Detective Fiction Has Nothing on This Victorian-Science Murder Mystery

In the summer of 1893, an unusual volume appeared on the shelves of London booksellers. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities, published by W. H. Allen and Company, was remarkable both for its price—the leather-bound volume would have cost a skilled tradesperson nearly two weeks’ pay—and for its fantastically close observation of the world’s largest reef system.

Many British readers knew of the existence of coral reefs, from the accounts of Charles Darwin and other naturalist-explorers. They might have known that James Cook and his crew had been trapped and nearly died in the labyrinthine “shoals” off the eastern coast of what would become Britain’s most distant colonies. But far fewer grasped that coral reefs were living systems composed of countless tiny, soft-bodied animals; even fewer had any real sense of the squirming, kaleidoscopic grandeur of the Great Barrier Reef. For most of its readers, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia revealed an almost completely unknown world.

At a time when photography was cumbersome and expensive and color photography was little more than a curiosity, the author William Saville-Kent had waded into the Pacific at low tide and, with the help of a specially constructed four-legged stand, had worked out a method of photographing coral colonies from above. The resulting large-format prints were exceptionally clear, and Saville-Kent’s accompanying watercolor sketches suggested the polychromatic glory of a flourishing reef: Pale-violet stony corals, orange sea stars, and crowds of colorful reef fish burst from the pages in preindustrial abundance.

To some of the readers who admired Saville-Kent’s work in 1893, his name might have sounded familiar. He wasn’t a famous naturalist. Was he famous for something else? No matter; although the author had recently returned home to England for a frenzied, year-long bout of specimen identification and writing, he had since sailed back to Australia.

T before the publication of , the mutilated body of a young boy named Saville Kent was discovered on the grounds of an English country house. Three-year-old Saville lived with his family in the village of Rode (then Road), about a hundred miles west of London, and had gone missing from his bedroom in the predawn hours of June 30, 1860. After several hours of frantic searching by his parents, his four older siblings, the household staff, and several neighbors, Saville’s body was found hidden in the servants’