The Coast of Coral Read online

  We made the trip to Bowen Island in the hope of giving all our equipment a thorough test, under operational con­ditions, before we set off on the much longer journey to the Great Barrier Reef. My most vivid memory of the island, however, has nothing to do with underwater explo­ration. We lived in small, isolated wooden huts which had once formed part of a military base guarding Jervis Bay, and one dark and dismal night I was alone on our little hilltop, a quarter of a mile away from any other human being, as Mike had driven up to Sydney for the weekend. The wind was howling, but I had settled down comfortably enough in my sleeping bag on the lower level of a two-tiered bunk, so that I was supported about a foot from the floor.

  I was just dozing off when all thought of slumber was banished by a sound which shot me straight out of my sleeping bag. Something large and very determined was digging its way up through the floor immediately beneath me. It was putting so much energy into the excavation that the entire wooden bunk in which I had been resting quiv­ered as if with a fit of ague. I sat there in the darkness, while the wind moaned around the hut, the rain fell in torrents, and the Thing underneath the floor came steadily nearer. Cheerful little tales like H. P. Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls flashed through my mind, and I remembered the wicked bishop who had been eaten alive by the army of rats that gnawed their way relentlessly through the walls of his castle.

  I am not ashamed to admit that without wasting any more time I climbed out of the lower bunk and scrambled upstairs. The cause of the disturbance still baffled me; I could not believe that a rat could make so much noise. As the tin roof was now only a couple of feet above my face, and the rain had worked itself up to a crescendo, I felt as if I were inside a kettledrum during the finale of Ravel’s Bolero. However, I decided that it was better to be deafened than to be eaten by whatever it was that still shook the wooden framework beneath me.

  I don’t know how long it took me to identify my tor­mentor—if there was only one, which seems hard to be­lieve. Those infernal penguins were on the move, enlarging their burrows. I climbed out of the bunk and banged vig­orously on the floor until the mining operations ceased. Then I went back to bed—still upstairs, just in case. . . .

  It was on Bowen Island that, quite unexpectedly, I met an opportunity for which I had been waiting for several years. I was able to make my first social call on an octopus.

  By this time, the octopus is somewhat thoroughly de­flated as a menace to divers, so no one will expect this encounter to be a notable addition to the epic literature of Man against Beast (Marine Biology Section). I have no in­tention of entering for the Hemingway Stakes, but octopi (or octopodes, if one wishes to be pedantic) are interesting creatures, well worth the trouble of getting to know. Blasé octopus-fanciers can profitably ignore the next few pages.

  I was skin diving around a small reef off Bowen Island, in about ten feet of water, when I noticed a small rock beneath which something had obviously been burrowing. There was a little cave under the rock—a cave which ap­peared to be occupied by old bicycle tires. More detailed examination showed that these bicycle tires were covered with suckers, and as I dived closer and peered into the cave I could see a slitted yellow eye staring back at me. The octopus was so nearly the color of the surrounding rocks that it was quite hard to see; only the regular rows of suck­ers, and the birdlike eye, betrayed its presence.

  It was impossible to judge its size from the little I could see of it; what was more, I had no idea how large an oc­topus had to be before it became advisable to keep out of its way. I swam around for a while, analyzing the situation, and wondering whether to be valiant or discreet. The reef was almost a hundred feet from land, I was by myself, and there was no one on the shore to give me any help. The octopus remained in its hole, providing me with no vital statistics of size and strength on which to base my plans.

  After a while, I decided that Trojan Horse tactics offered the most promising approach to the problem. My seven-foot-long spear, though its only use so far had been as a focusing-aid, was still a useful weapon, and I had no difficulty in impaling a nice two-pound fish that came up incautiously to have a look at me. I could have hit something considerably larger, but that would have been a waste.

