Coral was used variously as jewellery, medicine (ground up like mummy-powder) and inlays in cabinet-making. The precious red variety was traded for thousands of years without anyone being able to say precisely what it was. It was found in the sea, certainly, but fishermen and dealers were studiedly vague in order to protect their source. It presented a problem in the eighteenth century, however, since with the development of natural history it finally became necessary to say whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral.
Perversely, it exhibited characteristics of all three. At a time of industrious taxonomy this was unsatisfactory and exasperating. Coral reefs were notorious from the lyrical and often ambivalent accounts of sailors, who could one day view them as luxuriant herbaceous borders of surpassing delicacy and beauty, and the next as the most treacherous threat the tropical oceans could offer, ready at the first sign of a dozing lookout to tear the bottom out of a ship. The imagery used to describe reefs reflected this ambivalence; it also reflected confusion about the substance being dealt with. Horticultural images were common, and R. M. Ballantyne’s view of a reef in his novel The Coral Island (1858) as a sublime rock garden was by then almost a cliché, one of the two commonest ways of seeing coral. The other, somewhat later, was to view it as architecture. A reef was a fantastical cityscape, habitation for King Neptune and his courtiers (that is, when they were not housed in an Atlantean version of this kingdom, whose style tended towards Hollywood Athenian). Perhaps certain illustrations of science-fiction cities, in their lack of any unifying architectural style and their proliferation of bizarre organic shapes, derive ultimately from the iconography of reefs.
Until about 1750 zoophytes – that is, plant-like organisms such as anemones – were classified as vegetable. The very terminology (animal-plant) reflected uncertainty. At that time ‘the animal’ was distinguished from the other class of living creatures as having the capacity to move at will from place to place. It was a long while before the agents responsible for coral were identified as zoophytes; but when they were, many saw them as vegetable since, like marine plants, they were attached to the substrate by disc or tubular fibres. What was more, the branching arms of coral looked convincingly arborescent.
This classification was challenged by mineralogists. They argued that many zoophytes were hard and stony, a description which fitted no known plant. Clearly they were rocks, made of calcareous and clayey sediments ‘moulded into the figures of trees and mosses by the motion of the waves, by crystallisation, by the incrustation of real fuci [seaweeds] or by some imagined vegetative power in brute matter’.* It was not for nothing that many reef-building corals became known generically as ‘madrepores’ or mother of stone.
The animal theory had its supporters, too. According to one of its proponents, Dr Vitaliano Donati, the ‘stone’ of coral was not stone at all, but bone. ‘I am now of the opinion, that coral is nothing else than a real animal, which has a very great number of heads. I consider the polypes of coral as the heads of the animal. This animal has a bone ramified in the shape of a shrub. This bone is covered with a kind of flesh, which is the flesh of the animal.’† It is an ingenious and eccentric idea. An animal in the shape of a shrub is – if nothing else – the exact opposite of topiary, and suitable for a zoological garden.
