The first diver, Freddie, had been working on a “flash” bottom—that is, a bottom covered with sand, mud, and occasional coral fans—nineteen fathoms down. He had been at this depth of about 115 feet for half an hour, and the time had come to bring him to the surface by stages. His tender brought him up to nine fathoms (54 feet) and was “hanging” him there until the nitrogen which had been dissolved in his blood and tissues had had time to work its way out again. There are universally accepted tables (due to Professor J. S. Haldane—father of J. B. S. Haldane, with whom he is often confused) which state how long a diver can remain at various depths, and how long he must take to return to the surface. These tables, or simplified versions of them, should be known to all divers, but they are not always implicitly obeyed.
While Freddie was hanging, the lugger was still working the patch of pearl that had been located, and another diver was on the bottom. Since there was considerable wind, the motor had to be kept running to prevent the boat from drifting too fast for the diver. This method of operation, known as “standing up,” involves the danger of fouling the air hose in the propeller, but often there is no alternative and the chance has to be taken. Naturally, the tender takes all possible precautions but he cannot always tell what is happening to the hose as it snakes down into the gloomy water.
Freddie was unlucky enough to have his hose cut by the propeller. Serious though this was—for as soon as the air supply to a helmet is cut off, water starts to rise inside it—it might not have been fatal had it not been compounded with other disasters. In the general stampede, one boy jumped overboard to try and untangle the air hose (the propeller had of course been stopped) and another, rushing to help the tender, accidently knocked him overboard. The result of this tragicomedy was that, with no one holding his life line, the unfortunate diver was abruptly dropped and fell like a stone to the bottom, sixty feet below him, weighed down by the lead on his helmet and with no air to breathe.
He managed, somewhere during his fall, to throw off his helmet and swim up to the surface—in the circumstances, an astonishing feat. He was pulled on to the boat, coughing up blood, and gasped, “No air” before he collapsed. At once he was placed in a half-suit—that is, a diving suit which extends down to the waist and can therefore be worn by an unconscious man—and was lowered again for half an hour, another diver going down to keep an eye on him. But the attempt to repressure him was in vain; he had died the moment after reaching the deck. The extra two atmospheres’ pressure—with no compensating air to resist it—had crushed his lungs to a pulp. Freddie had avoided the obvious danger of drowning, but had been killed by the stupid accident of being dropped.
On another occasion, when a diver who had been staged was finally brought onto deck, he was unable to speak or move. He was at once placed in a half-suit and lowered to ten fathoms, but he was still helpless when brought back to the surface. There was nothing to do but to head for the nearest mission station, and to get him flown to the decompression chamber at Darwin. Though the man survived, his days as a diver were over; indeed, when last heard of he was still in the hospital and will probably never be able to work again. Perhaps, after all, Freddie was the luckier of the two. . . .
Whatever the future may hold for the pearling trade, we could not help thinking, as our launch drew away from Thursday Island, that we had seen it at the end of one era and the beginning of another. It is even conceivable that the market for pearl shell may collapse more or less completely, owing to competition from the far cheaper and steadily improving plastic substitutes. The pearl oyster also has a major rival in the Barrier Reef itself—the coneshaped trochus shell, the production of which now equals that of pearl. (The figures for both are approximately a thousands tons a year.)
Look closely at the “pearl” buttons on your shirt or dress. Turn them over and examine the undersides. If they are white all the way through, they are genuine pearls. If they are red or brown on the back, they are made from trochus shell. These spiral shells, which are four or five inches high and the same distance across the base, are collected by native divers working in shallow water without breathing equipment. It is therefore much cheaper (and safer) to fish for trochus than for pearl, but the resulting shell is worth only about a quarter as much.
Early in 1955, half a dozen young Australian skin divers decided to make their fortune using Aqualungs to collect trochus shell. Mike had introduced this gear to the industry during the previous year, and had found that for 4working in shallow water it had certain advantages, somewhat offset by the need for a compressor which could charge the cylinders to the required ton or so per square inch. Such compressors are scarce and expensive, but Mike had one which he sold to the hopeful crew of the Barrier Princess. They set sail for the seldom-visited Swain Reefs, a hundred miles from the coast, and were unlucky enough to be caught in these unsheltered waters by one of the cyclones moving in from the Pacific. No trace of them or their boat was ever discovered.
Even if competition from other materials makes diving for the genuine shell an uneconomical business, nothing can ever destroy the glamor and magic of the pearls themselves. Men will always marvel that such beauty can be born on the gloomy sea bed as an accidental byproduct of a mollusc’s irritation.
We were half a mile out of Thursday Island, and had seen our friends on the quayside shrink to indistinguishable dots, when Mike pulled a Kodachrome container out of his pocket and unscrewed the lid.
“Look,” he said, rather smugly.
I peered into the little tin, now no longer holding its cassette of film. I remembered how Mike had mysteriously disappeared not long before we were due to leave, and so I was not altogether surprised when I saw the constellation of tiny, captive moons. Even if we never saw T.I. again, we had some of its most famous product to refresh our memories. Whenever we look at that handful of pearls, we will see again the dusty streets, the luggers rocking at anchor, and the dark, smiling faces of its people.
