David R. Stoddart (Fiji, mid 1970s) 
E OF GOOD CHEER, MY EARY READERS, FOR I WAVE ES 
DAVID R. STODDART 
Scholarly and indeed devout readers of the Atoll Resenrch Bzclletln will at once 
recognize my title as a loose translation of an aphorism of Diogenes published in the 
eponymous Nuslzes Lenferz Stzcffe . . by Thomas Nashe in 1599. Pressed to say something 
on the fiftieth anniversary of the journal, which has been so central to the emergence of 
coral reef science as an independent dmipline and in which I have played a part over 
some four decades, I might well paraphrase both Diogenes and Nashe to say, "Life is 
landfalls." This is particularly true for anyone concerned with coral reefs: there is 
always a sense of both relief and anlazemcnt to be back on dry land and to have escaped 
the dangers of the deep. Perhaps more particularly for me, since 1 have made the study 
of the ephemeral sediment accumulations on the top of the reef and the plants and 
animals that came both to espy them and survive on them one of the chief scholarly 
concerns of my life. In this reminiscence I will pretend, as in writing a scientific paper, 
that life's strategy has from the beginning been planned with sagacity, wisdom, and 
common sense. My many companions on reef studies around the world will know that a 
quite different version can readily be written. But then-as they also know-I could do 
the same for them. So let me try to recall some of my salient moments on coral reefs 
around the world and in the emergence of coral reef science as a discipline. 
Why I have always been attracted to foreign lands in general and the tropics in 
particular remains a mysteny. Certainly, during my early life my parents never traveled 
more than 50 miles from the small market and industrial town in northeast England 
where 1 grew up. It was famous for being at one end of the first passenger-carrying 
railways in the world (the Stockton and Darlington Railway) in 1825, as well as the 
home of John Walker, the inventor of the Lucifer match in 1827. My father was a frugal 
and deeply honest man who had served in France and Belgium in biplanes with the 
Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. My mother was a nurse in France at the 
same time. Both their travels were, of course, involuntary. My father, engaged in some 
construction project, later lived for a time in Ekaterinburg in the southern Urals, where 
the Tsar and his family were murdered. It was the beginning of Stalin7s Great Terror, 
when comparable engineers from the British firm of Vickers were seized and put on 
show trial for their counterrevolutionary activities. My father had the wits to get out 
while he could, by taking the train to what had become Leningrad and then back home. 
It was at this euphoric point (and doubtless in consequence of it) that my own 
life began. The family at that time could scarcely be described as comfortably well off. 
Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. 
I t  was the period of the Great Depression: my mother's proudest boast in later years was 
that in contrast to many of her neighbors, her own three children always had shoes on 
their feet. So it came to be that I was born in 1937 and am thus of roughly the same age 
as the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in the area in which I now live. It was also the year 
of the ridiculous introduction of tihizopllom into Moorea from New Caledonia. 
Likewise, it was the year of the disastrous introduction of Mikoinia culvescens to the 
botanic Garden in Tahiti, whence it escaped with utterly devastating consequences for 
the vegetation of the Society Islands. 
One of my earliest menlories was in September 1939 when I reached for a 
kanana in a fruit bowl. y mother said: "170u may as well have it- you will never see 
one again." Why sl~ould that be? Where did it come from'? The next several years were 
strange ones in which to grow up. My father had dug a partly underground air-raid 
shelter in the garden behind the house. I t  was a nightly oceun-ence to be carried into it  in 
the middle of the night; as a special treat, he would let me peek out of the heavy timber 
door at flaming airplanes crashing out of the sky. Occasionally, 1 would be taken to see 
the remains of neighbors' homes demolished in the night. 
My much older brother was in the army. Three times during the war, my parents 
had a telegram pronouncing him "missing, believed dead." Kindly neighbors, I recall, 
assured my mother that once you had one of those they never came back. In fact, on the 
first occasion he had simply fallen asleep on sentry duty while the Army fled during the 
fall of Norway. Then he disappeared at the fall of Tobruk. Later he was in the Long 
Range Desert Group (the Desert Rats) creating havoc far behind enemy lines; he never 
liked to talk of the killing this involved. About once a year, he used to turn up 
unexpectedly at home with extraordinary stories of dare-and-do, together with a 
collection of service revolvers, Gelman naval dress swords and bayonets, and swastika 
flags. Perhaps the only occasion my father was truly cross with me was when I put one 
of the latter outside my bedroom window on VE Day; it is amazing the house was not 
burned to the ground. I still have photographs of Field Marshall Goering that my brother 
had taken from a German corpse. It early became apparent to me that there was a world 
beyond the limited horizon of Stockton-on-Tees. 
There were three excellent schools in our town, two of which were devoted 
entirely to girls. I never knew until years later that one of the founders of the 
International Society for Reef Studies and later its vice-president, Barbara Brown, was a 
pupil at one of them. At the age of 11, I went to the senior of these. It has since been 
razed to the ground but at that time had a quite bizarre collection of deeply memorable 
teachers. It was a turning point in my life that my first geography teacher there was 
Colin Nichols, who had been a student at Fitzwilliam in Cambridge under N. J. G. 
Pounds. It was he who suggested I go to Cambridge (my school had never had a pupil 
go to a great, or perhaps any, university before). My parents were appalled. Cambridge 
was not for the likes of us-we would always be the poor man at the gate-so it was 
laid down in the Church of England Hymnal, and one could not argue with that. I was 
sent out of the house, and Mr. Nichols argued them into submission. It was the first 
great turning point of my life: it was for me a commitment to science and letters at the 
greatest university In the world (and the most user-friendly library system I have ever 
found). Colin soon moved on. His place was taken by Ken Stott, a Dalesman from the 
north of England and a true gcntleinan and fiicnd; sadly he died suddenly a year ago. 
Both werc wondcrf~illy supported in their outreach to students by their wives Betty and 
Joan. 
So it came to pass that in Dccember 1955 I went up to Cambridge to take the 
entrance examination, having scrapcd through the mandatory Latin qualification (I never 
had Grcek but wife has, which is a hclp). My school days had been mundane, but I had 
two passions. One was for the geography of Tibet and the I-llmalayas. I spent two years 
compiling an atlas of Tibet (thc local public library borrowed books for me from all 
axes t h ~  coimti-y). I i  herd one map I drew that 1 think fondly of in retrospect--- 
accessablllty In Tibet by yak-days from Lhasa (years later, I learned that British 
explorers had clone the same thing for camel ro~itcs In Arabia). This passion was 
strongly tileled by British success on Mt. Elrerest at the timc of the coronation of 
El~zabeth !I. in 1953. Only last year, the E n m  reporter on that expcdition, then known 
as James Morris, came to our home. She (as he became aftcr rather horrendous surgery 
in Casablanca in the 1960s) clearly enjoyed life and indeed her own consequent 
notoriety to the full. The leader of the expedition, Lord Hunt, was rather bemused by the 
transition. I remember his deep puzzlement when he told me at dinner one evening that 
the body of a lone eccentric British mountaineer had been found on the north slopes of 
Everest in the late 1930s, dressed in women's underclothing. To change sex was one 
thlng, but to be a transvestite quite another, especially for a British officer and 
gentleman-mountaineer. 
I did in fact end up looking at climatic change in Tibet in the 1980s, a couple of 
times surveying in horizontal sleet above 17,000 feet and rephoeographing glaciers 
recorded during the Younghusband Expedition in 1904. Absurd, really, because 1 have 
no head for helghts. As a child I was q~iire petrified with vertigo at clinlbing to the top 
of the tower of Durham Cathedral. It was even worse the first time I stood on the 
medieval wall at Constantinople, and it occurred also 
on the absolutely vertical drop-off of the reefs around 
Palau. 
Another important childhood experience-the 
reason for which I cannot now recall-was that I got 
the local library to obtain from the university in 
Newcastle-on-Tyne a copy of William Morris Davis's 
book, The Coral Reef Problem (Fig. 1). This attracted 
me greatly, partly because of the logic of the arguments 
(some of which I have since shown to be a delusion), 
but also because of the aesthetic appeal of many of 
Davis's own illustrations, particularly his elegant block 
diagrams. I copied many of them, as much for the detail 
Figure 1. How it all began. I wish that I could say that the book I 
was holding was The Coral Reef Problem by Davis-it would 
have been much more interesting. 1950. 
of the humid tropical landscapes in the background as for the reefs in the foreground. 
After all, as Davis famously said, what is the point of going to look at a reef when you 
can work out all its history in your head without recourse to facts'? 
So when I went up to Cambridge as an Exhibitioner from the provinces in 1956, 
I had determined to be a tropical geographer; coral reefs as such really did not enter the 
equation. I had the good sense to be admitted at the College of St. John the Evangehst, 
where the resident geographer was Benny Fanner, a noted specialist in south Asia and 
especially what was then Ceylon. He was extraordinarily broad-minded on subjects 
academic, and equally liberal with sherry during his weekly hour-long meetlng with 
students. One came to know many of the leaders of British geography In his rooms in 
the evening. The alternative had been another Carnbntige coiiege where the lead 
geographer was an archreactlonary who, in the old Cambridge traditlon. had nearer 
published anything of note at all. It did not help thar I had by then decided that I was not 
prepared to waste my life shaving every day and he absolutely refused to be asscciatecf 
with anyone with a beard. 
Cambridge opened every intellectual door. One could stiil borrow eighteenth- 
century scientific classics-Hutton's Theory of the Earth, for example-and cycle away 
from the university library with them in one's basket; in the summer months, E. M. 
Forster would be put outside the front gate of King's to be photographed in his dotage. 
My own doctor had also been Wittgenstein's, who died in his house. The Master of the 
College was Sir James Wordie, who had been with Shackleton on Ei~dz~rarzce when the 
ship was crushed in the ice and the ship's company made their extraordinary open-boat 
voyage to Elephant Island; he subsequently achieved fame as an Arctic explorer: I once 
found him when I was an undergraduate wanderi~g around Second Court asking where 
he was; I was able to take him back to the Master's Lodge. Those were the days when 
to be outlandishly eccentric was a mark of distinction in a don-it greatly added to the 
interest of life. There was a lady in Cambridge who waiked everywhere-across the 
street and onto buses-with a red plastic bucket over her head. Another character who 
carried a family of rats on his person was reputed to have been a former Fellow of 
Trinity. Much later one of my students, a direct descendant of Whistler, released a rat 
(which lived inside his shirt and which he always took to l ec tu resance  it got out) at a 
dinner for my fiftieth birthday: he dropped it at the doorway to the kitchens and called 
the butler to protest at the stage of college hygiene. My tutors were Redford 
Bamborough, the philosopher, whom one met with him behind his desk and directly in 
front of him but 5 yards away in a single isolated chair: conversations in those 
circumstances were interrupted by very long pauses in which he reflected 
philosophically on what one had said. I once heard him say to a dinner companion: 
"Yes, indeed, I do believe I was born." There was also the distinguished behaviorist 
Robert Hinde (later Master of the College) who supervised the great lady students of the 
higher apes in Africa. He surrounded his study with photographs of the higher primates, 
and as you talked with him he glanced repeatedly from you to one portrait or another. I 
myself occupied the rooms once lived in by L. S. B. Leakey; I was able to tell him I had 
slept in his bed when I met him on the high cliffs near Mombasa. Many of my fellow 
students had recently returned from the Korean War. They seemed to have an endless 
supply of high explosives, which they routinely detonated in the underground lavatories 
in the market square, to the point where the vice-chancellor was obliged to make the 
entire center of Cambridge out of bounds on Guy Fawkes Night, November 5. The 
explosions rocked the entire square as well as destroying the toilets, which were closed 
down for years. 
