This paper traces changing attitudes to the formation and death of coral reefs from the late-eighteenth century to the recent past. I argue that these shifts were due in large part to changes in the scientific understanding of coral growth that were driven by shifts in the ways in which scientists accessed the ocean. I examine these ideas and their consequences, as indicated by the thoughts and actions of a range of individuals, including naval administrators, navigators, zoologists, geologists, and religious and environmental writers. I contrast the present view of coral reefs as fragile systems with the widespread nineteenth-century notion (exemplified by the 1853 lament by the British geologist Roderick Impey Murchison that “no human power can arrest the growth of [coral] reefs”) that reef growth was inexorable and undesirable. I argue that these alternate perspectives embody the two extremes of a shift from interpreting organic/ecological complexity as a sign of resiliency to understanding “delicate” complexity as a mark of fragility. I conclude by attending to the relatively new concept of the “death” of a reef, arguing that this description (or metaphor) was linked not only to environmentalist concerns of the late-twentieth century but to SCUBA and the other technologies that helped their users in the flourishing practice of marine biology to equate the reef with its actively growing portion rather than with the entire (mostly dead) geological reef structure.