When reviewing these conflicting theories one might imagine the issue could have been settled once and for all by any naturalist spending a few hours with a good microscope. Yet a certain Henry Baker, in his book Employment for the Microscope (1753), could only see evidence for corals as mineral. According to him they were accretions of salts leached out of nearby rocks by seawater and bonding themselves chemically to ‘the calcareous and saline particles’ of the water. At the same moment a London merchant named John Ellis began to use his microscope and came to different conclusions. Ellis was typical of a very English breed, the amateur naturalist, which was to flourish so valuably in the nineteenth century. Men with under-used intelligences and hours to fill would turn their attention to the fledgling sciences where there was still an immense amount of basic taxonomic work to be done, work which any dedicated amateur in quest of knowledge could perfectly well do. Country parsons were particularly given to this sort of hobby and alone accomplished field work and classification in a dozen disciplines including meteorology, geology, entomology, botany and ornithology. In addition to attending lectures at the Royal Society, Ellis, too, had a hobby. This was making miniature landscapes on sheets of paper with a collage of delicate fragments of seaweed and corallines. The more he used coral the more he wondered what it really was, finally putting it under his microscope. In 1752 he addressed the Royal Society, announcing ‘that these apparent plants were ramified animals, in their proper skins or cases, not locomotive, but fixed to shells of oysters, mussels, &c., and to Fucus’s’.*
Carl Linnaeus, the celebrated Swedish naturalist and father of modern taxonomy, was impressed by Ellis’s work but nevertheless decided that zoophytes occupied a classificatory niche of their own ‘between vegetables and animals: vegetables with respect to their stems, and animals with respect to their florescence’. Ellis would have none of this and wrote to the great man that he could not reconcile himself to ‘vegetating animals’. He had a powerful sense of how things might partake of the characteristics of other things without fundamentally changing their nature. ‘Artful people,’ he wrote to Linnaeus, ‘may puzzle the vulgar, and tell us that the more hairy a man is, and the longer his nails grow, he is more of a vegetable than a man who shaves his hair or cuts his nails; that frogs bud like trees, when they are tadpoles; and caterpillars blossom into butterflies …’†
In the mid-eighteenth century the Royal Society in London was to some extent the international arbiter of such things, and Ellis’s view won more and more endorsement as correct. Many of the naturalists of the period had tried burning corals and found they obtained much the same smells and residues as from burning animal products such as skin, hair and bones. This seemed conclusive. After Ellis there was broad agreement that zoophytes, including corals and sponges, were indeed animal though there were some who, with Linnaeus, hedged their bets by preferring to think of them as ‘intermediate beings partaking of a twofold nature’.*
This version of the dispute over corals turns out to be a very Anglophile account, implying as it does that it was all a matter of a handful of Britons working more or less in isolation. Such is not the case. Recent research makes clear it was a subject much discussed elsewhere in Europe a good half-century earlier, especially in France and Italy.† It reveals that it was actually a Frenchman, J.-A. Peyssonnel, who first identified the living part of corals as animal. In 1706 the Italian Luigi-Fernando Marsigli arrived in the French town of Montpellier, where he found ‘a thriving scientific community, serving the ancient university with its famous school of medicine and botanic gardens, a school of hydrography, and a Jesuit college’.‡ Having collected corals, he performed all kinds of experiments on them. He would take branches home and put them in seawater of the same temperature as at the depth where they had been taken. The next morning he found them covered in little white flowers. He took the branches out of the water and the flowers vanished again. He put them back and they reappeared. Over the next few months Marsigli experimented with adding different reagents to the water to see what effect they had on the flowers. Excited by this discovery, he evidently cannot have known that the concept of the ‘flowers’ of coral was already familiar and had actually been illustrated in a medical treatise five years earlier. There, the author had thought coral was a marine stone which somehow grew.
In 1724 the son of a French friend of Marsigli’s became interested in these coral flowers and called on him. Jean-André Peyssonnel repeated all the older man’s experiments together with some of his own. His findings convinced him that what everybody thought of as a flower was actually ‘un insecte’ like a little octopus. He wrote a letter to the Académie des Sciences which was never published but whose ideas were later addressed by Réaumur and demolished in the lofty fashion of a grandee confronting the work of a junior. Réaumur declared that ‘what Peyssonnel had taken for animals living in a habitat of their own creation, analogous to the wax combs of bees, were merely insects infesting the coral stems … Réaumur himself believed coral to have a dual nature – a vegetable “bark” growing on a stony core.’* Snubbed, Peyssonnel waited until 1751 when he sent a copy of his Traité du Corail to the Royal Society in London. This was translated and extracts published in 1752, the year John Ellis addressed the Society with his own theory of corals being ‘ramified animals’. Peyssonnel had anticipated him by thirty years.