By the time I went to Cambridge I determined that I would be a tropical 
geographer. The place was ideal: in addition to my director of studies many of the active 
nlembers of the faculty were also tropical geographers. It was ideal in another way, too: 
the academic year consisted of two terms of eight weeks and one of five, and even these 
numbers could be shaved-- a fact 1 later made considerable use of when appointed to the 
fzculty there myself'. No Arnerictln university has the intelligence yet to know that the 
advancement of knowledge and understanding depends in large degree on having the 
opportunity to browsc In libraries, to go where the spirit takes you, simply to sit and 
think: going to a great university should be a leap into intellectual freedom and 
oppol~unity, not endless dl-udsery of nnarginally useful mandatory courses that exhaust 
both teacher and student vi it11 45-hour lecture loads over 15-week semesters. And in 
England it was made possible by the excellence of the education system in the schools: 
teaching at the university became a matter of civilized conversation with students 
without the need to define words like "equator-" or "longitude" or to explain where 
places like South Africa or Argentina (or dare I say Vietnam or Afghanistan?) are and 
what they are like. 
Be that as it may, I planned my entry into tropical geography meticulously (this, 
of course, is retrospective justification). What kind of geography and where were still to 
be determined. It was clearly necessary to have a look at all three major tropical 
continents. I chose Asia first as there had been a long family connection with India (and 
indeed I smpect that could be said of most British families during the two centuries of 
the Raj). So during my first long vacation (the four-month break between academic 
years) I went to India, taking the train from London to Calcutta. The fare was 27 pounds 
one way, equivalent to perhaps $125. In retrospect it was somewhat foolhardy. The 
previous year, there had been the disastrous Anglo-French intervention in Suez, and the 
Middle East was in turmoil. In fact, the railway line went through Syria and was out of 
bounds. So after Munich, Belgrade, Sofia, and Istanbul, I was obliged to fly between 
Ankara and Baghdad, where the train to Basra resumed. It was the year before King 
Faisal and his family were assassinated and the prime minister dragged to his death 
behind a vehicle in the streets of the capital. Through Iraq I was constantly violently 
unwell, a situation that has recurred repeatedly throughout my exploratory life. 
In Basra, the only way to Bombay was by deck prssage on a British India liner. I 
think it cost 9 pounds. This greatly annoyed the British India management: they did not 
want white men cavorting with natives on the decks of  their ships. I was told: "We will 
allow it this time, but never again, and you will only be fed the slop we give to the rest 
of them." And so we traversed the Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas (where a Berkeley taxi 
drive has recently told me there is the finest brothel in the Middle East), Kuwait, and 
Muscat, in unbelievable temperatures and humidified. In Bombay, of course, the trains 
still ran on time. Lunch at the Calcutta Yacht Club was a great restorative. I had decided 
to have a look at industrial locations in Bihar and traveled about quite a bit. In 
Jamshedpur (the location of the Indian Iron and Steel Corporation, which was overrun 
by sleeping cows) I was in an intensely crowded train coixpartment when a frenzied 
man burst in and stabbed my neighbor to death. It turned out he had just been fired by 
his victim. But I emerged from that and in the end got back to Cambridge (though I 
chickened out-I flew). 
Having thus done Asia, in a way, I then turned to Africa. I decided on Sierra 
Leone, still a British colony and accessible by ship fiom Liverpool. My mentor, Benny 
Farmer, put me in touch with Professor Robert Steel, the noted Africanist in that city. 
Robert invited me to stay in his house before I boarded the ship. He was always an 
extraordinarily generous person with people he had never met but who s\ ere inrerested 
in things that he was too. He had done ficldwork in Sierra Leone just before World War 
11. Even then it was truly Graham Greene country, and he walked at the hcad of a line of 
Africans carrying everything needed. My own visit was post-Graham Greene, but there 
were many places in the diamond country too unstable to visit, but I did come up with L: 
map of the distribution of house-types in thc country and spent somc lime \% it11 tlic 
nomadic Fulani in the north. I had a look at the coastal landlords and mangroves in the 
south, around Bonthe: the barge I took there from Freetown was infested with the most 
gigantic cockroaches I have ever seen-it was sad that they hung from one's lips at 
night to drink and ate one's toenails to the quick while one slept. It was still the Empire: 
prisoners engaged in mindless rolling of 45-gallon drums of fuel around in a circle were 
detached to carry my bags. It was in~possible to imagine the savagery into which the 
country descended after independence. 
After that, there had to be South America. I decided on Colon~bia-no one i n  his 
right mind would do that now and anyone prudent would not have done it tl~en. I
decided to look at a tribe called the Tunebo, on the eastern flanks of the Andes in a 
catchment of the upper Orinoco. This involt;ed taking a ship form Livenyo01 via 
Bermuda, Cura~ao,  the Panama Canal, the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and ultinlately 
Buenaventura in Colombia. We then proceeded by air to Bogota and onward by truck to 
the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy. This was all done from Bogota so rapidly that soroche (the 
mountain sickness) was inevitable. Once in the Sierra, we hired porters and mule teams 
for the long haul over the Eastern Cordillera and down the rain-drenched and 
precipitous eastern slopes of the Andes toward the llanos. It was something of a 
nightmare. I think I have never experienced more continuous heavy rain. Everything fell 
apart. Mules fell from the trail into gorges filled with clouds and were never seen again. 
Some portions of the trail were so steep that to get up them one had to hang onto the tail 
of the mule in front, and this resulted in living in a horrendous miasma of mule gas. On 
one occasion the horse I was riding bolted and the poncho I was wearing blew over my 
head. I could not spare a hand from the reins to pull it from my face and expected to be 
immediately decapitated by low branches across the trail. We got there in the end, 
however. Most of our porters had the most horrendous scars form endemic intravillage 
ambushes, even before the drug wars supervened. It remains the only expedition in my 
life where I routinely carried both a sidearm (a silver Smith and Wesson) and a rifle. On 
examining the former one afternoon, I inadvertently put a bullet through our radio. 
We came back with recordings of the Tunebo festivals, and i t  led to a couple of 
papers. I thought I might become a L,atin Americanist, but we were infested with fleas. 
Thc only thing to do at night was to put all one's underclothes outside on a line and then 
to get up sufficiently early in the morning when thc fleas wcre still so soporific from the 
cold that you could pick them off one by one. We left Colombia by Cartagena and saw 
something of the Spanish Empire in New Grenada. In spite of all its upheavals, 
Colombia (like all the former Spanish territories) was an extraordinarily literate society; 
Libraria Buchholz, for example, was and hopefully still is, a world-class bookstore. 
So my reconnaissance of the tropics had been completed. But things had 
changed in a way that was truly to define the course of my life. Thc head of the 
Department of Geography at Cambridge when I was a student was Alfred Steers, a man 
of stature, imposing but rather shy, thc leading figure in the coastal geomorphology of 
Britain. He was both patrician and patriarch, and most abIy supported in both roles by 
his wife, Harriet. To many hc appeared remote, but 111 fact he was a most friendly man. 
Every year he invited the graduate students to his magisterial home to operate his 
extensive model railway-- entirely constructcd by his employees in the department- in 
the attic. He noticed me as a student at an early stage and was increasingly interested in 
my growing friendship with my future wife. She was my direct contemporary and a 
student at the exclusively female Newnham College where, unfortunately, her director 
of studies (a figure from the past in the historical geography) of Britain had the same 
name. The elderly Miss J. Mitchell must have been surprised at some of the 
communications from me that were sent to her in error. 
Now here is a case of pure serendipity, on which I am prepared to argue that the 
future of coral reef science began. There was a tradition in Cambridge that 
undergraduates as a matter of routine wcnt out on expeditions all over the world. That is 
how I got to take the party to the headwaters of the Orinoco. You begged and scrounged 
everything from cheap passages to tomato ketchup and somehow or other made a go of 
it. It was a quite exhilarating period. On the Colombian Expedition of 1959 I wrote to 
the Duke of Edinburgh for support: not only did he make a contribution but in mid- 
Atlantic the ship actually received a telegram from him wishing us "Bon Voyage." 
Prince Philip subsequently became Chancellor of Cambridge University and has been 
without question the most interested, visible, and knowledgeable Chancellor in its entire 
history. 
As we were setting out for South America, a group of fellow undergraduates had 
started to plan an expedition to British Honduras (now Belize), a country then virtually 
unknown except archeologically. It was to comprise three components: an archeological 
survey at the prime site of Xunantunich in the far west of the country (this was carried 
out by Euan Mackie, later the Keeper of the Hunterian Museum at Glagow University: 
he used to wear a solar topee-as indeed did I (both courtesy of the British Honduras 
Police Department) but unlike myself he had a habit of shooting rats with an enormous 
revolver while lying in his camp bed at night. The botanical work was carried out by 
David Hunt, later a grass specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, mostly in the 
Mountain Pine Ridge. And then there was the reef party (Fig. 2). This was led and 
inspired by John Thorpe, who later had a distinguished career at various research 
Figanre 2. Rendezvous Cay reef party and assistants (left to right): 
David K. Stoddart, Modesto, Paul K. Bregazzi, Jack Keyes, William 
F.A. Warham, Viola, John E. Thorye, and John D. Poxon. 1960. 
Tragically both Jack and Viola died a year later when Hurricane Hattie 
passed over this cay. 
institutes and universities 
and has for years been 
senior editor of the 
Joumal of Fish Biology. 
He was joined by Paul 
Rregazzi, whose doctorate 
later was on sub-Antarctic 
crustaceans with the 
British Antarctic Survey, 
and Will Warham. a 
fanner with experience 
with Guinness and later 
with Irish Television and 
with humanitarian aid 
around the world. 
John saw the need for 
a geographer-someone 
who could tell these 
zoologists where things were on the reef. Through the Head of the Zoology Department, 
Sir James Gray, he approached Alfred to ask if a suitable geographer might be available. 
Alfred recommended me. I was committed at the time to the upper Orinoco but agreed 
to get to Belize as soon as I could. Thus I returned to England from Cartagena at the end 
of the Colombian expedition and immediately set forth on an oil tanker to Trinidad, 
Curaqao, and Jamaica, on the way to British Honduras. John had organized with the 
government the use for a year of a small sand cay (Rendezvous Cay) on the barrier reef. 
Governor Sir Colin Thornley had had reerected there for his rest and recuperation a 
disused police station from the mainland, which was to be our headquarters. We also 
had a prime site in the center of Belize City above the main post office as our 
headquarters. By the time I was free of Colombia and back to the Caribbean, all the 
other members of the expedition were on site. There remained one important 
prerequisite for reef work: a boat. John located a total wreck on Cay Caulker, miles to 
the north. Somehow the hulk was taken to Rendezvous Cay, and the first months were 
spent in fitting a complete new bottom, caulking it, and even cutting and sewing sails. 