XIX
Of Perilous Seas
The floods and rains that had delayed our visit to the Reef could conceivably have saved our lives, since if we had arrived in Queensland earlier we would probably have gone out on the lost Barrier Princess. She was only the latest of a long and tragic line; even before Captain Cook crashed into the Endeavour Reef in 1770, more ships than will ever be known were lost in these dangerous waters.*
How dangerous they can be, even under apparently ideal conditions, is demonstrated by what is perhaps the most famous wreck in the history of the Great Barrier Reef, that of the British India Steam Navigation Company’s liner Quetta in 1890. The Quetta was sailing through well charted waters in the eastern entrance to the Torres Straits in perfectly clear weather under a bright moon. The channel through which she was passing was ten fathoms deep—but it contained a spike of rock which had been missed by all the hundreds of other ships which had passed this way. This rock ripped the Quetta from end to end, though the impact was so slight that at first her passengers—like those on the Titanic twenty years later—did not realize that anything serious had happened.
Yet the ship sank in three minutes, and less than half of the three hundred people aboard her were saved. The Quetta Memorial Church, on Thursday Island, still serves as a reminder of this disaster.
Even in this age of echo sounders, such an accident might still happen. And no precautions could protect a ship from the ludicrous fate which overtook the Blue Bell in Keppel Bay, at the southern end of the Reef, one night in 1877.
The Blue Bell was sailing quietly on her business when her captain was startled—to put it mildly—to discover that she was rising steadily out of the water. There was nothing unusual about a ship going down—but for one to go up was a little unprecedented. At first, those aboard assumed that a whale was surfacing beneath them, but in a little while they realized that the ship was wedged in a rock slowly emerging from the waves. The Blue Bell rose inexorably as if on an elevator, until she was twenty
feet above high-water mark. There was nothing to do but to abandon her to the wind and the waves until she had broken up.
The charts of the Barrier Reef, particularly in its outer fringes, are full of blank spaces and encouraging remarks such as “Dangerous for a stranger to attempt,” “Remains of wreck,” “Implicit reliance should not be placed on the beacons as they are liable to be washed away,” “Awash at high water,” and so on. Even if the Reef were stable and unchanging, to prepare a complete chart of it would be a task of appalling magnitude. But it is constantly altering as its sandbanks move and as the living coral grows up toward the surface, so that any chart must sooner or later become out of date. It is not surprising, therefore, that only the main shipping routes are charted in detail, or that the marine insurance companies are not really happy unless large ships passing through the Reef take aboard a local pilot when they enter it. The waters between the Reef and the mainland are the longest stretch of pilotage in the world; a pilot may board a ship at Brisbane and leave her at Thursday Island, almost fifteen hundred miles away.
As if the danger from reefs and shoals were not enough, every year cyclones of varying violence strike the Queensland coast. One of the worst on record was in 1899, when almost the entire pearling fleet from Thursday Island was wiped out, over fifty vessels being destroyed. I have never been in a cyclone, and never wish to be, but Mike was once caught in a “big blow,” while anchored off the edge of a reef, with no shelter for a hundred miles.
It had been a still, dull day, hot and sultry—the sort of day that makes sailors look anxiously at the sky. During the afternoon, clouds had built up until by nightfall the sky was completely overcast. There was no breath of wind, and Mike went to sleep on deck in the hope of getting some fresh air. He was to get plenty before the night was out.
About 1 A.M., he was awakened by a sudden sharp puff of wind against his mosquito netting. Within five minutes, the ship was heeling beneath a screaming gale and mountainous seas were sweeping across the deck. The lugger was riding at anchor with the mizzen sail up to keep it headed into the wind, but the sail did not last for long. It was torn away from the rigging, and by the almost continuous lightning flashes that were their only illumination the crew had to cut the wreckage away. To add to their difficulties, some fuel drums which had been lashed on deck broke adrift and started rolling around, crushing one man’s foot and smashing the dinghy. The reef was only three hundred yards away, and the roar of the breakers thundering against the coral made an ominous background to the screaming of the gale.
Such was the force of the wind that the anchor began to drag, so that the lugger started to drive onto the reef. Mike collected together his flippers, face mask, and Aqualung, and waited on the pitching deck, while the lightning sliced through the sky and revealed the steadily approaching breakers in its flashes of illumination. If the ship hit, it would be broken up in a matter of minutes, and with his diving gear Mike calculated he would have a slim chance of getting to safety. It would be a very slim one, since even in moderate seas anyone swimming over a reef can be cut to pieces by the jagged corals and the razor-sharp shells embedded in them.
Luckily, he never had to make the attempt. Toward morning, the storm dropped as swiftly as it had risen. The lugger had almost reached the Reef; another few yards and she would have been pounded to pieces. When the anchor was pulled up, it was found that the stock had been broken completely off, so that it was a miracle that it had been able to act at all.