The idea that corals were not colonial invertebrates but a strange hybrid species lingered for a long time, and even the authoritative George Johnston a century later dissented with this view of sponges because they lacked polyps. He asserted they were plants and quoted in his support a certain Professor Owen writing in the Lancet: ‘If a line could be drawn between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, the sponges should be placed upon the vegetable side of that line. Locomotion could be no proof of animality; for it was well known that the sporules of some cryptogamic plants possessed very perfectly the power of motion.’† Even in the twentieth century some people still found the living – let alone animal – nature of corals hard to accept. Vice-Admiral Boyle Somerville records an instance when crew members of HMS Penguin, ordered to take soundings in the Kermadec Deep near Tonga, became obsessed with the beauty of some reef formations and went to great lengths to snap off and bring back several large chunks as souvenirs. These were winched aboard the ship under the indulgent eye of the skipper (who had actually been in the old Challenger in the 1870s) and young Lt. Somerville. There is no indication that either of these men knew any better, and they seemed as surprised and disillusioned as their crewmen when after twenty-four hours in the ship’s hold the corals sent a stench of putrefaction throughout the vessel.* No doubt even today tourists by the thousand make the same error.
Susan Schlee suggests disarmingly that part of the reason why so many nineteenth-century oceanographers were fascinated by corals was that most of them came from cold, wet, northern climates and coral reefs are largely found in balmy, tropical and subtropical latitudes.† Once it was agreed that corals were animals, there was a new problem to be addressed, itself a promising field of research. This was, how could atolls have grown from the deep seabed when the reef-building polyps could not survive below about 200 feet? There was a suggestion that maybe they built on the lip around the craters of undersea volcanoes, but that left geology with the task of explaining how there could be so many volcanoes of nearly identical height, all of them conveniently reaching to within 100 feet of the sea’s surface.
There are three main kinds of coral reef: barrier, fringing and atoll. A barrier reef generally follows the coastline, often at a considerable distance, converting the sea between it and the shore to a shallow lagoon. A fringing reef is more like an extension of the land, and in place of a lagoon tends to have flats which may become partly exposed at low tide. An atoll resembles a roughly circular barrier reef, sketchily enclosing a lagoon. Even before the Beagle visited the only coral atoll of its voyage Darwin had evolved an elegant theory to explain how a coral atoll might be formed. He thought the process he described would apply equally well to barrier and fringing reefs since although the disposition of nearby land might be different, the principle had to be the same because of the constraints governing the life cycle of coral polyps. He took for granted the truth of three assumptions: that corals needed warm shallow water in order to flourish, that parts of the Earth’s crust were sinking at a very slow rate, and that corals could grow upwards at least as fast as their substrate sank. The idea must have come to him as a result of finding marine fossils in the high Andes, of realising how portions of the Earth’s crust had in the past undergone considerable vertical movement and knowing there was no reason to think this process had stopped. This by itself was a radical idea at the time, as we know from the controversy Charles Lyell’s geological theories had provoked.
Darwin proposed a volcanic island poking up out of the sea to whose shallow inshore waters coral larvae drifted, forming colonies. In time these colonies merged and became a fringing reef more or less surrounding the island. The island itself, meanwhile, was sinking and obliged the corals to build upwards so as to remain in shallow water. Since the island was cone shaped it shrunk as it sank, producing an ever-widening lagoon around itself. The innermost corals, now cut off from the constant supply of nutrients in the open sea, grew no more, so that when the peak of the island finally disappeared it left a lagoon roughly surrounded by a ring of coral whose outer edge might extend straight downwards to a great depth as successive generations of polyps had built on their defunct predecessors. In this way, the coral ring of an atoll marked the original outline of a vanished island.
This neat theory of Darwin’s was contested, notably by the Scottish oceanographer John Murray. After the sudden death in 1882 of Charles Wyville Thomson, who had led the Challenger expedition in the 1870s, Murray took over the job of publishing the expedition’s immense report. He had been on the Challenger himself and was very struck by the sediment samples which revealed far greater precipitation than he had imagined. He now thought Darwin’s theory too complicated and too dependent on crustal movement. Instead, he proposed that the calcareous remains of plankton, falling on undersea mountains in a steady drizzle over the millennia, built up a layer of compacted sediment reaching to within 200 feet of the surface, at which point the coral larvae started their colonies. In order to explain the atoll’s characteristic shape Murray somewhat weakly suggested that this was simply the normal pattern of growth for coral colonies. Trees grew into tree shapes, corals into atolls.
