Though it was such a calm and almost windless day, there was nevertheless a considerable swell when we reached Wistari, and we followed the edge of the reef for a mile or so before finding a spot where the coral ledge was relatively smooth and we could run the dinghy around without risk. Then we scrambled ashore over the wilderness of bleached and broken coral and started to explore the wide rampart surrounding the shallow lagoon which occupies most of the center of the reef.
At first sight, it was a somewhat depressing spot. We were standing in the midst of the ocean, and the only permanently dry land was a mile away. If the outboard motor refused to start again, it would be a long row back. If anything happened to the dinghy, it would be a still longer swim. . . .
Nowhere was there any sign of life; the coral on this portion of the reef was completely dead. We wound our way among scores of small boulders, shaped and smoothed by the seas which thunder incessantly across Wistari. Every one of these boulders sheltered a whole universe of marine creatures, and soon our little party had dispersed in all directions to see what wonders it could find. It was fascinating to overturn the lumps of dead coral, and to watch beautifully marked cowries crawl for shelter, ornate crabs wave their claws bravely in Lilliputian defiance, or feathery starfish writhe across the sand. You never knew what the next boulder would hide; it could conceal beauty, or danger, or both. The strangest creature I discovered on Wistari (strangest to me, that is; no doubt a marine biologist could identify it at once) was a centipedal beast about a foot long and half an inch across. It was a beautiful iridescent blue-black, and its body gleamed in the sun like polished metal. When discovered, it writhed through the rocks in frantic speed, and as I dared not pick it up (for I had foolishly not brought gloves) it soon disappeared. Each segment of its body sprouted two vicious hooks, so that the creature resembled an animated band saw as it scuttled to safety.
Even with gloves, it is not safe to touch some of the reef’s denizens. The bristle worm, for example, is covered with hundreds of spines, like the finest of glass fiber. These spines break off at a touch and work their way through thick leather with the greatest of ease, leaving the fingers partially numbed when they penetrate the skin.
We spent over an hour on the exposed reef, being careful never to get too far from the dinghy, though as the tide was rising there was no danger of its being swept away even had it not been anchored with particular caution. Soon the sea started to creep in across the stretches of flat coral, and the niggerheads around us began to stand out in isolation on the edge of the reef. Loaded down with the specimens we had collected, we hurried back to the boat, pushed it off into the gentle swell of the waves, and headed out into the channel.
Now was our chance to have a better look at the vast coral plateau surrounding Heron Island itself. During all the time we had been there, we had never been able to visit the eastern fringe of the reef, which lay on the very horizon, far beyond the reach of the most agile fossicker. So when we left Wistari, we did not head directly back to Heron Island, but cut across to the eastern portion of the reef.
For almost an hour we skirted the edge of the immense and now submerged plateau, whose limits were still clearly revealed by the broken line of niggerheads. We could approach safely to within a few feet of the reef’s edge, for the water was so clear that there was no danger of running aground. Beneath us unfolded a panorama of fascinating canyons, of curious sandy strips cutting almost like roads through the living coral, of grottoes and little hillocks which might one day give birth to new islands. It would have taken weeks to explore properly this one section of a single reef—and there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such reefs to visit when this one had no more secrets to reveal.
A few days later, we had a chance of examining more new territory. The Capre was going out on a fishing trip, and those who didn’t want to fish could be put ashore on one of the neighboring islands while the anglers remained on board. As it was a fine day, though there was a rather cold wind blowing, we decided not to miss this opportunity, and carted our photographic and diving gear out to the Capre. We also had with us a surf ski which Mike had managed to borrow; for the benefit of those who have never seen this somewhat hair-raising mode of transportation, a surf ski is a streamlined sliver of wood about fifteen feet long, four inches deep, and just wide enough to sit on. Even when you are lying flat, it requires a nice sense of balance to stay on a surf ski if the water is at all choppy—and to sit upright and paddle is something that requires real skill. Surf skis are very popular among Australian spearmen who have to operate at considerable distances from the shore, since they can be used as places of refuge in an emergency. You can have unwanted gear tied to them while you go spearing, and have the satisfaction of knowing that if the sharks get too interested in the bleeding fish with which you are festooning yourself, you can always put a few inches of wood between your anatomy and the water.
An hour and a half after leaving Heron Island, we arrived at the edge of the reef surrounding Masthead Island. The rest of the trip had to be made by dinghy, and finally by foot across a hundred yards of exposed coral. As we all piled into the boat, and the Capre started her motors and roared away out to sea, some humorist shook his fist at her retreating stern and yelled: “You’ll hang for this, you mutinous dogs!”
After a picnic lunch on the beach—I am almost ashamed to admit that it was the first time I had drunk a real brew of tea from a genuine billy—Mike and I started to explore the reef, in company with a pair of charming Fulbright scholars. It was a fact, statistically most improbable, that within two weeks no less than four Fulbrighters from various American universities came to Heron Island. On a pro rata basis, this would imply that there must have been several million of them studying the rest of Australia.