All this work was completely new to us and was supervised by another geographer, John 
Poxon, who hailed from Jamaica and had some idea what to do. Finally in December 
1959 the 16-foot boat was put in the water, and immediately sank. But the caulking 
held, and Tortuga became the most important piece of equipment of the Cambridge 
Expedition to British Honduras, 1959-60. All this is described in a book later assembled 
by John Thorpe and David Carr, From the Cam to the Cays. 
Now and undergraduate education at Cambridge was (at least at that time) 
arguably the best in the world-if in fact you were prepared to make use of it (which 
too many were not). It suited me down to the ground, and I did rather well there. But 
when I arrived in Belize it was at once apparent that I knew next to nothing about the 
coral reefs and reef islands that were to become the focus of my life. I recall precisely 
the exhilaration I felt on my arrival there, in the knowledge that I knew not a single 
thing about any of the plants and ani~nals, both terrestrial and marine, that would have 
to be central to any understanding of the natural world of the tropics. I know a little 
more now, but I still have that feeling whenever I go back to Belize. 
So how to proceed? It was quite amazing that no one had looked at these reefs 
and islands before. After his expeditions to the Great Barrier Reef, Alfred Steers had 
worked with Val Chapman on the Jamaican cays and had in mind to go to Belize after 
that. But the onset of war both curtailed the Jamaican work and made Belize studies out 
of the question. Agassiz never went there (which from his work elsewhere in the reef 
seas was no loss to science); Darwin had little to draw on when he published his coral 
reef book in 1842. Richard Owen, one of the outstanding British hydrographic 
surveyors. and who in the 1830s had meticulously charted the reefs off the eastern coast 
of Nicaragua, had then charted the central barrier off Belize, but it was decades before 
his work therc was followed up (in fact hls survey of the Belize area was revised by 
Edmund Irv~ng on H.M.S. ki'cr'ul shortly before we were there). So we began from 
scratch. There were two prerequisites for this. 
The first was operational survival on Tortugrc. We had rice, beans, conled beef, 
and Spam, and whatever fish we could catch. We had literally hundreds of donated tubes 
of toothpaste. Water was a problem. It will amaze graduate students today that we did 
not have enough money to buy plastic water containers. We eventually got one of the 
Chinese retailers in Belize to give us a wooden barrel that had contained pickled pig's 
tails imported from China. Try as we might, we could not rid that barrel of the intense 
flavor of its former contents. But it became our water supply. Then we needed mobility. 
We had a small Seagull outboard on the order of two and a half horsepower, but the 
propellor was only half in the water, and it was effectively useless in transportation. So 
we depended on the sails. Thus there were several occasions when we were totally 
becalmed, sometimes for an entire day within sight of our destination but unable to 
move. On those occasions we were roasted alive. But there were compensations. At first 
light one could go over the side and then breakfast on crayfish, and of course the 
barracuda were superabundant and when not poisonous totally delicious. 
The second prerequisite was information. At that time (1950-60) there were no 
field guides at all. The best was Walton Smith's book on Atlantic reef corals. And 
fortunately the reef corals were few: usually about one species per genus. So it was not 
too difficult to become familiar with the stony corals. But so much else (seafans, 
sponges, algae) was really opaque. The same was true of the plants on the cays. I had 
not collected plants in the tropics before and had great problems in drying all of them in 
such a humid environment, especially the succulents. I shudder to recall how 
desperately awful many of my first collections were. But gradually we came to know 
what we were looking at. 
The plan was to examine all the sand cays on the reefs, map them, and describe 
their vegetation. John Poxon successfully navigated Tortuga along the whole length of 
the barrier reef (some 200 miles) and did the same with the cays of Turneffe. Lighthouse 
Reef seemed a bit much, however, and we were glad to take passage there in the 
governor's yacht. So we did the cays there too. 
Meanwhile the other members of the reef party were doing great things- 
experiments 011 corals and other organisms, and especially the detailed mapping of coral 
distribution on the reefs surrounding Rendezvous Cay. This was a huge task and 
occupied John Thorpe especially for months. My job was to accurately locate the many 
marker buoys used for the underwater surveying. The coral distribution map that 
resulted was then and remains today the most detailed ever made of any reef in the 
world. Unfortunately, by the time we got back to England mundane matters like getting 
jobs supervened and the map was published only in outline, without specific identities 
of the organisms mapped. Last year, however, I found some money and four of us- 
John, Paul Bregazzi, Willian~ Warham, and myself--were able to look in detail again at 
Figure 3. With John Thorpe on Rendezvous Cay, 
Belize, during the 4ot11 anniversary re-survey in 
2000. 
a reef we had worked on exactly 40 
years before (Fig. 3). With advancing 
years, I was pleasantly surprised to find 
that the individual coral heads mapped in 
1960 had not changed their positions by 
the year 2000: that is, we could precisely 
find them again using identical 
techniques. The shock was that the wild 
luxuriance of the reefs in 1960 had 
become a scene of devastation. But I 
think that nowhere else in the world is 
there such a benchmark survey against 
which to measure the cumulative effects 
of catastrophic s t o n s ,  bleaching, and 
disease as at Rendezvous Cay. This work 
continues. 
When we left Belize in mid- 1960, 
my own work was incomplete. There 
were cays in the Punta Gorda region in 
the south we had not seen and likewise 
we had not seen Glover's Reef at all. 
More to the point, as I drew up the 
results, I realized what truly needed to be done. A priority was to identify the plants. 
Alfred Steers put me on to the professor of tropical botany at Cambridge, Edred John 
Henry Comer, one of the last true eccentric and overarching scholars that the university 
has seen. I went to see him; he said the man you want to talk to is called Fosberg, in 
Washington. The rest is history. 
I was acutely aware of the need to upgrade my work in 1959-60. Alfred again 
came to the rescue. He knew everyone who was anyone in coastal geomorphology at 
that time. These included Richard Russell and Andre Guilcher (the latter I was to meet 
all over the tropics in subsequent years). He wrote to Russell, then director of the 
Coastal Studies Institute and Dean at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He 
was then conducting research around the world on topics such as the beachrock 
problem, funded mainly by the Office of Naval Research. This was headed by the 
enormously influential head of its Geography Branch, Evelyn Pruitt. It was arranged 
that I should go to Belize a second time, in mid-1901, funded through the Coastal 
Studies Institute and taking in Miss Pruitt in Washington on the way. She provided 
passage on Military Air Transport Service (MATS), the first of many times. This was 
my first meeting with Ray Fosberg. 
He came to the now-demolished 
Raleigh Hotel in Washington, together 
with his co-worker Marie-Heline Sachet 
(Fig. 4). I t  was my introduction to the 
Smithsonian Institution at a time when 
Dillon Ripley was Secretary. Ray and 
Mar-ie->i@]&~ weye then housed -1: a!l 
annex to the National Academy of 
Sciences ciose to the Watergate buiiding 
(which then liad quiie a nornlal 
reputation). 'I'liai meeting led to 
frien&]lips Mritll Ray alld &faric-l--Ikl&ne 
that lasted for their lifetimes. Ray agreed 
to take my plants and told me how to handle them. I learned something about their 
cominitnlent to coral reefs and islands and indeed the Atoll Research Bulletii~. I left 
Washington with the distinct impression that I was now part of a great endeavor in a 
very definite scientific program. Dick Russell welcomed me to Baton Rouge and 
showed me the campus of ISU with pride. He provided another graduate student to help. 
This was Stephen Murray, who was to beconle a noted physical oceanographer and 
major figure ic the Coastal Studies Institute. 
Together we went to Belize. This time we charrei-ed a sailing boat from the 
Young family at Half Moon Cay In i t  wc did the cays of Tumeffe, Lighthouse Reef? and 
at last Glover's Reee later we did the Punra Gorda cays and also took t!le opportunity to 
resurvey many of the barrier reef cays. At the end of it, I felt I had some understanding 
of the reefs and reef islands of British Honduras: chipping away to my ignorance I at 
last knew something of the reef animals and the island planes. The human geography 
was also not without interest. The colonial secretary acted out his role by apparently 
living entirely on pink gin. The American consul's previous job had been building 
nuclear weapons. There was a character aptly called Strangeways-Dixon who worked on 
disease transmission by insects; he used to draw a polar zenithal projection on his 
abdomen, centered on his navel, and was thus able to record the effects of any particular 
insect bite in terms of the altitude and longitude of where he had placed the vial 
containing it. On the first occasion that my wife came with me in Ramrod, Ronnie 
Young (our skipper) wandered down the dock an hour later. I asked him if ne needed 
anything. He said: a pint of rum. Then he jumped off the quay and fell in a heap on the 
deck. Not so long after that he was by himself in a different boat on the way to 
Lighthouse and simply fell off the stem, leaving the vessel to proceed without him. But 
one staked one's life on such folk in the field. 
It was unfortunately extraordinarily useful in another way too. Finishing the 
work in mid-1961 was followed at the end of October by Hurricane Hattie, one of the 
great storms of the century. I t  passed directly over Rendezvous Cay. The storm surge 
flooded Belize City to a depth of 5 meters. Many people died, including the couple who 
we had employed at Rendezvous in 1959-60. I was back in Belize at Easter 1962 to 
start work again. In a fairly intensive period of fieldwork I resurveyed all the islands and 
looked at the effects on geornorphology and vegetation, as well as the impact on the 
reefs. Rendezvous Cay had been stripped of all vegetation. The house we had lived in 
was gone (I found the kitchen stove down the reef slope). In retrospect I am astonished 
at the almost manic way I did this fieldwork. But I knew that here was a quite unique 
opportunity to look at hurricane effects with both immediately before and imnediately 
after studies. I had published my prehurricane work on the three atolls (I rather foolishly 
thought thattlie Bzdletin was only i~iterested in atolls) in Aloll Researell Brllleiirl 87; this 
was followed by Bulletin 95 on hurricane effects across all the reefs. Later I went back 
in 1965 and did it all again. And again--with Ray and Marie-Helene during the 
Comparative Investigations of Tropical Reef Ecosystenls (CITRE) Workshop on 
Glover's Reef in 1971. 
I gained the Ph.D. in 1964. By that time I had been appointed to the faculty at 
the Department of Geography in Cambridge. I was in Belize in 1962 when I had a 
postcard from Alfred in a hotel on the Isle of Wight. "My dear David, would you like a 
job in Cambridge? Yours ever, Alfred." No nonsense about cumculum vitae, referees' 
reports, appointments committees: simply straightforward patronage. In the Cambridge 
context of the time, it worked. Unless one did something quite dreadful, it meant a job 
for life. My response was instantaneous: "Dear Professor Steers ...." (i.e., what a good 
idea). 