In order to settle the dispute, scientists visited the Great Barrier Reef and the Maldives (where the word ‘atoll’ came from) at about the turn of the century, but the results of their researches were inconclusive. It was obviously going to be necessary to bore straight down into a reef and take core samples. If these turned out to consist of dead coral, Darwin would be vindicated; if it was sediment, Murray. HMS Penguin (without Boyle Somerville on board) sank some holes and the findings seemed to support Darwin, but they were challenged by champions of Murray’s theory who claimed the results were false because coral fragments had fallen down the borehole as it was being dug.
The problem was not finally solved until after the defeat of Japan in 1945. Suddenly the United States found itself in possession of hundreds of scattered coral islands and atolls which had formerly belonged to the Japanese Mandate. Needing somewhere isolated to test nuclear weapons, the US searched its new trust territories and hit upon the Marshall Islands. At that point a serious investigation was made of the underlying geology, in the course of which scientists took core samples from deep borings. In Eniwetok and Bikini atolls they went down to over 4,000 feet and found it to be solid coral all the way to the basaltic bedrock, interspersed with strata containing the fossils of land snails and pollen which showed that the island’s generally downward progress had been interrupted from time to time by violent upheavals which had brought it back above sea level for a few millennia. Darwin’s theory was essentially, if belatedly, proved correct.
Since then it has become clear that many reefs (including the Great Barrier) are formed in ways rather more complicated than Darwin’s simple schema. In 1919 the American geologist Reginald Daly proposed that glaciation during ice ages would have had just as much effect on corals in terms of their growth and erosion as geological sinking. Current anxiety over global warming and the projected rise in sea levels has revived Daly’s ideas, and in places like the Maldives it should soon become apparent to what extent changes in sea level mediate the formation of coral reefs.
*
The centuries-long dispute about the nature of coral is rendered neither obsolete nor irrelevant by modern science. True, there is no longer any doubt about the organisms responsible for reef building and – broadly – how they do it. At levels of biochemical detail, however, there is still much to learn. Most reef-building corals, for example, exist in symbiosis with microscopic algae. A single coral polyp looks very like a miniature anemone, its close relative. It has rings of stinging tentacles surrounding a mouth, all of which is able to contract defensively into its stalk. Living within its tissues are the algae which among other things perform photosynthesis and fix nutrients for their host. More than that, the algae enable the polyp to secrete stone. This is a most remarkable attribute and brings a certain accuracy to the old name ‘madrepore’. Since algae able to photosynthesise are considered plants there arises the peculiar arrangement whereby a plant and an animal combine to produce a mineral – in this case pure limestone. The chemistry by which this is done is not yet entirely understood. There is great complexity in the way these symbionts interact both with each other and with the nutrients in the seawater, with varying temperature, degrees of salinity (fresh water is fatal to corals, which is why fringing reefs are always broken at river mouths), with currents and with light. Not the least striking part of a coral reef’s equivocation, therefore, is that it imprisons at its heart a gigantic plant, while on its surface and slopes there may be few marine plants visible since herbivores such as surgeon fish and sea urchins constantly graze seaweeds back to their roots.
