ABSTRACT
Of all the great phenomena of nature explored by Europeans during the voyages of discovery of the late eighteenth century and later, coral reefs were perhaps both the most exotic and the most enigmatic. Massive topographic structures apparently built by the simplest of skeleton-secreting organisms, the questions they posed were geological, geomorphological, zoological, botanical, and philosophical. Reefs came to the attention of the European imagination at a time when older interpretations of nature in terms of the great chain of being were beginning to give way to a more rational and functional understanding of the nature of things. But the sciences which would attempt to solve the mysteries of the reefs had themselves largely to be defined. Coral reefs too were themselves located on the farther limits of the scientific oikumene, generally on alien shores populated by heathens, cannibals, pirates, and (increasingly after 1788) convicted desperadoes of many kinds.