So where to proceed from the work in Belize? I took the same strategy as I had 
as an undergraduate: make it comparative. That meant the Indian Ocean and the Pac~fic. 
rofessor Maurice Yonge, the leader of the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928-29, 
had been one of my Ph.D. examiners. I still recall with some embarrassment my 
temerity when during the actual examination he denied that Sicierastrea radians ever 
formed equidimensional free-living colonies (coralliths, as Peter Glynn subsequently 
called them): Maurice had published on that species from his work in the Dry Tortugas 
before the war. I excused myself, went to my office, got half a dozen, and rolled them 
across the table at him. I also pulled much the same trick with what Robert Ginsburg 
subsequently called rhodoliths, common on the seaward margins of Lighthouse and 
Glover's Reef. I got the Ph.D. With anyone else, I wouldn't. So I asked Maurice what to 
do next. I had in mind the Maldives. There has since the war been a staging post on the 
southernmost atoll of Addu (there was also an airstrip close to Male, but that was 
evoking some political discontent). There had been something of a Cambridge 
preoccupation with the Maldives since Stanley Gardiner's expedition at the beginning of 
the century and then Seymour Sewell's during the John Murray Expedition (I never met 
Gardiner but did know Sewell toward the end of his life). There was also the great 
advantage of free flights to Addu through the RAF (the British equivalent of MATS). 
So I took a small party to Addu in the summer of 1964. The grant promised by 
Maurice was less than expected, but my father had recently died and so there was some 
money available. I thought of it as an investment for the future. After the Caribbean, 
the Indian Ocean was quite a shock. The diversity of the reef corals was overwhelming. 
Much of the island flora was quite new. Things were also now different from the earlier 
expeditions: by this time there was a need to know inore than the names of the plants 
and animals. This had been apparent when we first went to Belize: the paper by Odum 
and Odum on energy flow at Enewetak had just been published but not yet assimilated. 
Krumbein was publishing constantly on statistical sedimentology. One had to have 
transects, sanlpiing designs, that kind of thing. We dutifully laid out the transects, but I 
rapidly found that trying to reach a random point on a reef flat pitted by military borrow 
pits was not a good idea; it was there I lost 2 Pentaxes (the first of perhaps 20) within 
hours of unpacking them. simply by falling into a hole in the reef in order to get to some 
particular random point. But I still have a museum piece, my firs: undeiwater camera: 
Cousteau's Calypsophot, on which the Nikonos was modeled. Not so many of those 
around today. So Addu was a learning experience: indeed, I broke a finger there and it 
has bothered me ever since. The results were published in Aroll Research Rulleli~z 116. 
"Much Addu about nothing," quipped a fi-iend not exactly known for his fieldwork. He 
could ilot have been more wrong. 
So that was the Indian Ocean. What about the Pacific? Maurice was chairman of 
the Southern Zone Research Committee of the Royal Society. The committee was well 
known for its sponsorship of major expeditions to places like Tristan da Cunha and 
southern Chile. It turned out that they were considering a large project in what were 
then the British Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. It was to be led by none other 
than Professor Comer. I was round to his office at once. The expedition was to begin in 
mid-1965. I had to go back for a further survey on the Belize reefs before then, but was 
otherwise free. There were to be a land party of botanists and zoologists, and a marine 
party. The latter was to be accomn~odated in a ketch that had formerly been the 
of Tonga's yacht Maroro, which the Royal Society chartered for six months. So off we 
\vent from Guadalcanal, the first stop being Sandfly Passage in the Russells where the 
only previous scientific party had been killed and eaten on the beach (this habit 
evidently continued through the Second World War, and indeed we were not allowed to 
work on Malaita where it was feared it might continue). ib4aroro ranged widely through 
the Solomons, captained by Stan Brown, who lived in Suva (he later became head of the 
Fiji navy). He adhered to strong codes of naval etiquette (such as having all the scruffy 
scientists line the rails when entering or leaving port), but this did not extend to having a 
functional freezer. I most clearly recall the smell and taste of the rotten lamb served at 
dinner. The most interesting location we went to was New Georgia, with its tall 
volcanoes, double and even triple barrier reefs, and substantial tectonically raised reefs. 
It occurred to me that these latter could be used as an analogue of what happened to 
reefs during Pleistocene low sea-level stands. Rather foolishly, I spent a good deal of 
time alone running echo-sounding traverses in the Marovo and Roviana lagoons, which 
had not been done before. Fortunately, I managed to keep the outboard in the dinghy 
going when the ship was over the horizon. One was aware that the Pleistocene sea-level 
notches on the raised reefs were lined with skulls. 
This expedition, I have since thought, must have been one of the last to have 
been carried out in the way that Cook, Banks, and the Forsters worked: to show up on a 
remote and possibly hostile shore, collect and survey everything one could, and then sail 
away, never to be seen again. There were so many outposts of proselytizing faiths 
throughout the islands that Comer made it his business to plot them so that wc ncvcr 
arrived at a community on whatever day of the week it was where any kind of uscful 
activity was prohibited. Corner was quite a remarkable man. His first job after 
graduating was in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, just before the war. In his 
autobiography, he recalls the invading Japanese army swanning across the causeway 
and records that "I decided to throw in my lot with the victor." As a result, he was 
kindly interned for the duration in the Herbarium, during which time he wrote his first 
major book. Unfortunately. he dedicated it to the commander of the Japanese forces in 
Sirgapore who had jusi been executed. This did :lot so dovin too mell, and he was 
obliged to spend some years in Brazil. Rut then Cambridge, krlowing an eccentric when 
it sees one, brought him back. Not surprising!y, he finally fell out with his collcge over 
, . the admission of female students and never entcred i t  ngam d ! ~ ~ t e  w t h  rage, he leaped 
to his feet at the crucial meeting, threw his college keys at the Master, and stormed out, 
only of course to find that he had aiso thrown h ~ s  car keys and house keys, too. The 
head porter had to negotiate their return. Emperor Hirohito gave him an enonnous prize 
for science and Comer did the emperor's obituary for the Royal Society. I went to see 
him in England shortly before he died. I told him that I thought his various views on the 
evolution and distribution of the flowering plants were mutually inconsistent. He rose to 
the occasion and defended them mightily. I never saw him again. There is a wonderful 
obituary of him for the Royal Society by D. 9. Mabberley, which, if one reads between 
the lines, memorializes him perfectly. 
For me, simply to get to know Comer was one of the great experiences of the 
Solomons (there were other eccentrics there too). But there were other things as well. 
On the way there, it was my i k t  experience of California and especially of Berkeley, 
where I subsequently came to live. And also of Hawaii (all the high islands), Fiji, and 
the New Hebrides. On the way back, I detoured again through the New Hebrides, then 
New Caledonia, and finally French Polynesia (the airport was new and the nuclear 
program had yet to wreak its devastation on the Tahitian economy and social order). 
Moorea had but a single hotel and few paved roads, and certainly no research stations. I 
went to Rangiroa in the Tuamotu, where there was still no sigr? of nuclear modernity or 
tourism at all. I am glad to have seen it then. 
Very well: by the end of 1965 I had worked in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, 
and the Pacific, even if only dipping my toe in the waters. How to proceed? Serendipity 
again. The truly important outcome of my Addu expedition in 1964 was what I learned 
there. One became a member of a military community, and in the evenings at the 
incredibly inexpensive bar one could learn a lot. Specifically, there was much talk of 
new British military developments on Indian Ocean islands, for which surveys had 
apparently already begun. These included several islands in the Seychelles (then a 
colony) and others in the Chagos Archipelago, governed from Mauritius. I was too 
committed in Belize and the Solomons to do much about this in 1965, but early in 1966 
I wrote to George Hemmen, a senior Royal Society staff member who had been with the 
Solomons expedition, in effect saying that before any of these islands were devastated 
for dubious military purposes someone should have a look at them. George followed 
this up both within the Royal Society (through Maurice Yonge's Southern Zone 
Research Committee) and with the Ministry of Defence. I t  appeared that an expedition 
was shortly to depart for the Indian Ocean atoll of Aldabra. The Royal Society sought 
and was given two places in the party, for myself and an invertebrate 70010gist at the 
British Museum (Natural History), Christopher Wright, who had previously shown an 
interest in the atoll. 
So we appeared in Mombasa. The party was fronted by the British Broadcasting 
Corporation, which apparently wanted to have a relay station there, but its true 
significance was to detern~ine the feasibility and cost of a major Royal Air Force 
facility. h ship had been chartered in Kenya for the duraiien (the: Sois/her-~r .Ykiei.). Thc 
whole thing was treated as top secret. So we were all setto go except ehe shtp had no 
engineer-- urieil a chap walked along the dock and s a d  he was an engineer and could 
handle everything. He was taken on board at once. He was in fact and oddiy eno~agh a 
Russian. Finaliy, after several days, we reached Aldabra It was apparent at once that 
none of the people we were traveling with had the n'aintcs't idea of how to cope with 
such a place. Brand new outboards were unpacked, lowered over the side on ropes too 
short to reach the water, and then dropped into the ocean (I am of course aware that this 
is how the military has gone on since time immemorial). The point was to determine the 
viability of a major airfield ("a staging post") at the other end of the atoll, 20 miles 
away. All supporting facilities had to be located and costed too. The chief civil engineer 
was environmentally overcome by the place and never went near the proposed site, 
though he produced precise costings. 
Once on shore, Wright and I ran around like lunatics, mapping and collecting. It 
was immediately apparent that Aldabra was one of the most remarkable islands on earth. 
We were there so briefly, saw so small a part, and were under such time constraints that 
I simply brought a number out of my head: at least, I said, a population of more than 
10,000 giant tortoises (itself substantially more than the surviving populations in the 
Galapagos) (Fig. 5 ) .  Subsequent work has shown that I was wrong by more than an 
order of magnitude. It also became apparent that Aldabra was one of the great seabird 
Figure 5. Aldabra led to something of a fixation 
with tortoises and turtles-not a good idea because 
they seem to breed in the night and soon cover the 
entire floor space of the house. 
nesting areas of the Indian Ocean. It has 
the world's second largest population of 
frigate birds. Amazingly, the biggest 
concentration of these birds was directly 
in the flight path of the proposed 
airfield-in fact, a senior officer who 
was there told me that he would rather 
resign the service than attempt to land a 
jet through the spiraling towers of birds. 
There were also many species of land 
birds, most of them distinct at the 
species level and including the last 
flightless bird of the Indian Ocean 
islands. It was immediately apparent that 
any military development would be an ecological disaster of the first magnitude. 
Back in England I reported at some length to the Royal Society and 
recommended that any plans for nlilitary development be scrapped. Maurice Yonge 
passed my reports upwards to the council. By extraordinary good fortune, the society at 
that time was in good hands: the executive secretary, Sir David Martin, had been central 
to the society's expedition programs. The president, Lord Blackett, was at home with 
members of the Labour government. And the biological secretary, Sir Ashley Miles, 
proved a major supporter. My report was unaninlously approved by the council, and the 
society made its views public. This triggered what came to be known as "the Aldabra 
affair." To cut a long story short, the society demanded the abandonment of the military 
plans and said it would institute a long-tern1 proposal of research. In what must have 
been an unprecedented move, the officers actually got into a taxi and went to express 
these views personally to the minister of defence. The press and other media took the 
rnatter up, but none more fiercely than the Scottish Member of Parliament, Mr. Tan1 
Dalyell (today, after 40 years in the Commons, the longest-serving member, the "Father 
of the House"). Every day he asked question after question in Parliament until he was 
expressly forbidden to ask any more. Politically and scientifically, Mr. Dalyell and Lord 
Blackett made a11 the difference. The government finally abandoned its proposal in 
November 1978 (on purely economic grounds), and the Royal Society immediately 
announced that it would mount a major expedition to the atoll and that moreover it 
would build a research station there for long-term scientific work. I was asked to 
organize the expedition and plan the research station. An Aldabra Research Committee 
was formed, under the chairmanship of Professor Stanley Westoll. 