The swimmer among reefs likes to know such things, likes to shine torches into cracks and crevices, takes pleasure in seeing a tube worm sense his presence (smell? sound? shadow?) and retract in a flash, takes pleasure also in knowing the worm ate its tunnel into the coral limestone by secreting acid. It is not only in details that we experience reefs, though, any more than we experience a forest by examining leaves and marvelling at processes of gas exchange. Both reefs and forests may be studied closely but are experienced as environments. So viewed, coral reefs are true borderlands, abounding in all sorts of ambiguity. Many of these ambiguities are set up by the classificatory systems which have been used to make sense of phenomena that refuse their assigned niches. The swimmer who daily goes down among corals to watch and listen soon becomes aware of something in this rich profusion which corresponds to the so-called ‘dark matter’ postulated by astronomers to account for there not being enough visible matter in the universe to satisfy theory. (In this sense ‘dark matter’ can be viewed as the astronomical equivalent of the vanishing islands of the North Atlantic.) The ‘dark matter’ in reefs is the subject of the second part of this chapter; it is enough for now to point out that any form of classification, merely by drawing an imaginary border between two groups of objects, spurts into sudden being a third space as real as the counterbalanced pole which marks the frontier between two countries but is not in either one. Merely to propose that A is not B automatically brings a third coordinate into play, the offspring of wherever it is one stands in order to dispense categories, and which partakes of both A and B. All liminalities belong entirely to the mind, and we are perverse if we expect the objective world to keep to our categories.
At the moment the whole corpus of Linnaean taxonomy is in dispute as radically new ways of grouping creatures are proposed. The way we view the natural world is unconsciously influenced by our received picture of a stylised evolutionary tree which over the past 200 years has become steadily more ramous and bushy as efforts are made to graft fresh discoveries on to the existing trunk and limbs. Changing this schema would have an interesting effect. There is no serious question that some form of Darwinism is the best model we have of how things evolve, but there is much doubt about traditional notions of the relationships between them. Modern taxonomy has to confront the possibility that the hypothesis of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’, the putative mother of the entire human race, may eventually become elevated to a theory by advances in genetics. The category of species, the lowest classification of all, is under constant pressure not only from modern fieldwork but from palaeontological evidence like that of the Burgess Shale.* Maybe coral polyps will one day find themselves in an entirely new category (or back in an old one) of plant-animals, now based on something like ways of dealing with nitrogen.
Vladimir Nabokov, who was once simultaneously the Curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard and Professor of Literature at Cornell, said of writing that ‘the precision of the artist should accompany the passion of the scientist’. This is an admirable recipe for swimming among reefs, where details must be avidly noticed but never seen in isolation. Modern entomology no longer distinguishes between moths and butterflies (Nabokov’s particular interest), the classification having been deemed too arbitrary to be meaningful. All those Victorian clergymen, earnestly sorting knobbed antennae from feathered antennae and mildly put out to discover day-flying moths, were making distinctions which have turned out not to be taxonomically useful after all; except that no discrimination is ever wasted in either science or art since all interest derives ultimately from the ability to spot difference.
*
A reef project (how full the world is of reef projects!) was under way a few years ago off the coast of Kuyo Island. At the time I was living on an islet in the same group. On a visit to town I met Jim Parkes, who had until recently been a Peace Corps volunteer, had since gone away and returned with a technical qualification and was now seconded to the Bureau of Fisheries. He took me some miles to a dismal scene. Offshore was a typical fringing reef which at low tide became a flat, extending maybe 200 metres to a white line of surf. Ordinarily it would have been an expanse of puddles and small pools at low tide, dotted with boulders and slimy with liver-coloured blobs of this and that. One would have expected to see groups of villagers, mainly children, with tins and plastic bags, going through the tidal pools for edibles: shells, baby octopus, blennies and gobies. Instead, the reef was a destruction site. A new causeway of blinding white coral chips led out to the middle where a yellow excavator stood up to its axles in seawater, fanged bucket plunging and rising, disgorging a rubble of water and corals into the back of a truck.
‘We’ve got a problem here,’ said Jim. Up to then I had not especially liked him but was now won over by this unsuspected laconic talent, for the scene was one of ruin made ironic by its backdrop of a tour operator’s tropical idyll. A long white beach stretched in a curve backed by coco palms, all done in the three primary colours of holiday brochures (blue sea, white sand, green fronds) whose baldness in print never hints at the possibility of considerable subtlety. ‘What we’ve got is a company mining coral for construction and a fishing community without any fish. And a mayor up for re-election.’
