Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part III

Chapter 15. The Last Archipelago

A typical group of atolls in the Maldives, the last major
archipelago that Alexander would visit

IN AUGUST 1899, just two months after publishing the Fiji report and sixteen months after returning to the United States, Alexander Agassiz, having procured use of the U.S. Fish Commission’s Albatross, boarded the ship in San Francisco and set out to see the rest of the South Sea Islands.

He had essentially made up his mind about coral reefs by this time, concluding that they were built by elevation, erosion, accretion, and current, working in various combinations in different places. Where subsidence occurred, it was not the main cause but a supplement to these forces. This was the big picture. But science was in the details, and he wanted all of them before hazarding a comprehensive theory of the world’s coral reefs. His theory’s protean essence argued against applying it anyplace he hadn’t seen. His was not, like Darwin’s, a one-size-fits-all. And if he wanted to upend Darwin, he could not afford to overreach. He could not speak too soon or before he possessed every last gainable advantage. If you strike a king, you must kill him. Darwin had shown stunning resilience.

His journey of 1899-1900 covered essentially all of the South Sea Island groups, including a quick pass through the Fijis. He had spent much of the previous six months planning it, arranging for coal and food and other supplies to be delivered and stored at islands along the route; he figured to stay out as long as it took. As it happened, it took almost nine months, his longest expedition yet. Working east to west, he saw the Marquesas; the Tuamotus and Society Islands (also known as French Polynesia), which cluster together at the eastern end of the long dogleg of South Sea Islands; and then Tonga, or the Friendly Islands, which lie just below Fiji. After passing through Fiji he bent north toward the smaller, more scattered groups of the Ellice and the Gilberts, looped through the big oval of the Marshalls, and turned west through the loose line of the Carolines. From there he finished by heading north once again, hitting Guam before steaming out of the tropics and on to Japan.

Logistically it was not one of his smoother journeys, despite all his preparation. He found the crew of the Albatross just shy of incompetent; he once had to throw a line to the dock himself as half a dozen sailors stood inert because no one had ordered anyone to throw a line. The vessel was showing its age, with boilers so weak the ship could barely move upwind. Yet he enjoyed more than ever the scientific work and his ethnological tourism. He had always taken keen interest in the natives of the places he visited, and this long tour let him meet and see a greater variety than ever before. He was well aware that he was not seeing an untainted culture; in fact he found moving the struggles of the islanders to persist amid the presence of the various powers-mainly France, England, and Germany-that had colonized the archipelagoes. These were the islands of Melville’s Typee and Conrad’s Lord Jim(which Conrad was just finishing as Agassiz hit the Marquesas), and Alex shared those authors’ distress about what colonization inflicted on the inhabitants. He naturally harbored some of the condescension almost universal among white visitors. But his cynicism about authority (particularly religious), his democratic sentiments, and his habitual empathy for the underdog gave him a great sympathy for the islanders. He could smile at the idea of a Fijian eating a European and even joked that the practice might do well back home. He wrote of one queen in the Marquesas, “the wife of a celebrated chief, Toana (who conquered all the Marquesas); she must be eighty years old. … It is said that not liking her first husband she ate him and married the great chief. Would it not be a good recipe for Newport divorcees? It would lessen the later scandal so greatly and simplify matters.”

He joked partly to cover the pain he felt at seeing their decimation. “The natives here are going fast,” he wrote in the same letter, “dying off mainly with consumption [tuberculosis]; the adjacent valley, which held once three thousand warriors, has now four teen inhabitants.* It seems too bad. Christianity is fatal to the South Sea Islanders-they cannot stand its restraints, and they die like sheep.”

He particularly disdained missionaries, whom he saw as coercing a debilitating superstition in service of a monopolistic trade.