Now all this was in the mid-60s. It is an interesting part of British law that 
government files must be made available to the public at the Public Records Office after 
a 30-year period has elapsed. Over the past several years I have therefore had the 
opportunity to review files on this matter from all the main Departments of State and 
indeed from the prime minister himself. A few weeks ago I brought back 8 kilograms of 
photocopies of what I believe to be about one- third of the total Aldabra files. I am 
doing a book on these which is not simply about the ecological importance of Aldabra, 
but also about the ignorance and duplicity of both the government of the day and the 
military. One file stands out as a sustained criticism of myself. The general proposition 
at the outset was that Stoddart was useless to the Ministry of Defence. He is only 
interested in science (which is why I was there in the first place). Pages later, a leading 
RAF officer put the boot in: the fellow is so useless he does not even carry a bottle 
opener. I remember the occasion distinctly. I was collecting plants on my hands and 
knees at the eastern end of the atoll. A shadow looms over me and asks if I have a bottle 
opener. Alas, I said, I don't think I have. Of course I did (what field worker wouldn't?), 
but I wasn't going to give it to him. And the idiotic thing was that the reason he asked 
was that he didn't have one himself. 
Thereafter things moved rather rapidly. The society chartered the East African 
Marine Fisheries research vessel Manihine, which must have been the least agreeable 
vessel available (in the lab it had a typewriter on gimbals, which never failed to make 
everyone who used it throw up). With Westoll and Duncan Poore (the director of the 
British Nature Conservancy) I joined it in Mombasa. Then we visited Dar-es-Salam, 
Zanzibar, and Diego Suarez in Madagascar. Coming out of Diego Suarez was appalling. 
Poore and I tied ourselves to our bunks, as the ship was pitching and rolling to an 
impossible degree. Soon we had to undo the knots. Stanley had a cabin to himself. It 
was where they stowed the glass carboys of formalin. One broke loose and Stanley had 
clutched it as it rolled around the floor (he was lame in one leg, which didn't help). But 
all was well in the end, though the sea would be up above our knees on every roll as we 
made our way to the heads. 
The skipper was a curious chap. He was obsessed with being suntanned all over, 
so never wore clothes (at least on board); he explained that this was in order that the 
ladies of the night would not giggle at his pallidity when he took his trousers off. But he 
took this to extremes--he even shaved his head. Then he went to his bunk and read a 
book. On one of these occasions, with no one on the bridge, the ship went aground in 
the northern An~irantes, and on a falling tide. It was round-hulled and sinlply went over 
sideways until part of the deck was awash. It seemed obvious to me that when the tide 
rose it would fill the ship before it rolled over upright. "Right," I said to Poore, "let's go 
and do that island over there" (African Banks), and we did. Amazingly, it righted itself 
with no problem and we went on our way. 
Maizihine enabled us to look at Farquhar and Desroches (both in the military 
plans), together with Remire. Later, with Malcolm Coe, who headed the long-term 
tortoise project in Aldabra, we took in D'Arros and St. Joseph Atolls. And I took in Bird 
and Denis on the northern margin of the Seychelles bank. In 1967 with the Royal Navy 
there was Assumption, Astove, and Cosmoledo. Preliminary papers came from each of 
these (many in Atoll Research Bzilletzil 136). Nobody has done much on any of them 
since, with the notable exceptions of the birds and the turtles. But the main thing about 
this odyssey was that on Aldabra I selected the site for the Aldabra Research Station, 
devised a plan (largely adhered to), and pegged the buildings out on the ground. The 
station was built in 1968-69 (Fig. 6). It lasted for 30 years before needing replacement. 
With the generous assistance of the World Bank and other institutions, it has now been 
rebuilt to last at least another 30. 
This is not the place to recount the sometimes bizarre stories of our stewardship 
of Aldabra-except for two. The first involved the cook, a woman, and a third party. 
The cook got into the medical store and used its contents to poison the culprit, who took 
a long time to die. This was in November. The police finally showed up in February. 
There was the somewhat alarming situation that everybody had to sit down for 
Christmas dinner prepared by the guilty man. Of course the victim had been put in the 
ground on the day he died. When the police arrived, they demanded the body. So the 
remains had to be exhumed, placed in a very large plastic bag, and taken out through the 
surf. By that time the body was so decayed that the evidence of poisoning had gone, and 
the man was finally released. On another occasion, one of our Seychellois laborers, a 
young chap, was afflicted with acute appendicitis. Something had to be done. There was 
a full surgical kit on the atoll but no one with any medical knowledge. Radio contact 
was established with the main hospital on Mahe, 600 miles away, and it was decided to 
proceed. He was put on the kitchen table and anaesthetized. Surgery commenced, being 
'I'he Red-C'resttd Stoddart 13ird 
Figure 6. This notice was for macy years on the bulletin board in the Aldabra 
office at the Royal Soclety. Suspected author was D.Y.H. Griffin of the Royal 
Society's staff. 
talked through with the hospital. It rapidly became apparent that the wall of the 
abdomen was more complex than anticipated. One of the assistants passed out at the 
sight and had to be revived. Finally they got through. Nobody could find the appendix- 
the only printed guide we had there was The Ship Captain h Medical Handbook, and this 
deals mainly with the more social diseases common to sailors. So the instruction came 
to sew him up again. A passing tanker was contacted and agreed to take him to 
Madagascar. A month or two later he walked back up the beach again on Aldabra. The 
next scientist due to go there from England was so shaken by this story that he made a 
point of having his appendix removed before he went. There are quite a number of 
stories such as these, but I will recount them in due course elsewhere. 
While all this was going on, there was a parallel development elsewhere in the 
Indian Ocean. Among the military sites selected for "development" was Diego Garcia in 
the Chagos Archipelago. I was sent there by the Royal Society in 1967 with an 
American defense team to see if any objection could be made to its military 
development. The whole business was cloaked in secrecy to a quite absurd degree. 
When we were there a paragraph about the survey appeared in the Times of London: 
when it got to Diego Garcia i t  was instantly taken down to thc beach and burned-a 
security risk, except it had already been seen by every reader of the 7irnes in the world. 
The atoll was by then simply a coconut plantation. I had to say there was no case in the 
terrestrial ecology to object to the military plans. It is now a major fo~ward base for U.S. 
conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. I have been distressed by this ever since. I think 
my original assessment would be confirmed by an independent adviser. But I know 
perfectly well that at that time my thoughts were on safeguarding Aldabra: trying to 
save one, you might get away with; trying to save two, you might lose both. The Diego 
Garcia reports are in Atoll Reseur-ch Bdletzrl 147. All of this Indian Ocean defense 
business took an enormous amount of my time and energy; sometimes I was in London 
for tl~rce consecu~ive days in the week. 
'Ihe main results of the Aldabra work came in an entire volume (over 600 pages) 
of the Phzlosoph!ct!l 7i.mnsact~on.s of the Royal Society (1971) and in The Terr-estrzul 
Ecolom, of Altlrrhr-rr ( 1979). The results of a joint symposium of the Zoological Society 
and the Royal Society, "Regional Variation in Indian Ocean Coral Reefs," organized 
with Maurice Yonge, appeared in 197 1 .  Papers on the floristics and ecology of western 
Indian Ocean coral islands were published in Atoll Research Bzdletirl 273 in 1983. 
Biogeography urlrl Ecology of the Seychelles Islur~cls appeared in 1986. 
But then there were several other things to do. The first was the Great Barrier 
Reef. Maurice Yonge had led the 1928-29 expedition to Low Isles and beyond, and 
Alfred had been on that and then went back in 1935. Both approached the University of 
Queensland, and it was agreed that the time was ripe for a further expedition in 1973. 
The timing was appropriate. The Australian Institute for Marine Science was taking off, 
and there was an opportunity to focus research on the reefs of Queensland. With Dick 
Orme at the university, we put together a program that also involved Janles Cook 
University In Townsville and the Australian National University in Canbena. This was 
quite a complex logistical operation, given the different interests involved, and anyone 
familiar with Cook's first voyage will have some idea of the sea conditions to be 
expected. 1 mapped every island we went to and collected plants: the received wisdom 
at the time was that the flora of the reef islands on the Great Barrier Reef was limited to 
30 or so common Indo-Pacific strand plants. This idea had come from the fact that 
people were more experienced with the islands of the southernmost Bamer than with 
those of the northern. On the northern Barrier we increased the total by an order of 
magnitude (Atoll Research Bulletin 348, 1991). The northern Bamer lagoon is much 
shallower than the southern, where one might think of the islands as oceanic, whereas in 
the north it seemed to me that the flora (which included many species not usually 
known from coral cays) was relict from the time when the lagoon was dry. The main 
results of this were published in The Northern Great Barrier Reef in 1978. 
Then1969 was the bicentenary of Cook's first arrival in the Pacific. He had been 
sponsored by the Royal Society, and it was natural for the society to seek to mark the 
occasion. Through the Southern Zone Research Committee, Maurice proposed a 
commemorative expedition with the Royal Society of New Zealand. There were to be 
two field parties, one in Tonga, focusing on the high volcanoes (notably Tofua where 
Bligh briefly landed after the mutiny) and marine work in Vavau, and the second in the 
Cooks themselves. For this I chose the almost atoll of Aitutaki, which Darwin had seen 
from the Beagle. I assembled a team from the expeditions to the Solomons and the 
Great Barrier Reef. At that time it was only possible to get to Rarotonga by ship and 
then through the reef by barge; tourism did not exist. It was idyllic, and even more so on 
Aitutaki. This was the first island at which the village elders would assemble on the 
beach to pray to God for the safe arrival of the voyagers on the other side of the lagoon. 
I have been back there since-there are now motels and I suspect this practice no longer 
exists. The girls of Teriora High School on Rarotonga put on a display of Polynesian 
dancing on the beach that was truly remarkable. The bishop of the Cook Islands, 
Reverend Bernard Thorogood, a rather large man, insisted on standing between me and 
them in order to discuss the economic conditions of the Cook--I an1 sure it gave hinil 
some amusement. Equally memorable has been the dancing throughout French 
Polynesia. These make the meretricious performances for tourists in Hawaii a deep 
embarrassment to watch. The Aitutaki work appeared in Atoll Rc,rccil-ciz Rrilletrn 190. 
The Royal Society had a special meeting for the Cook bicentenary in 1959. For this they 
erected Cook's tent, his table, and his chair at their rooms in Cariton House Terrace In 
London: on the table stood one of Harrison's chrononleters (normally on the mantel 
shelf of the society's president), still keeping the perfect time that made Cook's second 
and third voyage so spectacular. It was extraordinarily moving to be thus reminded of 
the essential continuity of the scientific endeavor. 
