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January 8, 2008
THE
JAMAICA SUB AQUA CLUB:
Presented at the 50th Anniversary
of the JSAC The Jamaica Sub Aqua Club was not only the first overseas branch of the British Sub Aqua Club, it was also the first diving club anywhere in the tropics. Since I am the only person at the 50th Anniversary who was present at the original founding meeting at Morgan’s Harbour in Port Royal, I wanted to focus on its origin and early history. This was unique because the Club did not begin as club of diving hobbyists. It started as an outgrowth of the first scientific marine research using what we called Aqua Lungs in those days, now commonly called SCUBA tanks. Modern underwater diving research was pioneered here in Jamaica, and for decades we led the world in it. The origin of the JSAC was an outgrowth of these research efforts. The story begins in 1946, oddly enough not in Jamaica but in Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands of the Central Pacific. After the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ended the Second World War and people there had died from nuclear radiation, there was still no understanding of the medical and biological effects of nuclear radiation, so the US military decided to do experiments to find out what the effects really were. They summarily expelled all the native islanders from their homeland (they are still refugees more than 60 years later because their ancestral homeland remains uninhabitable from radioactivity). The navy moored several derelict ships damaged during the war in the centre of the lagoon, and dropped an atom bomb on them. To see what the effects would be, they used sacrificial rats, lambs, goats, and their own military personnel in boats and on the islets at various distances from the blast. To document the medical effects they chose the world’s most famous scientific photographer, Fritz Goreau (who used the professional name F. W. Goro). He was the natural choice because he was the staff science photographer at LIFE Magazine, and known there as “the Atomic Photographer” because he had long specialized in photographing the research that led to the atom bomb, and had been at the first atom bomb blast, not as journalist, but as part of the Physics Team. This was carried out at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1944 to see if a bomb could be made that could serve as a weapon. He photographed ground zero as soon as the ground was cold enough to walk on. Like all the top military and scientific experts, he was “protected” by wearing nothing more than linen socks over his shoes, because the effects of nuclear radiation were basically unknown at the time. The death of thousands of Japanese victims of radiation poisoning made it clear that there were impacts that had been ignored, which needed to be understood before the bomb was used again, hence the Bikini Bomb “Tests”. These blasts made such impact on the public mind that when soon afterwards the French invented two-piece women’s bathing suits, with explosive effects on male psyches, they named them after the previously unknown Pacific atoll. Fritz Goreau photographed sailors holding their hands in front of their faces to protect themselves from the blast (they saw the bones in their hands like X-Rays despite tightly shut eyes), the horrific tumors and cancers that quickly formed in the sacrificial animals on the ships anchored in the lagoons, and images of reef fish taken by their own radiation. But what he found most fascinating were the coral reefs and the wonderful creatures living in them, and he longed to dive and photograph them underwater. His major scientific advisor was his son, Tom, who at that time was simultaneously a medical student pursuing his MD while doing a PhD in ecology, in two different universities in two separate cities hundreds of miles apart. As an undergraduate student, Tom had become one of the top experts in the physiology of respiration, because his university had gotten one of the first Warburg machines to measure tissue metabolism, and he was the only one there who could figure out how to use it for fundamental medical research. The following year, in 1947, Tom Goreau went to Bikini, as the chemist and biologist to the second experimental atomic bomb test. There he made the first measurements of the metabolism of whole coral reef ecosystems, and was the person who dived into the radioactive waters to collect the scientific specimens of corals, fish, and other marine organisms. At that time Aqua Lungs were a military secret, used by navy “frogmen” to attach explosives to enemy ships, and had never been used for marine scientific research. Tom immediately began to build his own rebreathers, and by 1948 he and Fritz tested them in Bimini, the Bahamas, where they took the first high quality underwater photographs. Underwater photographs had been made before, but they were of very poor quality, and these were the first sharp images that allowed people to see marine life in all its glory. By 1950 Fritz had taken Tom’s rebreather and his home made underwater camera housings to the Great Barrier Reef, where his spectacular color photographs of coral reef life, published in Life Magazine, first brought the full beauty of underwater life to the public. In 1951 Tom moved to Mona, Jamaica, where he joined the new medical faculty of the University of the West Indies, and brought his home-made