The danger from cyclones, though it will always exist until something drastic is done about the weather, is no longer as great as it was in the old days. In this age of radio, a fair amount of warning is possible, and when we were out on the Gahleru it was very reassuring, twice a day, to tune in to the Thursday Island radio and to pick up not only its general weather forecast, but also the messages relayed to individual ships. If there was anything for us, we could send a suitable reply; even if there wasn’t, we could report our position so that T.I. knew that all was well with us.
Radio has done much to end the loneliness and isolation of the Reef’s inhabited islands, as indeed it has mitigated that of the Australian outback. It is hard for us to imagine, in this era of instantaneous communications, what it must have been like to live on one of the remoter islands, never knowing when the next ship would come along and there would be news of the outer world.
Anyone shipwrecked on the Reef’s countless islands—as thousands of sailors must have been during its history—might have to wait a very long time for rescue, even today. While we were in the north, Gillie Sheldon, a friend of Mike’s from Mackay, about five hundred miles north of Brisbane, lost his fishing boat on a reef when he was unable to get its motor restarted. He swam for fourteen hours until he reached the nearest island, where he dug a trench for shelter, and kept himself alive on a diet of raw shellfish. Heavy rains added to his discomfort, but saved his life by providing him with drinking water.
The island on which Gillie had landed was far from the main shipping track; probably years had passed since the last human being had walked upon it, and more years might pass before men returned. But the castaway was lucky; after only eighteen days a Royal Australian Navy survey ship, charting these unfrequented waters, arrived on the scene and rescued him—a good deal thinner, and badly sunburned, but otherwise in good health.
Of all the Reef’s stories of peril and rescue, of triumph and tragedy, none can compare with the saga of Mary Watson, which took place in 1881 and is still remembered throughout Queensland. Through the courtesy of the Oxley Memorial Library, Brisbane, I was able to examine the original documents and, so far as I know, much of the following material has never before been published.
The story provides an interesting link with Captain Cook, for it begins on the island which he named and from which he first glimpsed the Great Barrier Reef in all its majesty. After he had repaired the Endeavour and set sail once more from what is now Cooktown, he proceeded northeast away from the mainland until he came to a large island crowned by a thousand-foot-high mountain. From this peak, Cook hoped, he would be able to survey the sea and find a safe passage for the battered Endeavour.
What he saw from the mountain was a view of breathtaking loveliness, but it was not one to encourage a navigator half a world away from home. Around the base of the island was a maze of shoals and sandbanks, washed by waters of every color from emerald-green to the deepest of blues. The darker water revealed the presence of channels; the lighter areas showed where the endless miles of coral grew almost to the surface. But these hazards had already been negotiated; the sight that filled Cook with apprehension lay ten miles further to the east.
Barring him from the open waters of the Pacific lay a line of foaming breakers, stretching north and south as far as vision could reach. It was, in Cook’s own words, a “line of dreadful surf,” formed when waves which had been gaining momentum for a thousand miles smashed to a halt against the Outer Barrier as it reared abruptly from the ocean depths. Fortunately, there were breaks in the wall of coral, and through one of these, a few miles north of the island, Cook was to sail into history and to complete the circumnavigation of the world.
Just 110 years after Cook’s departure in 1770, a newly married British couple landed on the mountainous island which, because of its extensive reptile population, Cook had named Lizard Island. Captain Watson and his young wife Mary must often have thought of the man who had left his mark all along the coast. They could never have guessed that they too would become part of the Reef’s history and that their names also would be recorded on its charts.
Robert Watson, Mariner, of Aberdeen, was forty-two when he married Mary Oxnam, a Cornish girl of exactly half his age. Mary had been a schoolteacher in Cooktown; a photograph taken about the time of her marriage shows a woman looking older than her years and with firm, regular features. She was not beautiful, but one would have guessed her to be competent and levelheaded even without knowing
her subsequent history.
Captain Watson pursued a trade which flourished until as late as the Second World War, but which is now virtually extinct. He fished for the sausage-shaped bêche-de-mer which inhabits every coral pool and which the Chinese gourmets prized so much. It was regarded in the East not only as a table delicacy but also—a claim which most westerners would regard with, if possible, even more skepticism—a restorer of flagging vigor. The sluggish sea cucumbers were collected by hand when in shallow water, or by being impaled on long spears when they were too deep for comfortable free diving. They were then boiled, gutted, dried in the sun, and smoked until they became as hard and wrinkled as dried prunes. In this condition they kept indefinitely, and since the most prized varieties once fetched as much as $1,000 a ton there were small fortunes to be made collecting them.
Shortly before his marriage, Captain Watson had established a bêche-de-mer fishery on Lizard Island, with the help of a European partner and some native divers. Working along the Barrier Reef in small boats, they collected bêche-de-mer and brought it back to the island to be cured. When enough had been gathered, they would take it in to Cooktown to be sold to the Chinese dealers, then return to Lizard Island with fresh stores, mail, and news of the outer world. It was a hard and lonely life, and not one which many young brides would have welcomed. Mary Watson had been married only three weeks when she joined her husband in the picturesque solitude of the Reef, twenty miles from the mainland and sixty from the nearest human settlement.
The Coast of Coral Page 16