The Cook Islands proved seductive. In the following years I took a party to 
Mangaia, looking at raised reefs and sea-level history; then one to the likewise elevated 
Figure 7. "Me and the Vicar". On 
Rarotonga, discussing our program 
on Atiu, Mauke, and Mitiaro with 
Tom Spencer. 1985. 
reefs of Atiu, Mauke, and Mitiaro (see Atoll Research 
Bulletin 341); and finally to the uninhabited atoll of 
Suwarrow. If I had had the wit to take a metai detector 
to the latter I would by now be rich, given the history 
of the place; as it was, we were faced with a population 
explosion of Polynesian rats. Fortunately, they proved 
to be diurnal-very difficult not to share your lunch 
with, but at least you could sleep at night. The people 
involved in these studies were Terry Scoffin (from the 
Great Barrier Reef Expedition), former students Colin 
Woodroffe and Tom Spencer (Fig. 7), and Sandy 
Tudhope from Edinburgh. Many of the results of this 
work are yet to appear. 
During the late 1970s I also became interested in 
the Cayman Islands. This work centered on the 
Mosquito Research and Control Unit of which the 
director was the rather formidable and highly eccentric 
Marco Giglioli. In fact, his whole family was rather 
unusual. I went there first as a member of a team evaluating natural resources and 
returned repeatedly. Colin Woodroffe and Tom Spencer did their Ph.D. work there, one 
on the mangroves of Grand Cayman and the other on limestone morphology and erosion 
rates. As part of this program, I organized an expedition to Little Cayman; the results 
appeared as "Geography and Ecology of Llttlc Cayn~an" i11 Atoll Keselrrch Bzrlletlr1 241. 
I have never been in a placc worse with mosquitoes. Marco insisted that my students 
undergo what he called biting tests: they were obliged to go into the Iuangroves, hold 
onc arm out horizontally, and count the number of bites they suffered during a tixed 
period. Meanwhile, Marco hovercd overhead in the unit's helicopter to ensure that none 
of them swatted a single mosquito. He himself, after years of work there, had skin likc 
leather and didn't feel a thlng. On Little Cayman we had a screened house and each 
morning the maid swept up pyramidal piles of n~osquitoes on the floor. On Grand 
Cayman people regularly went to the market carrying a can of sn~ouldering rags in the 
hope that ~t would keep them at bay. It was said that it was commonplace for cattlc to 
die because their nostrils had becoine clogged with thcm Marco had rclied on malathion 
and they had become resistant to ~ t .  The fallback was to use ti-ucks belching out noxious 
suspensions: 1 was oilce having supper In a restaurant there M hen onc of these trucks 
backed up to the window and fillcd rhc place wleh whatever the lethal co~lcoction was. 
Everyone fell to the floor under the white cloud and crawled toward the door. 
In my experience, therc was only one place worse in the .~vorld: Barbuda 111 the 
Lesser Antilles. I took a party there of former Great Barrier Reef people; we were 
dropped on the south coast by H.M.S. Hydra. The place was infested with sandflies. 
They instantly got through the mosquito nets in our tents and when bloated could not 
get out. We were forced to take a bottle of Scotch and lie in the sea with only nostrils 
above water. The same was true on Grand Cayman, where one of the largest hotels was 
totally enshrouded in mosquito mesh: go outside and it was a matter of coiljecture 
whether you got down to the beach before they got you. Occasionally, I stayed at 
Government House. The governor was also distinctly odd. For some reason, he could 
not sit at table for dinner but was obliged to lic horizontally on the floor. I had not 
previously had experience of how to carry out a conversation in such a situation. Hugh 
Hefner's black bunny jet called there frequently: there is an issue of Plavhoy carrying 
pictures of young women astride the stilt roots of Rhrzophora. They must have been 
eaten alive. Routinely people were arrested at the airport with suitcases filled with U.S. 
dollar bills. At the start of the Little Cayman expedition, a botanist from Jamaica had 
the plane window blow out next to him at 25,000 feet. He refused to fly again. 
In 1984 I proposed to the Cayman Islands government that there was a need for 
a book summarizing what was known scientifically about the islands, and they agreed. I 
put together a list of chapters, approached all the prospective authors, secured their 
manuscripts, and found a publisher. It became a very substantial volume. Unfortunately, 
toward the end I had become quite unwell and had to hand it over to others. When The 
Cnv?~ian Islands: Natural History and Bzogeography appeared in 1994, my name was 
not on the title page, though in the introduction my role was made explicit by those who 
were obliged to take it over. I regret that after years of toil this book is not formally on 
my curriculum vitae. 
Finally, the Phoenix Islands in the central equatorial Pacific. These are some of 
the most desolate reef islands in the world, but with extraordinary seabird populations 
(including the world's largest population of frigate birds: because of the aridity, there are 
no trees except on two southern atolls and the normally arboreal frigates are necessarily 
ground-nesting, sharing territory with several species of boobies). 'I'he individual islands 
were used fairly roughly in the later nineteenth century by whalers and especially 
guano diggers. In the 1940s there was a doomed pro-ject to settle Gilbertese from the 
overpopulated islands of what is now Kiribati, but because of the aridity these proved 
unsustainable and had to be abandoned. Canton Atoll became a major forward base in 
World War I1 and this was maintained by the Americans into the 1970s. There has, 
however, been a long dispute over sovereignty between Britain and the United States, 
and hence at Canton there were two settlements, one British, one American. This 
arrangement had the bonus that each side maintained meteorological stations in fairly 
close proximity. It is highly u~~usual  on atolls to have this kind of duplication. The 
reason for our interest was that the Phoenix Islands had bccn chosen as the reception 
area for intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from kmdei~bers Air Force Base in 
California. There was clear concern about the impact of this program on the terrestrial 
ecology of the islands. This was headed in Washington by the Smithsonian Institution 
and in England (because of the sovereignty dispute) by the Royal Society So it was that 
Ray Fosberg and 1 were asked to go there and report. We went twice, in 1973 and 1975 
(an exceptionally hectic part of a too hectic life). On the first expedition we were joined 
by Roger Clapp of the Fish and Wildlife Service. He is the most dedicated ornithologist 
I have ever met. He had been with the Smithsonian's Pacific Ocean Biological Survey 
program, which resulted in the most massive issues of the Atoll Researcl? Bzilletirl on the 
birds and other terrestrial biota of many exceedingly remote islands and groups. The 
downside was that his body was continuously infested with bird lice. 1 rather drew the 
line at that levej of commitment, but it never seemed to bother him at all. 
These surveys were only made possible by the astonishing cooperatioil of the 
U.S. Air Force, which had an array of gigantic helicopters on Canton. The individual 
islands of the group are so far apart that f ~ ~ e l  dumps were needed on each one: these 
were swung into place in large plastic bags suspended below the helicopter. Then they 
dropped us and flew away. Now these are islands on or close to the equator, and on 
most of them in a normal year there was no vegetation higher than about 20 centimeters 
and hence no shade. It was quite a shock to the system to be on an island like Birnie 
within 48 hours of leaving England. What was especially interesting was that because of 
their location the Phoenix are periodically affected by the El Niiio phenomenon during 
which heavy rains fall on otherwise desert islands. We had the good fortune to be there 
in a "normal" year and an El Nifio year. The latter are known through the equatorial 
Pacific as occasions of catastrophic seabird mortality. The reason for this has always 
been ascribed to suppression of upwelling and hence in marine productivity and food. 
On the islands it was apparent that ground-nesting and especially heavy birds such as 
boobies had grave difficulty in becoming airborne once the vegetation reached a meter 
in height. 
On some islands the Air Force had trailers occupied by rather lonely men who 
appeared to have very little to read except Playboy. The idea was to track where 
between the islands the ICBMs fell. But by the time of the second visit they were all 
falling in the Canton lagoon; it was rather unnerving to be told at supper that "two came 
in this afternoon." But the need evaporated and the Air Force pulled out, leaving these 
spectacular islands unpopulated and unpoliced: the huge trailers were simply lifted from 
each island and dropped in the sea. Several of then1 have East Asian fishing vessels 
stranded on the reef, clearly for insurance purposes. On Hull, Ray and I came to the 
beach crest on one occasion to find a trawler heading directly to the reef. They must 
have been astonished to see us since they made a right-angle turn and fled. It was 011 
that atoll too that having been put on the beach by helicopter we were met over the 
beach crest by the unmistakable smell of death. Sure enough, there was a very recent 
shallow grave. One wondered slightly what was going on as the shadows lengthened 
and the evening came. The first thing that happens when these ships go on the reef is 
that they string a line to the shore and the crew are then rapidly followed by the rats, 
which is not a good idea on great seabird islands. The plants of the Phoemi\ have been 
published in the Htdletin, but most of the reports are now in near-final form (a 
substantial amount has been plagiarized, having been given in confidence to a character 
who has now sunk fmom sight). 
Another incident at this time was distinctly odd. T had a nlessagz from the 
Foreign Office that a Soviet research vessel wanted to look at atolls under British 
jurisdiction in the western Pacific. They were disinclined to agree unless there was 
someone from Britain to keep an eye on things. Would I go? Never one to turn down the 
opportunity to see a few more atolls, I at once agreed. It was fixed that I would join the 
ship in Madang, New Guinea. The day before I was due to fly to Sydney; I had another 
call, this time from the Ministry of Defence. You are leaving New Guinea tomorrow to 
join a Russian ship, said the voice. I could only agree. Then the voice said, "You will be 
met in the departure lounge at Heathrow by a man in a raincoat canying the Dally 
Telegraph." I thanked my caller and the line went dead. Off I went to Heathrow and into 
the departure lounge. Sure enough the door opens (the chap must have had some means 
of getting through officialdom) and a fellow in a rather grubby raincoat and indeed 
carrying a newspaper made straight for me: he obviously knew who I was. "Look," he 
said, "I'm sorry I'm a bit late but we've just had an office party and I'm rather drunk." 
Then he said, "We can't talk here in the middle of the lomge; we must get our backs 
against the wall." So we walked backwards to the nearest wall. Then he started 
unbuttoning his raincoat and knowing the general sexual proclivities of members of 
British Intelligence I wondered what was coming next. He produced a series of 
telephoto images of the ship I was to join. "Here," he said, "we want to know what this 
antenna does and where it goes in the ship." I had a vision of myself crawling round in 
the bowels of the ship at two in the morning, feeling my way along cables. I had little 
doubt that the outcome would be that my headless body would be found floating in 
some mangrove swamp. Finally he left and I called my wife. She instructed me to come 
home at once and wash my hands of the whole matter. But no, let me see what is going 
on. 