rebreather to start exploring the reefs. For years he dived alone, mainly in Long Bay, Portland, in the Port Royal Cays, in Ocho Rios, in Montego Bay, and at Don Christopher’s Cove in St. Mary. His work was the first systematic diving scientific exploration of any marine habitat in the world, and he quickly learned the habits of all the creatures of the reef, writing not only the first descriptions of how reef organisms were zoned by depth, but also pioneering studies of their ecology, behavior, and physiology, single-handedly making Jamaica the world’s leader in tropical marine research. As the fame of his unique underwater explorations spread, a small group of adventurous swimmers began to collect around him, people who also wanted to explore the mysterious underwater world more closely. The US Navy gave him some surplus aqua lungs, so he began to train other people in their use, using his expertise as a top medical authority in the physiology of breathing and respiration. His purpose was to train people to help him with his diving research. Many of those who joined the first group were former Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots, who after the war had become engineers and for one reason or other got jobs in Jamaica, and appreciating adventure, were fascinated by diving. They had been trained to be extremely acute observers during the war, in order to fly over enemy territory, recall every detail of what they saw, and then describe targets precisely to the bomber crews that followed them. Tom realized that they could provide completely accurate accounts of what they had seen, and were a great boon to him in describing and mapping the deep reefs all along the Jamaican coast. The first training exercises were carried out in Cow Bay, St. Thomas, because the sloping bottom allows you to go to any depth and still have bottom beneath you. We would go there every weekend, as the first trainees gradually developed their skills to go deeper and deeper. Once Tom was sure of their skills, the training locale then switched to Blue Hole in Portland. This was the famous “bottomless” Blue Hole, and very strange diving because once one goes through the very cold surface freshwater pouring out of the springs, one is immersed in warm salt water that is completely empty of life. The reason for this, as I found out 40 years later, is that these waters have no oxygen, and so nothing but certain bacteria can live there. Weekend after weekend Tom led the group in controlled stages deeper and deeper down into the eerie depths of the Blue Hole. It was at that stage that the Jamaica Sub Aqua Club was formed, as the first overseas branch of the British Sub Aqua Club, with the opening meeting in Morgan’s Harbour, Port Royal. This had only recently been expanded with the building of the bar and the saltwater swimming area, next door to where Tom and his wife Nora had founded the original Port Royal Marine Laboratory in an old abandoned warehouse, now long destroyed. Tom had no interest in running the club, so he took the post of Diving Officer, to make sure that the training was done to the highest medical standards, and left the leadership of the Club to Stan Downton, one of the former RAF pilots, who left Jamaica soon after. Soon after the forming of the JSAC Tom went to England on academic sabbatical, where he did research at Cambridge, Oxford, and London, and formed firm links with the British Sub Aqua Club. After his return, three months later, Tom led the first JSAC team to the bottom of Blue Hole, which he found to be 185 feet deep. Soon after this, the JSAC and Tom’s research agenda began to move in different directions. Several years before JSAC had formed, Tom had written management plans for Marine Protected Areas in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay. Instead of protecting these reefs, the first in the world to be described by diving, the government ignored the protection efforts and authorized their complete destruction by dredging for tourism and port facilities. Many of the members of the JSAC were only interested in spearfishing using aqualungs. When Tom had been the only diver in Jamaica, every reef had a huge Jewfish, the largest of the groupers, at the bottom. They were 400 or 500 pounds, curious and friendly, would always be there, and would come up to you on every dive. Some of the divers Tom trained went back with spearguns, and in very short order wiped them all out, all around Jamaica. We have never seen them again. And that was only the start of the destruction of the finest reefs of the Caribbean, to the point that what we now have is an unrecognizable wasteland to the few of us left alive who still remember how it used to be, as in some of my father’s photographs from the early 1950s that I will show you soon. These show a lost world that has vanished without trace. By 1960 Tom’s efforts moved to establishing the Discovery Bay Marine Lab in St; Anns, which was to become the world’s leading center for coral reef research, and his efforts moved to the north coast, too far away to be convenient for the Kingston-based sport divers. So shortly after it was formed, specifically in order to aid scientific research of coral reefs, the scientific efforts diverged, and the JSAC became the fundamentally recreational diving club that it still is, with a unique and remarkable history to be proud of.
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