What I never like in the South Pacific is to see the swell houses (comparatively speaking) of the missionaries. They always in all the islands have the very best of everything, and certainly don’t show the natives any example of plain living, for they are most comfortable and have no end of servants. … I have been reading M n [apparently an advocate for the missionary cause],
and such twaddle passes my comprehension. It is nothing but an apology to join the European band of robbers in despoiling the barbarians, as we are pleased to call them, and compelling them to buy our goods and wares in addition to stealing their land-all in the name of spreading civilization. Just as the missionary swindles in the South Seas, who trades with natives, makes a lot of rules for them adapted to our uses, and compels them to do as we think right, all in the name of Christianity!- and if they resist, the missionary claims the protection of a Man-of-War of his country! What fun it would be for a man of energy and pluck to come among the islands and help them to resist such aggressions.

This fantasy of helping liberate these oppressed natives emerges repeatedly in his letters home.

Alex was delighted when he found the occasional island that had been left mostly alone. One of his most pleasing visits was to the Fijian island of Kabara, where he had stopped two years previous in the Yaralla and where the village retained some economic and cultural independence. Despite having no common language with the villagers, he was received as an old friend. “It was very funny to see how pleased the natives were to see us again,” he wrote home. “The old chief and his wife greeted us in a most stately manner, and after our return from the hill we called to bid him good-bye.” Agas-siz and the captain then hosted the chief and his wife and a large party on the Albatross, where some of the Fijians sang a song and then, accepting a few gifts from Agassiz, took their leave. Agassiz was heartened to have found them so well. “It is really refreshing to get to a village again where nobody can speak English, and where there are no missionaries or traders and the natives run themselves.” It was the cleanest, healthiest, and most attractive village he had yet seen.

In the Marshalls, where the Albatross worked a month toward the end of the trip, trade and missionary work had badly diluted the native culture. Agassiz was depressed to see the native houses in many villages replaced by flimsy shacks with metal roofs. But he was thrilled to find that the islanders still made and sailed the best and most graceful outrigger sailing canoes in all the South Sea Isles. Many of them still knew how to navigate with the strange “charts” made of sticks lashed together that allowed them (inexplicably to Western navigators) to hit even tiny islands after days of open sea. He bought several of these instruments for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Ethnology.

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Sailing in Dana’s tracks, Alexander repeatedly found places the young geologist had misread. In the large lagoon of the Tuamotus’ Rangiroa atoll, for instance, one of his first stops, he disembarked at an islet that Dana had described:

I rushed across the islet to examine the limestone ridge which flanks the islets on the sea face, and which Dana saw from ship-boardand described as elevated recent reef. I was tickled to death when I got there to find myself on familiar ground [that is, the limestone Dana had seen as reef rock appeared to be classic marine limestone]. … It is the same pitted, honey combed, eroded rock with which I had become familiar in Fiji. I think I have the key of the Paumotucoral reef problem, and it’s only an expansion of what I have seen in Fiji; only this group is comparatively plain sailing and clear work, for Dana did not examine his islands very closely. As for Darwin, he only sailed through and never stopped at all, so that I am quite sure that unless something new and unforeseen turns up, I can chuck this group of atolls at the heads of the Darwin-Dana party and ask them for the next.

Which is what he did, moving on from there to find one group after another contradicting Darwin’s theory and fitting into his own broader, more multifaceted one. The Tahiti atolls proved much like Fiji, as did the Cook Islands and Tonga, which lay just below Fiji. The picture grew more complicated as they moved north to the Ellice and Gilberts and Marshalls, for the limestone beds there often appeared more coralline in nature, suggesting old coral reefs, and so thick he couldn’t know how deep they went or what underlay them. These raised coral beds, he allowed, had probably been formed by subsidence-but did not play the role in shaping the present reefs that Darwin envisioned. Rather, they had slowly formed on subsiding bottoms more than two million years before and later been lifted into place, at which point they were shaped by erosion and current into today’s reef foundations, just as volcanic and elevated marine limestone foundations elsewhere were. Thus subsidence helped cre ate the material underlying the present islands and reefs, but it did not create the present reef forms. This, Alex concluded, was the usual end result of any localized subsidence, though he allowed there were doubtless a few cases in which an ongoing subsidence combined with erosion and current to help shape isolated islands or atolls.