So off I went to Sydney and thence to Madang. "Take me to the Russian ship," I 
said to the taxi driver. "Russian ship? Russian ship? There is no Russian ship around 
here." I was obliged to check in to the Madang Hotel. I was there for a month before the 
ship was found-sailing westward in the Indian Ocean. The ship was called the 
Academician Bogorov, and though it sounds trite to say so, it had simply bogoroved. I 
had called the Royal Society for sustenance to support immediate cash-flow problenls, 
and there was in Madang a bl.anch of my own British bank and I got to know the 
manager slightly. One night I was rudely awakened in the early hours, seized a towcl 
and there at the door was the bank manager with several rather burly locals. "Right," 
says he, "where is she?" He evidently had designs on one of the ladies on the front desk 
and was convinced that I had out-maneuvered him. "My dear chap," I said, "do please 
come in." Eventually they trooped away. But when the Royal Society money did not 
come I was obliged to go to see him in his office and ask him to cash a personal check 
on a bank on the other side of the world so I could actually pay the hotel bill and get 
away. He was evidently a gentleman and did so. Back in Sydney I bought a copy of the 
London 7in1es. In it was the obituary of the academician who had mvited me on the trip 
in the first place. I sent a message to the Rogor-ov saying bon voyage. It was returned a 
month later from Port Said saying thc ship could not be contacted. On the good side, I 
got a paper in Nlrtur-c out of the stay in Madang. On the downside my wife and both 
children got chicken pox while I was in New Guinea and were not pleased at my 
absence. What transpired with the lady in Madang I do not know. 
Before my gentle readers conclude that I seem to have finally lost it, there is an 
equally bizarre follow-up. In 1979 the Pacific Science Congress was held in Khabarovsk 
in the Soviet Far East; I was the British delegate to Council representing the Royal 
Society. By some means, which I cannot now remember, I had a message from a 
Russian reef worker (who shall obviously remain nameless) saying that his wife 
particularly enjoyed Playgirl magazine-would I bring some copies? I should say that 
all kinds of distinguished people were at that time being asked to step to one sidc at 
Moscow airport to explain the contents of their brief cases. My wife said, "You must be 
a total idiot if you do this," but then I thought that I would trust any reef worker 
implicitly as members of a common brotherhood. I had not looked at that particular 
journal before but laid hands on some copies and took off for Moscow. All was well. I 
met people there whom I had known for years and took off for Khabarovsk. I had riot 
been in my room too long before there was a knock at the door. My friend came in, 
motioned me to say nothing, then went into the bathroom and turned the shower on. 
"This is not a safe room," he whispered; "we must go outside and walk around." 
(Parenthetically I have to swear to God that all these stories are absolutely true.) So we 
did, and I handed him the magazines in a brown paper bag. It is easy to see how people 
like Philby, Burgess, and Maclean got away with what they did. I saw something of him 
over the next few days, before going off to the Sikhotin Alin, where amazingly I saw the 
spoor of a Siberian Tiger (I had heard Bengal Tiger in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh but 
never seen them-indeed, I thought the armed Bangladeshis the greater danger to my 
personal safety). He said to me, "You must come to Vladivostok-it is the most 
beautiful city." I pointed out that it was a city closed to foreigners. "No problem," he 
said, "we will put you in the car trunk." Even I began to realize at that point that things 
were getting slightly out of control, and I declined. 
But in the early 1980s Vladivostok was opened up. I was at that time president 
of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 
and had to go to Vladivostok to open up contacts with the Academy of Sciences of the 
USSR. Foolishly I did this in January, which is not a good time of the year to visit that 
part of the world. The statue of Lenin, draped with yard-long icicles still stood outside 
the Khabarovsk Hotel. Khabarovsk airport was filled with mothballed ships they could 
not afford to keep afloat. It was there to my amazement that I finally caught up with the 
Bogorov. I wandered round the ship and took pictures of its lifeboats, which still proudly 
proclaimed the name of the academician. So that was closure on my first New Guinea 
adventure. 
Let me turn for my next reminiscence to the southern Bahamas. In 1985 I was 
approached by Lloyds of London, the insurance brokers, about the sinking of a huge 
tanker taking a very unusual route from the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic. It had 
allegedly gone aground at or near East Plana Kcy, managed to free itself, and then sank 
in 4 kilometers of water. It was photographed by someone in a light airplane as it sank, 
and though it had half a d o ~ e n  compartments it went down liorizontally, suggesting that 
all compai-tments were equally holed (or that all the cocks had been opened ir! each). 
The point was that if such a huge ship llad indeed gone onto a reef the signs must be 
rather obvious. Would I look into it? Well, why not? I was at that time a Regents Feiiow 
at the Smithsonian, and from the days of Tom Goreau I had kept in touch with the 
University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Indeed, I had been there that same year to look 
at the Pedro, Port Royal, and Morant Cays, using their newly refurbished research 
vessel, Curanx. This was a 60-foot converted trawler. The Department of Zoology 
housed a former Cambridge Ph.D. student, Stephen Head, who h2d wide experience in 
the Red Sea. He agreed to come along on a reconnaissance. We flew to Acklins Island, 
the closest to uninhabited East Plana Cay. I told people that we wanted someone to take 
us there. The locals seemed extremely wary, perhaps because of drugs. Finally, I found 
someone with a small boat and outboard who said he could do it. Start early, there by 
lunchtime. A thousand dollars cash, payable in advance, which I did. He would look 
after all the logistics, like eating. Start at dawn. The fellow could not be found until 
almost noon, and then we started off. It was late afternoon that I noticed a trace of land 
far behind us. It was East Plana Key: we were in the open Atlantic heading for Senegal. 
Finally we got ashore. Time for food. "Right," says he, "I'll get the supper if you get 
some edible molluscs off the beachrock." His logistics amounted to building a fire with 
driftwood. Next day we looked at the reefs, which were vast. We saw no sign of the 
tanker, but Stephen did locate another older wreck, from the plates of which he 
fashioned me a rusting parrot fish. 
I put a proposal to Lloyds to do an intensive survey of the area using Caranx and 
a team from Jamaica. It was agreed the ship and I (plus a senior Lloyds marine man) 
would meet on Great Inagua. The Lloyds chap and I had to wait for the ship and had a 
very good lunch. Finally we all made contact and went off to East Plana Key in rather 
rough weather. The plan was to start the next day doing echo-sounding traverses with 
Caranx, with positions being fixed from shore stations. I called it a day in late 
afternoon, having worked with Malcolm Hendry plotting the ship's track. We went back 
to our original anchorage and awaited the ship. It never came. When it was finally pitch 
dark (no moon) we saw stationary lights on the horizon. Evidently what had happened 
was that once the survey was complete everyone congregated aft and had a beer, other 
than the skipper, a Jamaican, who n~anned the bridge. He put the vessel on autopilot and 
proceeded in a straight line. Someone said, "Let's have another beer before that bugger 
Stoddart gets back" (I  quote this absolutely), when suddenly there was an almighty 
crash and the ship was stranded on the reef. This was on the windward face of the 
Bahamas and huge swells were surging across the reef. 
They begged for rescue. We had only a Zodiac and did not know the area at all, 
except for our anchoring the previous night. The only thing to do was to get out of the 
lagoon we had entered and go down in the open sea to investigate. Hendry and I got 
outside through the passage by which we had entered and proceeded eastwards. There 
was absolutely no moon and we could locate the reef only by the phosphorescence of 
the breakers. Finally we got abreast of the ship. I i  was being punched across the reef by 
every breaker, and those 011 board were expecting it to capsize. I refused to go across an 
imknown windward reef at night in a Zodiac. "No," I said, "we'll come to you through 
the lagoon." So we turned about In the Zodiac and made our way by the 
phosphorescence along the windward reef. Simply by dead reckoning I judged the point 
to turn into the lagoon, and ~t worked. Happily, it was the highest springs for about 19 
years and we could ignore all the patch reefs in the lagoon. Soon we were back at 
Caranx. The swells were 2 meters or more and I was afraid we would be caught under 
the bow. The ship visibly moved with every wave. There were more than a dozen people 
on board and some were frozen by fright: their fingers had to be prized from the rails 
before they could jump into the Zodiac. It took half a dozen runs to the beach a couple 
of kilometers away to get them and their gear ashore. On the last trip 1 shouted to 
Stephen Head, the last on board, and said get a case of rum. I still have a bottle of 
Appleton Estate Special that my children are instructed to force between my lips as the 
end grows nigh (they have a problem: when I left Cambridge for Berkeley my 
colleagues gave me a bottle of port of the same vintage as myself, so they have 
decisions to make). 
We finally got everyone on shore and people tried to sleep. It then became 
apparent that East Plana Cay was the last refuge in the entire Bahamas for a relict 
Pleistocene species of Geocapromys, which turned out to be nocturnal. Huge animals 
were soon climbing over everyone as they foraged along the strand line. It is a Red 
Databook species and I foresaw crises of conscience if we were forced to eat the things. 
Mayday calls elicited no response until finally a Norwegian tanker came 
through. We continued working Mayday (though the ship was full of seawater, 
miraculously the radios had survived) and finally over the horizon came the U.S. Navy. 
I was on the ship at the time. It was in a lamentable state-everything was new after its 
recent refit and all a total write-off. In came a Rigid Hull Inflatable manned by troops 
with carbines, all at attention, and the captain in the stem. He came on board. I said, 
"Good afternoon, captain," or words to that effect. He said, "Stand to one side," 
whereupon they swarmed on board and started tearing the panels off the cabin walls, 
doubtless looking for substances. They soon realized we were just inept scientists. In 
resigned tones, he said "O.K., I'll take you to the nearest airport, an overnight trip to 
Great Exuma. I have 14 people on the beach." I said we could take them too and that I 
could guide them through the reefs. With some acerbity he replied that would not be 
necessary. We got there before h m ,  and as he walked up the beach I came down to him 
and asked whether he would like a gin and tonic-with ice. It was one of the high points 
of my life, how to be shipwrecked in style. Well they got everyone on board, and only 
he was left. What about that gin he says. We had three cases -all emergency supplies of 
course--of whiskey, rum, vodka, and gin. When we finally got out to the ship, I could 
hardly get up the rope ladder for the clinking weight of my backpack. 
We arrived at Great Esuina on a Good Friday. All the hotels were full and 
anyway we could not afford such prices. Stepl~en called Jamaica to tell them the sad 
news. Then he called Miami airport and chartered a jet to take everyone back to 
Kingston. The chap from Lloyds and I waved them fa-ewe11 and then took off for Fort 
Lmderdale. The people making !he Insurance claims on thc tanker l i d  a ficli: ddy, 
knowing that we were trying to show that the recfs in the area of the alleged grounding 
were more than 5 meters deep, and we managed to go aground on reefs virtually at sea 
level. Indeed, they lost no time in sending a q o u p  to Last Plana Key to document the 
debacle. By that time the locals had stripped the wreck of anything of the least value. 
The case came to trial in thc High Courts of Justice in London. I had a couple of weeks 
sitting in my suit, shirt, and tie and was never called upon to speak, only to listen to 
encomiums about my incompetence (which was in fact that of employees of the 
University of the West Indies). The lunches near the High Court were excellent. The 
case was finally settled out of court as the plaintiffs' case collapsed, and I found it all 
rather profitable. As did Lloyds, who saved something like 5 million pounds. 
One further anecdote will suffice. Soon after coniing to Berkeley I saw the 
opportunity of extending departmental interests in the Pacific. I had already done a great 
deal in the Cooks, but these islands were now so much more accessible than the Indian 
Ocean. I got a substantial grant for work on paleocllmates based on coral evidence. 
Thinking of good places to go where I hadn't been before, it stmck me that Ball might 
be rather pleasant. I had only been in Indonesia once before, on a UNESCO workshop. 
