A Connected Account - Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs

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

Part III

Chapter 16. A Connected Account

I

ALEX RETURNED from the Maldives the way he came, crossing the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean to Europe. He and Max (who often traveled with him) reached Paris on March i, 1902, and, in what would become a sort of spring ritual over the next few years, checked in for a long stay at the Hotel Athenée. He had no desire to return to the dreary New England spring, and he was feeling tired and unwell-“used up,” he told Murray. The return to civilization seemed to sap him. His appetite was so spare he lost fourteen pounds his first few weeks there. His doctor in Paris told him he’d been working too hard, and indeed he worked “like a beaver” even in Paris, pushing hard to draft his Maldives report. “Somehow I am feeling the effects of this trip,” he wrote home. Home replied with cables about how poorly the copper business was going. Calumet seemed to need his attention, but he decided to delay returning until May. “I don’t want to go home if I can help it,” he wrote Murray. “I could not stand one of our blizzards.”

The other reason he couldn’t go home yet is that he had promised Murray he would give a talk on his Maldives findings at the March 31 meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s Royal Soci ety (not to be confused with the better-known Royal Society of Lon don) seemed a fitting place for Agassiz’s first talk now that he’d finished his coral explorations. It was Murray’s home crowd, and in the decade or so before the “conspiracy of silence” controversy moved the coral reef discussion to the pages of Nature, the society’s publications had been the main forum for those skeptical of subsidence.

Murray doubtless hoped Alex would now give an abstract of the “connected account” of reef development that he had promised in his letter from the Maldives. There’s some possibility that he did- the society’s proceedings hold only a notice of his talk, no transcript-but if so, it was only in a brief moment of candor. For Alex now returned to a reticence he hadn’t shown in a quarter century taking the sort of noncommittal stance he had occupied before he saw the Pacific. He clammed up. A year after returning, for instance, invited to give his views to London’s Royal Society-given a chance to deliver a blow right in the lion’s den-he gave a talk so short and insistently particularized that not even the most imaginative reviewers could call it a connected account of his views. Rather, it was the shortest summary (just two printed pages) of what he had seen. He merely presented descriptive synopses of the observable traits typical of the major coral areas and avoided almost anything that might seem an “all-embracing idea” about what dictated those forms. The closest he came to stating his theory was a single sentence, amid a dry description of the Carolines, offering that “denudation and submarine erosion fully account for the formation of platforms upon which coral reef and other limestone organisms may build, either barrier or encircling reefs, or even atolls.”

In terms of bare fact, this does describe the core of Alexander’s theory. But while a statement so unemphatic might take hold if no prevailing theory existed, it could hardly be expected to displace a theory that had tenaciously held its ground for six decades. It had none of the spirited assertion of his Fiji report, for instance, and his attack on Darwin consisted of the comment that Alex had done his own studies “recognising that Darwin’s theory did not explain the conditions observed.”

His hesitance today seems perverse. It must have been maddening for his friends and colleagues, particularly Murray, who wanted not only to see the new theory advanced but to see Alex finally play his hand. His retreat seems inexplicable. Yet it was in fact a reluctance very much like the one Darwin had experienced for twenty years with his evolution theory. Knowing he would meet resistance, he sought to marshal every last fact and argument before he let loose; and even when he’d marshaled every last bit, he hesitated. Darwin’s hand was forced when he learned that Alfred Russel Wallace had developed the same theory. Alexander had no such prod. He could continue to indulge his caution.

2

Time passed, and not unpleasantly for Alex. His long research mission complete, he was free again to do other work and to travel more leisurely. He lived much as he had in the early 1880s, when for a few years he set aside the coral reef problem, before the Duke of Argyll flap convinced him his own efforts would be needed after all. As then, he was not now the only one working on the question. Of a new generation of reef researchers, J. Stanley Gardiner, who had closely preceded Alex both in the Fijis and the Maldives, was advocating a multifaceted theory much like Alex’s, one that discounted subsidence and stressed the erosion of banks created by upheaval and accrual. Gardiner, just thirty at this point, lacked Alex’s standing, but he had been looking at reefs virtually nonstop for almost five years and was willing to speak plainly. In the first few years of the 1900s, he published several papers that explicitly laid out his model as one that should replace Darwin’s. Wharton, Bourne, Guppy and others lent support to this effort, as did the final reports of the Funafuti drillings, which were unambiguously inconclusive. The tug-of-war was looking more even, and as in the early 1880s, when Murray’s the ory was getting attention, Alex allowed himself to stand aside and let others pull.

He did not forget his plan to write a semi popular “connected account” of his coral reef theory. But neither did he push everything aside to concentrate on it. He tended to it among everything else- of which there was plenty. Having closed the Newport summer-research institute in 1897, he now spent his summers there working mainly in the morning, generally tending a mix of scientific publications and museum and mine business and-in his late sixties now, giving himself permission to slack a bit-passed most afternoons riding, golfing, boating, or entertaining. Winters he usually settled for a month or two or three in Paris, where he sometimes worked on the book between planning future trips and writing up reports from pre- vious expeditions. (He still had research from the 1890s he hadn’t written up.) Thus the coral reef book was usually set aside as a winter project, and the winters often got full.

