they were long thin spirals—exact replicas of a unicorn’s horn. These fragile shells, bleached white by the sun, lay so thickly that it was sometimes hard to walk without stepping on one of them. Their geometrical perfection was so astonishing that I could not resist picking them up, until my pockets were full of them. Though they were wafer-thin, hardly one had been damaged by the seas and storms that must incessantly attack this beach. They dwindled from a base perhaps a quarter of an inch across the sheerest pin point—their spiral a complete record of the life and growth of the creature whose home they had been.
There was also another curiosity on Crab Island, which I had not seen before but which I recognized at once. Emerging from the water and leading up the beach were what appeared to be tank tracks, two or three feet wide. They would have been a great—and probably disturbing— mystery to anyone who did not know their simple explanation. The turtles had been coming up the beach to lay their eggs, and these were the marks made by their flippers. Usually they ended in a shallow depression in the sand, high above the water line. I dug hopefully in one of these depressions, but not having brought an egg-detector with me failed to hit the exact spot. Stephen, who had come properly equipped with a sack and spike, brought back so many eggs to the dinghy that we had difficulty in finding somewhere to sit on the return journey.
The next morning, after a good night’s sleep with the boat rocking gently beneath us, we continued the program of diving and drifting. Slowly the shell accumulated on deck, until there was a pile of eighty or ninety, looking like a heap of dirty dishes that had lain on the bottom of a muddy river for a few years, and had become covered with weeds and barnacles. Nothing could have seemed more remote from the jeweler’s window. . . .
After several drifts, I had my first opportunity of going down. As I had never dived before with any equipment which had to be connected to the surface, but had always been a completely mobile and independent marine organism when underwater, I was not very keen on the experiment. However, I knew that it had to be carried out, partly in the cause of science, partly because there was no other way in which I could watch the divers actually at work on the bottom.
Mike fitted me into the Hookah harness—whose only purpose is to provide a firm purchase for the air hose, so that no strain will be placed on the mouthpiece through which air is fed into the lungs. The lead weights were adjusted, I checked to make sure that the face mask was watertight, and then clambered down the ladder. The safety line had been attached around my waist, and I asked Mike to hold me at a depth of ten feet, so that I could clear my ears before going an
y deeper.
I hung there beneath the shadowy hull of the Gahleru, blowing my nose and swallowing until my ears had popped. Then I gave the signal on my life line, and Mike played it out as quickly as he could. I did not know that if one wished to keep upright while descending in this manner, it was necessary to keep back-pedaling with one’s legs. I relaxed and let myself fall, with the result that I was soon going down head first, with my legs trailing above me. This didn’t matter—but it would have been a different story had I been using a helmet. By this time it would have been full of water, unless I had managed to find the trick of keeping it upright. . . .
I did not enjoy losing my freedom of vertical movement, which I had always taken for granted in all previous dives I had ever made. Now I was weighted down, and had to depend upon someone on the surface when I wanted to move upward. But this could not be helped; a diver who has to walk along the bottom has to be heavily weighted; otherwise he will drift away in the slightest current.
The green gloom deepened around me, and quite suddenly I was on the sea bed. Visibility was no more than about ten feet, but all objects up to five feet away were perfectly clear. There was no time, however, to stop and enjoy the view, such as it was. My air hose and safety line were dragging me along the bottom and I had to keep walking forward as steadily as a man on a treadmill.
The sea bed here was flat and sandy, with occasional clumps of fan- shaped sponges. The only fish I saw were some tiny ones which darted away at my approach; that morning I had seen a manta ray jump out of the water half a mile from the Gahleru, and, remembering the one which had approached our anchor line at Heron Island, I hoped that there were none around to get interested in my air hose.
Within a minute of reaching the bottom, I found my first pearl oyster. It was a little fellow (“it” is the only possible pronoun for oysters, which can be male or female not only consecutively, but even simultaneously), and so I decided to leave it there to grow up. In any case, I had no bag with me and did not wish to be encumbered with a shell six inches across. Relying on Probability Theory, I argued that since I had found one shell so quickly, I would fairly soon come across a bigger one, which would be worth carrying back. As it happened, mathematics let me down and that first shell was also my last.
Presently, in my erratic (and largely involuntary) progress along the bottom, I blundered into one of the helmet divers. Now that he was buoyed up by the water around him, he was no longer quite so helpless, but he still seemed a grotesque and clumsy figure. Feeling rather smug and superior with my greater mobility and my wider angle of vision, I waved cheerfully to the diver as he trudged along beneath his geyser of bubbles. Since I could see him so clearly, I decided to go back and get the camera in the hope of securing some photographs, so I gave the standard two tugs on my life line and was pulled back to the surface. It seemed a long time before I broke water, even though I was ascending briskly enough. Yet I had been only sixty feet down; what would it be like coming back from a couple of hundred feet?
When the camera had been hung round my neck, I went down again at once. And this time, through my own carelessness, I ran into trouble. Because I had cleared my ears without much difficulty on the first descent, I had assumed that it would be still easier this time, and had not asked to be held for a while ten feet down. Consequently, Mike lowered me straight to the bottom.