  With my victim wriggling on the end of the spear, I swam back to the octopus and dropped the fish on its doorstep. I hardly expected that such an obvious ruse would work—for octopi were supposed to be shy beasts—and was both surprised and delighted when tentacles started to creep coyly out of the cave and wrap themselves round the bait. I could now see that the octopus was about three feet across, and that its body was as large as a coconut. This appeared a reasonable size for a beginner to tackle, but before I got too close it seemed a good idea to test the beast’s strength. It requires very little effort to hold a diver on the bottom, and being drowned by an octopus of this size was a fate too ignominious to bear contemplation.

  When the animal had emerged completely from its hole and enveloped the bait, I began a tug of war. The fish was firmly fixed on the end of the spear, and the barbs prevented the octopus from getting it off. I fully expected that when it encountered opposition, the mollusc would retreat into its lair; to my surprise, it remained outside and prepared to give battle. From time to time I dropped the spear on the sea bed and took a few photographs, then continued to inch the octopus farther and farther away from the safety of its cave.

  When I had succeeded in getting it into the open, I made an interesting discovery. The cave—or rather bur­row—had two entrances, and the right-hand mouth was still occupied by a tangle of tentacles. The octopus had a companion, presumably its mate. I wondered if it would come out and give a hand—or perhaps several—if the con­flict got too one-sided, but it showed no interest in the proceedings at all.

  That was perhaps just as well, for though the octopus I was teasing was small, it was surprisingly strong. When I was tugging at the end of my spear, my breathing tube barely reached the surface of the water when I held the spear at arm’s length, and as there was a fairly rough sea running I could get air only when the trough of a wave happened to pass overhead. I could not exert enough force to pull the octopus away from the rocks to which it was clinging, and neither of us would let go our respective ends of the spear. For a while it seemed an impasse, but the octopus got fed up first and finally relinquished the fish.

  It did not, as might be expected, then retreat to its lair, but remained clinging to the rocks outside, giving me am­ple opportunity to photograph it. As a camouflage expert, it would have taken high honors, for it was very hard to distinguish the creature from the lichen-covered boulders on which it was sitting. From time to time it changed the mottled pattern on its body in order to match its surround­ings, being quite dark when it was in shadow and lighter when it came out into the sun.

  It seemed to have no particular fear of me as I swam round and round waving my camera in its face. Indeed, it began to show signs of annoyance, and started to vibrate to and fro as if working itself up into a lather. This an­noyance communicated itself to me, and my intentions, which had been fairly honorable, began to change. I remembered that the anglers on the island had told me that octopus made the best bait, and I decided to do my bit to cement relations between those fishermen who go underwater and their more effete brethren who stay on top. (Those relations sometimes need improving; I have known charter boats to “bomb” spearmen with their anchors, and not to desist until the aggrieved parties threatened to shoot their guns through the hulls below the water line.)

  “Very well,” I told the angrily undulating mollusc, “if that’s the way you feel about me, you can end up as fish bait.” Thereupon I speared it neatly, and the water promptly filled with a cloud of ink. The ink did not make a very effective smoke screen, for it disappeared almost at once.

  According to all the authorities I had read on the sub­ject, it is a foolish thing to shoot an octopus, since it is likely to climb up your spear and enmesh you in tentacles. I don�
�t think that my victim had much fight left in him, but in case he felt like coming at me I swam rapidly toward the shore, towing the spear behind me. The water resistance kept him safely at arm’s length, and a few minutes later I handed him over to the anglers who, with cries of glee, cut him up as bait for their hooks.