This reading of the northern string of archipelagoes was strength ened by the oversights and misreadings of Darwin and Dana. Every group seemed to have marine limestone that Dana had misread as reef rock. As in the Fijis, the surrounding banks differed on wind ward and leeward sides, suggesting that erosion and current were the main shapers of reefs, for subsidence would not produce such a dif ferential. Finally, the contours of most archipelagoes, as shown both by Alex’s own soundings and others done since Dana’s time, showed the bathygraphy as other than Dana and Darwin had assumed. His soundings made plain that while some atolls rose from great depths, as Darwin’s model envisioned, many did not, resting instead on broad plateaus that stretched well away from the islands before falling off. This broader contour seemed far more consistent with elevation than continued subsidence; the deep ravines between some atolls were likely channels created by currents.

The evidence accrued. “I am gradually knocking out a lot of super stitions about atolls,” he wrote home, “and it is really absurd that Dar win and Dana should have written such a lot of nonsense, all evolved from their brains or reading of what others have said and done.”

His dismissal of the sweeping nature of Darwin and Dana’s the ory deepened when he visited Funafuti, where in 1897 the Australian Edgeworth David had drilled through six hundred feet of some limestone-like substance that defied identification. David had returned in 1898 and shot another bore 1,114 feet deep, passing through similar material and still not reaching bedrock. The results remained controversial. Some of the investigators and members of the sponsoring Royal Society had declared them clearly supporting subsidence, while others who had examined the borings found them inconclusive. The Royal Society itself would later officially take a neutral stance on the results. Alexander, meanwhile, found the place consistent with his thoughts on elevation and erosion-and not particularly supportive of subsidence. Most striking to him was how different Funafuti was from other islands, and how foolish it seemed, given such variation among atolls, to draw sweeping conclusions before you’d seen them all.

“I found Funafuti just as different from other atolls as possible,” he wrote,

and … I begin to see how useless it is to discuss coral islands between people who have not seen the same thing. I could not make out what David, Sollas [another recent researcher], and Gardiner [who had been there two years before] meant until I had seen Funafuti-it’s so different from all other atolls, and unless I had my experience to go upon it would be hopeless for me to give a natural explanation, and I should be groping round and talking in the air.

From Funafuti they steamed north to the Gilberts, where the natives, complained Mayer, “insisted upon opening our jaws in order to admire the gold fillings in our teeth,” and where Alex bought for the Peabody Museum a suit of coconut-fiber armor. They spent a full month in the Marshalls, a group of huge atolls with particularly thin rims surrounding immense lagoons, as if they had formed on particularly broad plateaus (or in Darwin’s view, particularly large islands). Many a rim narrow enough to cast a stone across surrounded a lagoon so wide you couldn’t see the other side. Alex did much sounding here, getting results similar to those from the Tuamotus and Ellice and Gilberts.

After coaling one last time in the Marshalls, the Albatross moved west through the Carolines. This last of the Pacific archipelagoes seemed to offer little new, being much like the Marshalls but on a smaller scale. He skipped through them quickly. Though he still had about two thousand miles to go to reach Japan and then the Pacific to cross, he was on his way home.

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This transpacific trip expanded and solidified Alex’s evolving model of reef building. It let him integrate for the first time the occasional incidence of subsidence in a way consistent with his central con- tention about how reefs were built. He had more confidence in this theory than ever, and there seemed few rocks left to turn over.