The coral had been mined here for some years before the heavy machinery came. Men with crowbars had levered out chunks which buffalo hauled away on crude sleds. Coral could be crushed and spread as a gravel bed for roads, or roughly dressed could be used for building in place of the ubiquitous hollow blocks. ‘Labour’s cheap, cement costs,’ as Jim remarked. ‘Now, the gentleman who owns the rig and the truck is a local who sort of inherited them from a government project to build a road around the island. That failed from lack of funds and equipment, largely because they were all embezzled or stolen in the first month. I’ve got this congressman friend in Manila who has his own reasons for not wanting the beaches of this island ruined. … No, you don’t want to know about it, believe me. … So although he doesn’t realise it yet, within a week or two this guy with the ’dozer’s going to get zapped by Presidential Decree number twenty-eight thousand three hundred and eleventy-six which forbids the destruction of the foreshore owing to the fact that it’s national property. Problem is, what to do with the remains.’
About half a mile of immediate reef had been destroyed, the topmost 4 feet having been stripped out. One consequence was that the corals on the surviving outer slope were visibly suffering since the outgoing tide was now bringing with it none of the nutrients and planktonic matter generated by corals inshore. Jim and I swam up the reef and he showed me a further effect of the excavations. There were powerful currents on this coast, in some places running almost parallel to it. Lowering this reef flat by a mere 4 feet had caused a neighbouring bay to be scoured of its sand which the current was dumping over adjoining reefs, smothering them. Local fishermen had been driven on to reefs further along the coast, leading to friction with those already there, to overfishing and the increasing use of dynamite in an attempt to make up for smaller catches. This in turn destroyed corals which led. …
‘You get the picture,’ said Jim. ‘It’s bad wherever it happens but they’re doing this sort of thing even in the Maldives, which has to be cutting their own throats. The highest point in that country’s about 2 metres above sea level, and since it’s all coral there’s nothing else to use for building. Probably the best thing there would be to earmark an entire atoll for excavation and ban it everywhere else. As it is, when you remove coral piecemeal, like here, it’s hard to see the end of the knock-on effect. Last week a fisherman was killed about 5 miles down the coast. Dynamite. Got the fuse wrong, took off his arm and half his head. OK, you can say that was his fault, it was his choice to go fooling about with gin bottles packed tight with fertiliser. On the other hand you could say he might never have done it if it hadn’t been for this thieving dickhead here.’
Our swim had revealed something else about the surviving corals on the seaward slope, which was that they were showing the first signs of bleaching. This is a condition which happens when the polyps eject their symbiotic algae. Since it is the algae which give polyps their colour (true corals produce pure limestone, which is white) the corals blanch, the polyps becoming no more than a milky slime on their surface. It is not yet known why bleaching occurs, only that it is probably a sign of stress. There may be no unitary cause. The polyps can recover spontaneously or die, in which case the corals often turn green as their skeletons are colonised by ordinary algae. It is unsettling to swim along a reef slope and see among the profusion of coral species the bone-white beginnings of blight, a marine leprosy mysterious and as yet patchy. It conveys only that something is wrong and likely to become worse, that everything is more poised on an edge than one knows.
A few days later I was in the middle of the small island, inside the belt of coconuts and among the paddies and fields of peanuts. Behind the last plantations rose an abrupt low cliff of dark grey rock from which grew creepers and swags of greenery, an escarpment topped with uneven patches of forest. It was evidently from this miniature lost world that each evening the great fruit-eating bats flew out, many of them spanning more than a metre, to descend on the cultivated coastal belt. There they fed on papayas and drank the palm sap being tapped to make toddy. The cliff was no more than 100 feet high, generally less, and was made of fossil coral. Everywhere were the regular patterns of polyp colonies, the dimplings, pores and stars of tiny stone-secreting animals whose labour had built entire islands as well as the Great Barrier Reef, the biggest single structure on Earth. At some time in the past the flat top of this island where I stood among the tamarinds and cashews had lain beneath a shallow sea rippled with sunlight and thronged with blue devils and fuseliers like chips of sapphire. Having sunk and then risen it was presumably now sinking once more. It was difficult to make sense of such geological eras because the inconceivable slabs of time could briefly be prised apart and wedged open by rudimentary arithmetic. If corals could grow at the rate of an inch a year, which under optimum conditions they can, then this entire escarpment might only have taken 1,200 years to lay down – say from the time of Beowulf to the present. A mere nothing, really.