My right ear popped at once with that startling but reassuring “click” that every diver is glad to feel as he descends. My left ear, however, stubbornly refused to do anything of the sort, and very quickly I was in severe pain. I blew madly, and even yelled into my mask in the hope that the resultant muscular movements would do the trick. The one thing I didn’t do was to jerk twice on the line; I am not sure if I had forgotten the signal, or whether a foolish stubbornness prevented me from using it. Feeling extremely unhappy, I continued to drop toward the bottom, while the pressure in my ear mounted relentlessly. I was very scared, for once or twice in my diving career I had known ear pains so agonizing as to incapacitate me completely until I had risen a few feet and reduced the pressure. The pain had not yet reached that level—but what would happen if it did, now that I was unable to swim upward under my own power? This was just the sort of unnecessary—or at any rate, exaggerated—panic one can easily get into underwater, when something goes wrong. I still had the use of my arms, after all, and even if Mike didn’t respond to the “bring me up” signal I could always start climbing back up the life line under my own power. (Though a friend of mine, who once had to do just this in an emergency, barely managed to make it. As he climbed desperately up the line, his resourceful wife, thinking that he needed more rope, kept briskly attaching additional lengths and playing them out to him, so that his progress toward the surface resembled that of Sisyphus climbing the mountain.)
Fortunately, my blowing and yelling managed to stop the pain from getting any worse, and soon after I had reached the bottom there was a curious soft explosion in-side my ear, which left me slightly dazed but otherwise none the worse. The feeling of pressure vanished immediately and I was able to take notice of my surroundings once more.
My struggles had got me into something of a tangle, and the Gahleru was dragging me remorselessly across the sea bed. I had to spend a minute sorting out life line, air hose, lead weights, and camera strap, but eventually I was operational again. None of the divers were in sight, which was just as well for I wanted no audience while I was unraveling myself.
The sea bed was much the same as it had been a quarter of a mile back—quite flat apart from a few knee-high corals and sponges, which were easily avoided. The only representatives of the animal kingdom that I came across were a couple of feathery starfish, and some multiarmed relatives which I could not identify. One of these creatures was a mass of tentacles which, a few inches from the body, split into other tentacles—which again subdivided, so that eventually there were hundreds of them, all writhing in different directions. I wondered how on earth such a beast—whose nervous system could hardly be very elaborate—knew what all its extremities were doing at any moment. The centipede “which fell distracted in the ditch, considering how to walk” had no problem by comparison.
After walking a few minutes, I presently came across our diver again, and shot off a few photographs with very little expectation that they would be any good. (They weren’t.) It was hard work keeping my companion in sight, for my life line seemed determined to pull me the other way. Eventually I lost the battle; the diver disappeared into the murk, like another pedestrian swallowed in a London fog, and I was unable to find him again—though I knew perfectly well that he could not be more than twenty or thirty feet away.
There seemed no point in staying down any longer, so I gave the signal to be pulled up. As I came back to the surface, I once again became aware of pain in my ears— and suddenly realized that my face mask was full of blood. I must have been a fairly gory sight when I removed the mask, for Mike promptly dashed a bucket of water in my face (without bothering to warn me first). He then told me, cheerfully enough, that I had probably punctured an eardrum, but I found this hard to believe as I could still hear perfectly. Whatever the trouble had been, there were no aftereffects, possibly because I was careful to wash out both ears thoroughly with fresh water and alcohol.
We were now about to witness the scientific, as opposed to the purely commercial, approach to the pearl oyster. The pile of shell on the deck had been scraped to remove the covering of dirt and weed, so that the oysters looked as clean and scrubbed as their relatives had done when they set out on their ill-fated promenade with the Walrus and the Carpenter. They were then “tagged,” by having a small hole drilled clear through the shell near the hinge, well away from the actual body of the animal. The operation looked and sounded just like a drilling session at the dentist’s; I wondered if it felt the same to the oyster. Plastic tags, each carrying the letters “C.S.I.R.” and a serial number, were then wired
to the shell. The oysters were now no longer anonymous; each had an identification number. They were carefully weighed and measured, and the figures logged on already prepared forms.
Then they were thrown back into the sea.
I could not help wondering what Horace and Gordon, who spent arduous and sometimes dangerous hours collecting these shells ten or more fathoms below the surface, thought about this. The pile of shell which had been gathered on this trip was not a particularly valuable one, but it was probably worth $150. That, however, was only part of the story. Any one of these larger shells—which, of course, we could not open without killing the animal inside—might contain a pearl worth thousands of dollars. The probability was small, but it existed. During the course of her scientific career, the Gahleru would certainly have thrown back many pearls in the hundreds of shells she had returned to the sea. It was a piquant thought; we were rather like men destroying a pile of lottery tickets, before the draw had been made. We should never know what we might have won.
It was true that these shells were not tossed overboard at random. They were dropped carefully at one of several sites, marked only by bearings on the chart—and the skipper had scanned the horizon to check that no luggers were around to watch what we were doing. In a few years’ time, the Gahleru would return to this spot and the divers would go down again. Many of the tagged shells—but never all— would be recovered, and the scientists at the lab would be able to measure the rate of growth of the shell under natural conditions.
A good many of the marked shells are, of course, picked up by other divers in the course of their normal work. When they first came across the C.S.I.R. tag, the pearlers quickly threw it away under the impression that they might be fined for stealing government property. Needless to say, they only threw away the tag—not the shell. When they discovered that there was a reward for tagged shells, they became much more cooperative, and most of the shells picked up by other crews now probably reach the lab. If the shell has been back in the sea for only a few weeks before it is brought up again, then most of the Gahleru’s efforts are wasted as far as this particular specimen is concerned—but at least the lab will know what has happened to it. The one thing that the lab will probably never know is whether the shells thrown back into the sea by the Gahleru ever contained any pearls.
The Coast of Coral Page 14