Alex made slow progress. In Paris for the winter of 1903, for instance, he put the finishing touches on the Maldives report, which left, he wrote a friend, “only … a general résumé of the whole Coral Reef question, … which I hope to get out within the year.” The Maldives report was published, but not the reef book. He spent the winter of 1904 in Paris too, but he apparently devoted most of his time to planning an eastern Pacific expedition (mainly zoological) for the following winter. The Pacific trip itself occupied much of the winter of 1905. He spent the winter of 1906 in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt, where his friend and Newport neighbor, archeologist Theodore Davis, had just discovered the tomb of the king and queen Yuya and Tjuyu. This was one of the most extraordinary finds in Egyptology, eclipsed only with the discovery sixteen years later of the tomb of King Tutankhamen, and it offered a world of distraction for anyone, especially an avid ethnologist like Alex. Winter of 1907 he went collecting in the West Indies. Winter of 1908, Africa.

He wasn’t exactly making time for the thing. As the years passed, he admitted to Murray that he found the book a struggle. His only previous attempt at semipopular writing, the Three Voyages of the “Blake,”had occupied several years and two fat volumes, and being primarily descriptive it had not carried the much stiffer demand that now stood before him: explaining concisely and cogently the complex dynamics that produced the world’s reefs. It seemed you had to write either a reductive aperçu, an approach that repelled him, or a tome that explained all the evidence driving the theory, which would be so massive and technical as to defeat the purpose. It was a slippery damn problem. How did you convey, in a work that by definition must be sweeping and summary, even a cumulative version of the vivid, particularized impact of the many pieces of evidence that proved Darwin wrong? The further he moved in space and time from the reefs, the less certain he seemed to become of what he’d seen there. Nowhere in any of his papers is he as adamant as he is in the letters he wrote from atolls, where it all seemed as clear as lagoon water. The reefs themselves must have started to seem a bit unreal- particularly the lagoons, those calm circles of water surrounded by breaking surf and a world of ocean. They had once been quiet centers distant from everything: the cold of New England, the savagery of the letters in scientific journals, the dirty Cambridge snow and its horrid memories, the inexhaustible resistance of those who believed in subsidence, the maddening power of Darwin’s baseless idea. In their bright, flat particularity, their surf-surrounded calm, the lagoons had been free of all that. Now, mashed together into a distant abstraction, they composed a vortex that drew it all in.

Castle Hill, the mansion that Alexander built at Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1870s, and the only place where he felt at home

“I have started [again] on my coral-reef book,” he wrote Murray in the late spring of 1907, “but it is a good deal more than I expected. If I stay at home I ought to make good progress.” A few months later he wrote Murray that “I have made a fair beginning, and hope to keep the material within reasonable bounds and not allow it to run away with me.”

He worked on it that fall of 1909 in Newport and Cambridge and reported working on it in Naples, where he wintered that year. After his customary May visit to Calumet he took it up again that summer in Newport. But that fall, when he came back from his annual autumn check at Calumet, he was so dissatisfied with what he’d produced, he told Murray, that he set it aside, thinking he would ponder it over the winter and then in spring either salvage it or hatch a new version.

He planned to spend that winter traveling in Java. A flare-up of his old leg problems, however, convinced him he shouldn’t be so far from doctors, so he decided to return to Egypt, where his neighbor Davis was working his way from one wondrous find to another. By the time he arrived, he had recovered well enough to get about and see Davis’s discoveries. He found he had to nap more often. But despite feeling his age a bit, he enjoyed the winter keenly.

3

He stayed in Egypt through February, then returned to Paris. He and Max found the city still recovering from catastrophic floods that had swept through a month before. The Jardin des Plantes, France’s fore most botanical museum, had been badly hit, with many specimens ruined and the work lives of his many friends there were disrupted. But Alex was heartened by how energetically the Parisians bounced back, particularly those in the poorer, lower districts who lost the most.

“The damage is stupendous,” he wrote George’s wife, and “all the small workmen who owned their houses in the banlieux … are cleaned out … ruined from one day to the next… They ought to be crushed, but they rise to the occasion and get ready for the daily work, which, after all, has carried many a man over calamities which seemed unbearable.” All these years later, his own grief was still close enough that he thanked work for burying it.

A week later he and Max left Paris for home, heading first to London to visit Murray. Murray asked Alex how the book was coming. Alex told him that though he had drafted it three different ways, he was still not quite happy with it. However, he said, he had hit on a more efficient plan and, having cleared his desk of other matters, he expected to get it written over the spring and summer.

On March 23, 1910, he and Max sailed out of Southampton on the giant passenger steamship Adriatic II, bound for New York. The fifth night out they had dinner, then spent the evening chatting in the smoking room before turning in. The next morning, Easter Sun day, Alex did not emerge for breakfast. When Max went to wake him, he found his father could not be roused. He looked like he was sleeping. But there was no breath or pulse. At seventy-four years of age, Alexander Agassiz had died.

Murray, back in London, was much aggrieved to hear of his friend’s death. He was soon mortified at the further news relayed him by George and Max. They could not find the coral reef manuscript. They looked everywhere-the house in Cambridge, the mansion in Newport, every drawer, box, cabinet, and cranny of his museum quarters-but found no sign of the book. No outline, no organized notes, no hint of the three drafts he’d spoken of writing and setting aside. Only “extracts from other papers,” reported George, “and a few rough notes, of no use to anyone but himself.” It was, George noted with magnificent understatement, “an excellent example of his method of carrying his work in his head until the last moment.”