  After lunch I went back to look for the creature’s mate, which was still skulking in its hole. I had no intention of harming the bereaved survivor, but wanted to catch it and bring it back to land so that I could examine it at close quarters. This time, my attempts to spear a fish as bait failed completely; all the fish had now left the area, now that they knew that I could no longer be trusted. After swimming around vainly for thirty minutes, I came across the corpse of my earlier victim, and carried this back to the octopus’ apartment. The animal came out quickly enough, but refused to engage in a tug of war with me and shot back into its cave—taking the fish with it. Eventually I had to prod my spear in the back door until the octopus emerged from the front one, and after some gentle persua­sion I managed to prize it off its rock and start it swimming around. It was a very feeble swimmer, its jet propulsion equipment apparently operating at low efficiency. This was partly due to the fact that it was still carrying the dead— now very dead—fish, which it stubbornly refused to drop until it realized that its position was now serious. Once I had got it into open water, away from any rocks to which it could cling, it was relatively helpless and I was able to shepherd it toward the shore. As soon as we were in shal­low water, I picked it up and carried it onto the beach. It is by no means easy to pick up an octopus, unless it is co­operating. This one was not, and slithered out of my grasp so promptly that it required a positive juggling act to keep it under control.

  I knew that an octopus has a small, parrotlike beak, but was not exactly sure where it kept it. While the animal was sitting on my arm, I felt a sudden sharp prick and hastily prized it loose to find that blood was welling from a small bite. It was no more painful than the stab of a hypodermic needle, but I was very careful to clean the wound thor­oughly. Not long before, a man at Darwin, in the Northern Territory, had died after a bite from a very small octopus. There seems to be some kind of poison associated with the parrot-beak, since crabs attacked by an octopus are quickly paralyzed. When I turned the octopus over, I was just in time to see the beak being retracted into the animal’s mouth, which is situated on the underside of the body at the meeting point of all the tentacles.

  As soon as I had got the beast to shore, I placed it in a bucket of salt water, where it lay panting for breath. This is a perfectly accurate description of its behavior, for it kept squirting water in rhythmic jets from the tube or siphon on the side of its body. At no time, however, did it emit any sepia, as captured octopi sometimes do, nor did it make any serious attempt to climb out of its bucket. It just sat and looked at me with its yellow, strangely intelligent eyes, and made no particular fuss when I picked it up and played with it.

  I kept it for a couple of hours, changing the water frequently, before tipping it back into the sea. It would have been a novel pet to have taken back to the mainland, but hardly a practical one. Could I have trained it to act as a retriever when I went spear fishing, thus solving the ma­jor problem of what to do about injured fish that creep under rocks? I commend the idea to someone with unlim­ited time and patience. . . .

  These two octopi were the only ones of any size that we net during our entire stay in Australia. There must be plenty on the Great Barrier Reef, but we saw no sign of them. And only once did we come across their cousins, the squids, though the porous white cuttlefish “bones” were common enough on the beaches of many of the Reef islands. These animals are in some ways even more inter­esting than the octopus—and they come in considerably larger sizes. A few years ago, Mike was walking along the shore of the Red Sea, near the outpost of Abu Zenima, when he came across a single rotting tentacle lying on the beach with the sea gulls pecking at it. It was devoid of suckers, so it must have been one of the twin arms, ter­minating in grasping palps, which the giant squid whips out to grasp its prey. Holding his nose, Mike paced the tentacle as accurately as he could—and he swears that it was a hundred feet long. If I ever meet this sort of char­acter, I hope it will be at the remote end of a TV circuit.

  It was at Bowen Island that I almost achieved another ambition—that of going for a swim among porpoises. Every evening, just before dusk, a small school of these delightful mammals would go gamboling across the little bay above which our hut was sited. They would be punctual to the minute, and when I had got to know their habits, I made ready one evening to go out and meet them, carrying the camera and a spear just in case they got too playful.

