May 31, 2014 — When Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, snared on coral in 1770, the Great Barrier Reef became his “labyrinth of shoals”, a life-threatening trap. About 30 years later, Matthew Flinders, a British navigator, saw the reef in a different light.
Flinders is best known for circumnavigating Australia, and for giving the continent its name. Less well known is that he was the first European to discover the reef for its beauty. To Flinders, its corals were a “new creation” with shapes “excelling in grandeur the most favourite parterre of the curious florist”. For Charlie Veron, a scientist who has seen more of the corals from underwater than anyone, the legacy after two centuries of human impact casts a more chilling sight. Watching the reef’s disintegration, and perhaps its extinction, is “like seeing a house on fire in slow motion”.
Iain McCalman, a historian at the University of Sydney, has written a masterly biography of the Great Barrier Reef through 12 stories like these. The idea came to him in 2001 when he joined a group of historians, literary scholars, astronomers, botanists and indigenous guides aboard a replica of Cook’s ship to re-enact his 18th-century voyage. Most visitors today see the world’s largest reef as a tourist destination. Mr McCalman found it so vast that no human mind can take it in except, perhaps, “astronauts who’ve seen its full length from outer space”.
Read the full story from The Economist