He set off to study the one major reef area he had not yet visited, the Indian Ocean. In December 1901 he crossed Europe and the Mideast to spend several weeks in the Maldives, a set of atolls that rise from a submarine peninsula extending several hundred miles southwest from India. Some five hundred miles long and eerily beautiful, the Maldives are perhaps the world’s most singular reef archipelago. They had fascinated geologists ever since the British explorer Moresby charted their strange configurations in the mid-i830s. Most of the Maldives’ twenty-six large atolls, particularly those in the northern archipelago’s two-thirds, are composed of numerous smaller atolls, or faros, as they are called there, of which there are hundreds. Some of the faros have been built up into islands by wave-deposited sand and rock; others are largely or completely submarine, looking like ghost reefs and islands from above. Though some form open crescents, most are closed loops, and the loops take every conceivable shape: ovals, gourds, pears, beans, quarter-moons. The larger atolls, more consistently oval, are defined not by a continuous line of reef but by strands of spaced faros that on a chart look like water spots. The openness of these atoll rims lets the alternating seasonal monsoons (wet westerlies in summer, dry easterlies in winter) push water through and across them. This creates unusually rich lagoons that hold yet more faros and islets-far more than typically found in more classic atolls-and spectacular marine life.

Darwin, in one of his coral reef book’s less convincing passages, described the Maldives as the remains of a single atoll that grew up around a huge, sinking island and was then slowly carved into its modern form by the monsoon currents. Since Darwin never saw the Maldives, Alex did not hesitate to differ. An actual look at the archipelago, he said in his report, showed that “theingenious suggestions of Darwin regarding the formation of the Maldives are not borne out.” To begin with, the entire area showed signs of a slight elevation. The highly varying depths of the lagoons and surrounding plateaus further argued against an archipelago-wide subsidence, which could hardly be expected to differ so much across small areas. The breadth of the underlying peninsular bank also defied Darwin. On a finer scale, the faros all seemed molded less by any broadly con- sistent force than by the particular topographies of the knolls they grew upon and the currents that struck them.

Finally rather than conforming to Darwin’s vision of islands that evolved into barrier reefs and then atolls, these faros seemed to take an opposite course of development. When Alex compared what he observed to the reef forms in Moresby’s 1830 charts, he saw that many curved reefs were becoming atolls and many atolls were turning into islands. One crescent-shaped reef had become a closed, circular reef with a shallow lagoon; several other crescents had extended their ends to come closer to forming circles; and some faros that Moresby showed as entirely submerged had grown islets on their rims. At least one small, closed faro had filled its lagoon in almost completely. Alex could virtually watch these reefs being built, and they were being built in a progression opposite Darwin’s model. Alex, puzzling it out, concluded that the Maldives had begun as a submarine landscape of low hills and hummocks that bloomed into faros and atolls when either elevation or accrual had raised the higher elevations to reef-growing depths.

In their broad outlines, in their detailed variety, and in the development of their forms, the Maldives made the most striking contra diction yet to Darwin’s theory, a fitting last piece to Alexander’s quest to explain the world’s reefs. A month after he turned sixty-six, still anchored amid the most beautiful and fascinating reefs he’d ever seen, he wrote Murray that he was finally done:

OFF NALANDU, SS AMRA,
MILADUMMADULU ATOLL, MALDIVES
JAN. l8, I902

This will be the end of a most successful expedition, perhaps to me the most interesting visit to a coral reef group I have made-for certainly I have learned more at the Maldives about atolls than in all my past experience in the Pacific and else where. I should never have forgiven myself had I not seen the Maldives with my own eyes and formed my own opinion of what they mean.

Such a lot of twaddle as has been written about the Mal dives. It’s all wrong what Darwin has said, and the charts ought to have shown him that he was talking nonsense. … I am glad that I always stuck to writing what I saw in each group and explained what I saw as I best could without trying all the time to have an all-embracing theory. Now, however, I am ready to have my say on coral reefs and write a connected account of coral reefs based upon what I have seen, and it will be a pleasure to me to write such a book.

*According to a note in George Agassiz’s Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz(p. 354), this was the valley “Typee” of Melville’s story where a band of warriors was holding out against the corruptions of colonialism.