  The sun was almost setting when a couple of curved fins came slicing around the headland, and as quietly as I could I slipped into the water. It was rather gloomy in the failing light, but I could see twenty feet or so. I saw no sign of the animals while I was underwater, but once when I came up for air a sleek, shiny back was breaking the surface fifty feet away. I took a bearing on it, and swam toward it as quickly as I could. At the same moment I heard a curious, high-pitched squeaking noise—a loud squeak followed a fraction of a second later by a fainter one, then the pair repeated after a pause: SQUEAK, squeak. . . . SQUEAK, squeak. . . .It seemed an oddly feeble and ineffectual sort of noise for such a large animal, and I had no doubt that the beasts were “ranging” me by their sonar equipment in exactly the same way as a bat detects obstacles in the air. That regularly repeated pulse with its fainter, answering echo awakened a haunting memory in my mind, but it was not until a long time later that I identified it. I had once heard a recording of a radar transmitter beaming its power out across space and receiving, two and a half seconds later, the returning echo from the Moon. There had been that same insistently repeated double pause; the principle was just the same—only the scale was slightly different.

  Unfortunately, I was not equipped to send back the cor­rect identification signal, and once they had discovered the presence of an unknown body in the neighborhood the porpoises shot off out to sea. When I saw them again they were half a mile away, pirouetting in the last rays of the sun, and there was nothing to do but to creep shivering ashore.

  I have often thought what a pity it was that I arrived in Australia about a hundred years too late to see porpoises and men cooperating in a fashion that would have made a wonderful film sequence. And lest anyone suppose that the following is all a figment of the imagination, they can look it up (if they have access to an unusually good library) in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for 1856, pages 353–4. I quote verbatim from an article concerning the natives of the Moreton Bay area (on the Queensland coast not far from Brisbane).

  Some of the natives may constantly be found during the warmer months of the year fishing for mullet . . . in this pursuit they are assisted in a most wonderful manner by the porpoises. It seems that from time immemorial a sort of understanding has existed between the blacks and the porpoises for their mutual advantage, and the former pretend to know all the porpoises about the spot, and even have names for them.

  The beach here consists of shelving sand, and near the shore are small hillocks of sand, on which the blacks sit, watching for the appearance of a shoal of mullet. Their nets . . . lie ready on the beach. On seeing a shoal, several of the men run down, and with their spears make a peculiar splashing in the water. Whether the porpoises really understand this as a signal, or think it is the fish, it is difficult to determine, but the result is always the same; they at once come in towards the shore, driving the mullet before them. As they near the edge, a number of the blacks with spears and handnets quickly divide to the right and left, and dash into the water. The porpoises being outside the shoal, numbers of the fish are secured before they can break away. In the scene of apparent confusion that takes place, the blacks and porpoises are seen splashing about close to each other. So fearless are the latter that strang­ers, who have expressed do
ubts as to their tameness, have often been shown that they will take a fish from the end of a spear, when held to them.

  Several other independent observers have described this same unique method of fishing, and one adds: “The co­operative principle was so well understood between these fellow adventurers that an unsuccessful porpoise would swim backward and forward on the beach, until a friend from the shore waded out with a fish for him on the end of a spear.”

  Fantastic though these accounts may have appeared to many who read them at the time, they would not surprise anyone who has seen the playful and intelligent porpoises showing off their tricks at such places as Florida’s Mari­neland, or at the Theater of the Sea on the highway to Key West. Porpoises are at least as clever as dogs, and have a much superior sense of humor. As I clambered back over the rocks on Bowen Island, I think those distant dorsal fins gave me a mocking farewell salute as they disappeared into the sunset.

  VII

  In the Wet

  From Sydney to the southernmost of the islands in the Great Barrier Reef is a little matter of eight hundred miles— and the Reef itself stretches northward for twelve hundred miles more. The problem of transporting our heavy equip­ment over such distances was a formidable one, and after much argument we decided that the most practical thing to do was to buy a car and to drive up to Queensland. Not only would we then always have our gear in our own pos­session, but the car would be invaluable at any stopping points on the coast where we might decide to go diving. We planned to go by road to Cairns, about fifteen hundred miles north of Sydney, and the last town of any size along the coast. From there, we calculated, it would be a simple matter to take a boat to Thursday Island, in the Torres Straits, just off the extreme northern tip of the continent. This, as it turned out, was an interesting theory but overlooked a few stubborn facts.