Dorothy was a botanist from Duke University, and set us collecting seaweed (“With holdfasts, please”). Celia was a political economist, so there was little we could do for her except help her over the rougher patches of coral. When we found anything interesting, Dorothy would promptly photograph it with a mortar-sized reflex camera. I am sure that when her lavishly illustrated thesis appears, it will start another wave of Fulbright scholars heading for Heron Island.
You never know what you will find when exploring a reef, and this one kept its biggest excitement until the very end—until, in fact, we were already making our way back to rendezvous with the Capre on the other side of the island. The tide was still well out, for we had landed when it was ebbing and it would be some hours yet before the reef was covered. A few hundred yards from the island’s sandy beach a number of coral pools formed a complex of little lakes, and in one of these lakes five big turtles had been trapped. And by “big,” I mean exactly that. The smallest would have tipped the scales at a hundred pounds, while the largest must have weighed two or three times as much.
At first sight, the pool looked as if it were empty. It was not until the massive boulders lying in it started to move slowly around that one realized that they were not boulders at all.
Mike wasted no time, but promptly plunged into the pool. At once, the water started to boil. The great, ungainly beasts hurtled themselves in all directions, and the surface of the pool was thrown into such convulsions that we could catch only occasional glimpses of the mobile rocks dashing frantically around in its depths. After much shouting and splashing, Mike managed to trap the smallest of the turtles in one corner of the pool, so that it could not retreat and was stranded helplessly on the coral. He grabbed its front flippers and, after a brisk tussle, turned the beast over on its back. We then had no difficulty in dragging it completely out of the pool; it lay pathetically waving its limbs and looking at us with big, sad eyes.
Having successfully tested his turtle-catching technique, Mike decided to be more ambitious. However, a three-hundred-pounder was rather a handful for one person to manage, so he called for reinforcements.
A couple of days before, o
ur expedition had been joined by a full-time volunteer, John Goldsmith. John was a member of the Underwater Research Group of Queensland, and had timed his holiday on Heron Island to coincide with our stay there. Though a three-hundred-pound turtle could probably take a man’s hand off with one snap of its beak, he promptly joined Mike in the pool, which erupted again as the remaining beasts paddled frantically in search of non-existent shelter.
Once they had cornered the big boy, Mike and John managed to repeat the maneuver and get him stranded on the coral. It took the rest of us, grabbing a flipper apiece, to heave him completely out of the pool. After all this effort, however, there was nothing we could do with him except take photos of each other sitting on his back—his carapace was about four feet across, so there was plenty of room—and then to let him go. Mike tried to ride him back into the pool, but he was as hard to stay on as a bucking bronco once he had reached water again, and in a couple of seconds Mike was swimming by himself.
We had no intention of letting our more manageable victim go, but were determined to take her back to Heron Island. (It was a she, so we could christen her Myrtle without inaccuracy.) We had no very precise idea of what we should do with her, but vague thoughts of turtle soups and steaks did pass through our minds.
After much heaving and puffing, we got Myrtle back to the beach, carried her halfway round the island, and then lugged her out across the reef again to the dinghy which would take us back to the Capre. We tried to avoid unnecessary violence, but there were times when it was necessary to skid her like a sled over the coral. She didn’t seem to enjoy this, but she made no active objection—not even snapping at our ankles when we rowed out to the Capre, now waiting off the edge of the reef.
She continued to lie on her back throughout the home-ward voyage, as if resigned to her fate. But there was still plenty of fight in her; before we were to touch land again, she was to make a determined bid for freedom.
When the Capre tied up at her mooring off Heron Island, Mike decided to take his prize back on the surf ski, so that he could return in triumph like a successful hunter. So poor Myrtle was lashed securely—though not securely enough—to the ski, and it was lowered into the water. Unfortunately, her weight upset the calculations; no sooner did the ski go over the side than it slipped out of its handlers’ grasp. With a mighty splash, Myrtle and ski fell into the water and started to drift away on the powerful current along the edge of the reef.
As soon as it hit the water, the ski promptly turned over, submerging Myrtle, who at once revived. She managed to extricate herself from her bonds sufficiently to start paddling, and the ski doubled its speed of departure. As it passed the stern of the Capre, there was a second splash as Mike went in after it; a moment later came a third splash as John went in after him. By the time the two of them had reached the ski, it was a hundred feet away, and details of the resulting three-cornered conflict were somewhat obscured by distance. Mike and John wanted to go west, the ski wanted to go east, and Myrtle, who was still attached to it by one flipper, wanted to go straight down.
After a prolonged tussle, Mike and John managed to get Myrtle more or less under control, and, swimming alongside the ski, tried to push it back to the Capre. However, the current was too strong for them, and they steadily lost ground. What made their position extremely precarious was the fact that Myrtle, owing to the bad treatment she had received, was bleeding slightly, and the general commotion could hardly have been improved upon as a means of attracting sharks to the spot.