Why, then, could it not be dismantled again? If people needed building materials it made more sense to break up dead coral deposits than to destroy live reefs supporting a complex local ecology which included many hundreds of villagers. I put this point to Jim but he said fossil coral was far harder than recently formed limestone. The outside might appear friable, but that was just weathering; inside it was like granite. I did not know if this was true. At any rate the idea came to nothing and one was left with the sense of a gross imbalance. It seemed abysmally crude to smash up a construction of microscopic architecture in order to build other structures of a coarseness grotesque in comparison. What, then, was Jim’s ‘project’ if not merely to stop the mining of coral?
‘Re-establishing fish, naturally,’ he said. ‘Or unnaturally.’
The best thing to do was simply to leave the hacked substrate alone for a century or two, by which time and with any luck new corals would have established themselves. Sure, said Jim, the best thing so long as you had an alternative source of food. Hadn’t I got the idea yet? This business wasn’t particularly to do with corals, it was to do with fish and, eventually, with votes. If I tried thinking of the fishermen as farmers, then these reefs were their fields. Plough up a field without re-sowing it and you’d get nothing but a crop of weeds.
I supposed so. The truth is, remedial work bores me. If one is a fatalist one believes that once something needs to be restored, to be caught and fought for on the edge of extinction, then in a sense it is already gone, has already been lost in the form that had meaning. It is a pleasing irony that any revivalism, like life support, always suggests demise and not survival. Why should this be? And does it mean that someone who recovers after terrible injuries and weeks of intensive care is no longer authentic? At any rate, Jim’s solution was to create an artificial reef out of old truck tyres. He was going to take delivery any day now of several hundred tons and dump them all over the ruined reef. It was, he said, an experiment which would be watched closely in many parts of the world. If it worked it would solve two major problems at once, since up to now nobody had found any use for old tyres except maybe as fenders on wharves. Tyres would make terrific habitats for reef fish because if dumped higgledy-piggledy they formed an elaborate honeycomb of holes and crannies for shelter. After a time they would become encrusted with marine growths and maybe eventually even corals would take root and start building. In the meantime they would be colonised by fish.
By now I had grown quite fond of him despite his stainless-steel faith in remedies and projects and even – quite possibly – in progress, too. But away from Jim I found myself caring only slightly that well-meaning, busy people like him should succeed in their tasks. I knew all about the fishermen but saw no reason for not holding contradictory views at one and the same time. It is not possible to balance an equation between aesthetics and somebody’s livelihood. They have nothing to say to each other. As far as I was concerned the dumping of a shipload of old lorry tyres into a man-made gap in a fringing reef was adding insult to injury. If the equation were to be solved equitably it would entail the agents of the damage paying its victims compensation for as long as it took the corals and fish to re-establish themselves. Jim said I was a drivelling idealist, flitting about the world like a disdainful butterfly irresistibly attracted to decay, content merely to feed off it rather than do something about it. I warmed to him still further, saying he was an excellent judge of character. Butterflies do not believe in the efficacy of doing, but they definitely are fond of flitting and feeding and drivelling. We bought each other a series of drinks until the Mayor who would be mayor again came in and began a lengthy discussion of arrastre or lighterage fees for unloading hundreds of tons of perished rubber.
* George Johnston, A History of the British Zoophytes, 2nd edn (London, 1847).
† V. Donati, Phil. Trans. (1757) abridg., xi, p. 83.
* John Ellis, Essay on the Corallines of Great Britain (1755), Introduction.
† Linnaeus, Correspondence (1821).
* Johnston, A History of the British Zoophytes (1847).
† See Anita McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral – Some Unpublished Conflicts from Montpellier and Paris during the Early 18th Century’, Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 12 (1990), pp. 51–66.
‡ McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral’.
* See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1990).