The motorboat which had met the Capre at her mooring was taking on the passengers and their goods, and its skipper refused to be moved by the yells for assistance which were now steadily dwindling into the distance. There was nothing much I could do except help to load the boat as quickly as possible, and it seemed an age before we finally untied from the Capre and went to the rescue. When we pulled the three swimmers aboard, Myrtle—despite having been dragged on her back across a quarter of a mile of reef—seemed the least exhausted of the trio.
It was, I think, around about this moment that the project for turning Myrtle into steaks was quietly abandoned. She had put up such a good fight that we did not have the heart to eat her (even if we had the stomach, which was also questionable). There was at the Tourist Center a small pool, holding two turtles and sundry sharks. As Myrtle was a good deal larger than the specimens already in captivity, we added her to the collection and she quickly made herself at home.
At least one occupant of the pool was very pleased to see her. Some weeks before, a couple of remora, or sucker fish, had been caught; the smaller of these had attached itself to one of the sharks, but the larger was too big to find any suitable host. It spent most of its time swimming disconsolately beside the already-occupied shark, looking the picture of frustration.
As soon as Myrtle was dumped into the pool, it had found a home. It wasted no time in latching onto her, though occasionally when the pool was partly drained and most of Myrtle was out of the water it would have to start swimming again.
Sucker fish are remarkable creatures—the straphangers of the sea. They are beautifully streamlined little fish, two or three feet in length, with the tops of their heads modified into suction pads. Though they are quite good swimmers, they have found that they can make a better living by attaching themselves to larger fish, letting them do the hard work. When a large shark is caught on a line and hauled aboard a fishing boat, it is quite usual for several remora to detach themselves and fall back into the sea. Sometimes they leave it too late and are caught themselves.
In many parts of the world, native fishermen have used remora as automatically homing surface-to-underwater guided missiles. The technique is simple; you catch your sucker fish, tie a string securely to its tail, and let it loose when your canoe is close enough to a likely target. The Barrier Reef aborigines are particularly adept at catching turtles in this manner; once the remora has attached itself to the turtle’s shell, the native angler plays his line, perhaps for several hours, until the animal is exhausted and can be speared. The grip of the remora’s suction pad is so powerful that turtles weighing several hundred pounds cannot break away.
There is a common belief that sucker fish are parasites who actually extract nourishment from the bodies of their hosts—that they are leeches, in fact. This is quite untrue; remora would have a job getting much nourishment out of a turtle shell, and indeed have been known to attach themselves to ships. They are scavengers, and will accompany anything—animate or inanimate—in whose presence they will find scraps of food.
One day when the turtle pool had been drained, and the sharks and remora had all been squeezed rather uncomfortably into a small tank, I was able to seize a chance I had missed two years before on the other side of the world. I had been skin diving over a wreck fifteen miles out from the Florida coast when a small sucker fish, obviously looking for a parking place, had swum up to me and begun a careful survey. As I did not know what it would feel like to have that efficient-looking suction pad pressed against my bare skin, I had offered the fish one of my flippers. It had taken a sniff at this, decided that it did not like the taste of rubber, and promptly departed, leaving me regretting my lack of the true scientific spirit.
I finished the experiment on Heron Island, by getting someone to clamp Myrtle’s remora on my back. The fish promptly applied suction, and it was impossible to remove it by pulling—either my skin, or the suction pad, would have come off first. But by this time I knew the trick of dislodging remoras; their pads consist of about twenty backward-sloping slats, so arranged that when the host moves through the water, the resulting pressure clamps them even more tightly to its body. Because of this, though it may be very hard to pull a remora off, it is quite easy to push it off. If sharks were intelligent enough to swim backward, they could soon dislodge the hitchhikers who, if they do nothing else, must slow them down and impede their hunting ability.
The remora’s grip was not exactly
pleasant, but I cannot pretend that it was at all painful, though it left a red weal which took a few minutes to vanish. The next time I meet one of these interesting little fish, I will not hesitate to offer it a temporary home if it seems lost. But should I then find myself being towed rapidly backward, I will reverse myself with all possible speed so that the suction pad comes unstuck. I would hate to think of those fishermen throwing their harpoons before they had checked on their catch. . . .
XXII
Aladdin’s Cave
The sensible underwater explorer never goes diving alone, but by this definition there are no sensible underwater explorers. There are times when even the most cautious person (and I would be high on such a list) cannot resist temptation.
It was a beautiful, warm afternoon, with the sun shining steadily from a cloudless sky. Not a breath of wind was blowing, and the water beyond the reef lay flat and untroubled by waves. Conditions for diving were perfect, but Mike was not feeling well. Since such a day might not come again, I refused to waste it and set out by myself.
As it was near low tide, most of the reef was uncovered and I had to carry my gear for the first hundred yards. As soon as the water became deep enough to swim in, I put on my flippers and started to paddle out to sea.
I was now in a two-dimensional world, and could easily imagine that I was one of the inhabitants of Flatland. Visibility was so good that I could see sixty or seventy feet horizontally, but the smooth sandy bottom was only a couple of feet from my nose. I was sandwiched between the flat mirror of the surface and the almost equally flat sea bed—two parallel planes that stretched to the limits of vision in every direction.
The Coast of Coral Page 19