There I was accompanied everywhere by Indonesian scientists from the Institute of 
Oceanography in Jakarta. It was a great delight to reexamine the islands surveyed by 
Umbgrove and Verstappen decades before. The reefs themselves were a disaster. The 
slime of the pollution in Jakarta Bay was impossible to get off your skin; the reefs were 
dead. With no sediment supply, the islands were eroding to the point of total 
disappearance. But I imagined that Bali would be different. I recruited graduate students 
and a new faculty member and finally flew there. I arrived in Bali at two in the morning, 
together with the contents of several other jumbo jets. The students were there to meet 
me, and my new faculty colleague was traveling with me. She got through immigration 
sooner than I did. I got to the desk, the passport was stamped, and then someone 
shouted, "That's him!" I was suddenly surrounded by two dozen troops with rifles. They 
already had my suitcase. We set off rather briskly down the hall to what I imagined 
would be the hospitality lounge. Then I saw a sign saying "Departures." The lounge was 
full but we went straight through the departure gate. There was an armored vehicle into 
which I was bundled. It then took off across the airport to a jet with its engines running. 
I had been deported to Guam. No reason was given other than this was a direct 
instruction from Jakarta (evidently all visitors to Indonesia have their names and 
passport details sent ahead to Jakarta before the plane lands). It so happened that I knew 
the British ambassador in Jakarta f o ~ m  previous discussions in London about the 
Pitcairn Islands, but at two in the morning that was not much use, and obviously 1 
would not be let loose near a telephone. So having left San Francisco on a Thursday 
afternoon I landed back again on the Saturday evening. This caused me some 
annoyance. The British Foreign Office was explicit that whether or not a state had the 
right to admit people was entirely a matter for them. After endless badgering I learned 
that I had been deported as "a threat to state security." It is a sadness to me that the 
Indonesian scientists I wrote to asking for an explanation-some I had known for two 
decades-never replied to my letters. I knew that this kind of thing had happened to 
American scientists. Hence I spoke against the proposal to hold thc last Inlernational 
Coral Reef Symposiun~ in Bali. Somehow and at the last minute, the Bali symposium 
was pulled off? but not without its considerable embarrassment. It remains my view that 
170 one in science or out of it should lend legitimacy to such government actions. 
This is, I think, enough abo~at my fieldwork in the reef seas: there is a great deal 
more to tell, but I shall do that eisewhere. It has taken me to the tropics up to three tmes  
a year for some 40 years. But 1 early realized that there were occasions when it was 
difficult to go there. And since I am trying to demonstrate that behind it all was some 
grand strategy, let me say that I ran a parallel program on the morphology and 
hydrodynamics of salt marshes, using the input of perhaps hundreds of undergraduates 
over the years. This was highly labor intensive and indeed rather tanpleasant work. It 
turned out that the best tides for recording crucial data were in the middle of the night in 
December. Often we worked on the Norfolk coast when the seawater on the marsh 
surface had frozen into sheets of ice. There were memorable occasions through the years 
of this work. As on the northern Great Barrier Reef, these were macrotidai marshes and 
thus really rather tricky to handle. There was a rather dire occasion when 1 took dozens 
of students to the marsh and unfortunately checked the tide tables for the wrong year. 
By the time I realized this it was too late: the tide was already flooding in at something 
like a meter a second and the channel width was about 300 meters. There was nothing 
for it but to go for it. Students did not seem to understand the urgency of the situation 
until they saw the smaller lighter women unable to keep their feet on the ground and 
starting to be swept away. It once happened to my wife, and 1 could do nothing more 
than observe the situation through binoculars. She survived. There was another situation 
when I deployed everyone across the marsh to measure velocities and then had to go to 
Edinburgh to collect a medal for fieldwork. As I was doing this, there was a storm surge 
through the North Sea, which means that the tide floods in and doesn't ebb for several 
hours. People were obliged to stand at their stations up to their a~mpits in frigid water 
for hours. It is impossible to move on the marsh during an over-bankful tide because 
you cannot see where the major channels are. To my amazement, no one ever actually 
died on these occasions. More to the point, the work resulted in a string of papers that 
changed the way that marsh morphodynamics are understood, and they led to a number 
of Ph.D. dissertations, often by students who then went to do the same kinds of thing in 
mangrove swamps and on coral reefs. 
My other back-up, as it were, against the day when active fieldwork on the reefs 
would draw to a close, was to look at history. I had the very good fortune to be a 
graduate student at a time when the vast archive of tlie papers of Charles Darwin 
became accessible in tlie University Library at Cambridgc. Indeed, I think I may have 
been one of the first to get into them. There I found the first statement of Darwin's 
theory of the development of atolls, which he wrote on board the Beagle between Tahiti 
and New Zealand, and which I transcribed and published in the Rzrlletzr~ in 1962. 
Thereafter I pursued Darwin and had several more papers, including some of my 
fworites. It also led me to archival work on Huxley, Wilkes, Jukes, Agassiz, and others, 
on most of which I have published. Some small part of this appears in my book 0 1  
Gcogr-rrph?? crnrl Its History. but there was more to come: I have since published a 
numbcr of papers on these historical topics. 
Perhaps I should also mention that my childhood interest in Tibet Ied to a major 
coninlitsilent 111 China after that country became more open follow in^ the death of 
Chairman Mao. I was at that time a member of the British National Conmiittee for 
Geography, and I suggested to it that the time was ripe for an interaction between 
British and Chinese geographers. The committee set up a subcommittee to discuss the 
matter, of which I was a member. To no one's great surprise, the subcommittee 
recommended that a delegation should go to China to begin the process, and it also 
recommended that the delegation comprise all the members of the subcommittee. So I 
arrived in Beijing in 1977 on the first of niany visits. Apart from traveling widely 
throughout the country, I also taught later at Nanjing University, and the only thing 
approaching a textbook that I have ever written derived from one of those courses (Hai 
an j.zr hierz picn Izua [Geomorphology of low coasts], 1982). This Chinese work 
introduced me to a quite extraordinary group of Chinese scientists, most of whom at one 
time or another canie to our home. It also brought me into contact with one of the 
greatest scholars of the twentieth century, Joseph Needhani. y wife and I were quite 
amazed to be invited to a small dinner party held in Gonville and Caius College (of 
which he had been Master) to celebrate his eightieth birthday: a group came form 
Beijing especially for the event. It also brought us into contact with another 
extraordinary person-Noel Odell, the last person to see Mallory and Irvine on the north 
face of Everest before they disappeared. I could write a lot about this China experience 
and the people I came to know, but it has nothing to do with coral reefs. I do remember 
with great nostalgia, however, a cruise down the Yangtze when my Chinese friends 
started to sing Christmas carols in English, and it soon became apparent that they knew 
the words better than I did. 
I want now to say something about the formal institutional face of coral reef 
science, which I have had the good fortune to have been able to assist in creating. I do 
so because I know that all the most active members of the profession have been born 
after the events that created it. When I came into coral reef studies 40 years ago, the 
subject was strictly delineated. There were the Papers of the Tortugas Laboratory of the 
Carnegie Institution, the Studies of the Palau Tropical Biological Station, the work of 
Gardiner and the Percy Sladen Expeditions in the Indian Ocean, that of Sewell on the 
John Murray Expedition, Kuenen on the Snellius Expedition, and the Funafuti report in 
1904. In the background was the work of Vaughan and Davis. There were the reports of 
the drilling on Bikini and Enewetak. Fairbridge weighed in with his massivc paper on 
the Great Barrier Reef in 1950, and his 1961 paper on sea-level change, which really set 
the cat among the pigcons. 'l'here were the rcports of the Pacific Science Board 
expeditions in thc Pacific to Arno, Onotoa, Raroia, Kapingamarangi, and Ifaluk, many 
of which appeared in the Rlrlletin. And, ovcrarching eve~ything. were the reports of the 
Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 191 8--29 undcr Maurice Yonge. 1 have never ccased to 
be amazed at what the menlbers of that expedition did, given that none of them had ever 
seen a reef before. The reports on the nuclear tcst sites in the Marshalls were beco~ning 
available. Hut the point is that, first, the literature was readily co~nprchensiblc, and 
second, that these were clearly going io be extremely exciting iimes for anyone in that 
field. I i  was 111 that context that 1 did my eal-licr fieldwork anti then did a summary paper 
in Biolog~crzl R e ~ w w s  in I969 ("Ecology and Morphology of Recent Coral Reefs"); a 
fi~ture Darwin Medallist told me at the time that it had got him through his P11.D. I 
doubt if it could be done ii: so small a compass today. Oddly enough, I finti copies of it 
that I gave away when i t  appeared priced in antiquarian book catalogs at up to $90. It is 
good to know that one's lifework still has value. 
In 1967 Maurice Yonge received a letter from S. Jones, director of the Central 
Marine Fisheries Research Institute at Mandapan~ Camp in south India, inviting him to a 
syn~posium on coral reefs to be held in January 1969, under the auspices of the Marine 
Biological Association of India. Maurice did not feel that he could go and suggested that 
I go in his place. Since I had to be in New Delhi anyway in December 1968 it seemed 
sensible to stay over and go to the Mandapam meeting. I had a letter from Jones in 
October 1967, responded, and rather to my surprise was at once appointed chairman of 
the Advisory Committee. This led to a close association with the meeting convener, C. 
S. Gopinadha Pillai, whose thesis had been on the corals of India. So before Christmas 
in 1968 I flew to Madras and then took the train to 1Wandapam. Christmas itself was 
quieter than usual, though I had had the foresight on arrival in India to procure a card 
authorizing me to buy alcoholic liquor in that prohibitionist country; this allowed some 
kindling of the festive spirit, albeit solitarily. 
The meeting began on 12 January and lasted five dabs. Of the 72 attendees, only 
24 were from overseas. But the latter were a very interesting g r o u p p e o p l e  who were 
or were shortly to become household names in reef science and only a few of whom had 
previously met others. It is worth listing their names: Gerald Bakus (United States), 
Werner Barthel (West Germany), C. J. Bayne (United States), J. P. Chevalier (France), 
Michel Denizot (France), Ray Fosberg (United States), Peter Glynn (United States), Bob 
Johannes (United States), Ernst Kirsteuer (United States), Lawrence McCloskey (United 
States), Hans Mergner (West Germany), Len Muscatine (United States), Michel Pichon 
(France), Y. B. Plessis (France), Klaus Riitzler (United States), Bernard Salvat (France), 
Georg Scheer (with Anneliese) (West Germany), Raoul Serene (Singapore), S. Sukarno 
(Indonesia), Frank Talbot (Australia), Maria Vannucci (Brazil), and myself. The group 
seemed to develop a new dynamic when the Scheers arrived later, having been exploring 
temples, and in a taxi clearly on the point of expiry. They leapt from the vehicle and 
immediately started dancing. This year Georg had his ninetieth birthday, but sadly 
Anneliese died a few weeks later. Georg had been among the first underwater reef 
scientists, working with Hans Hass. It is remarkable, considering the small number of 
people involved, how many countries were represented It took a little time after the 
meeting, but at last a very substantial volume of proceedings appeared-it must now be 
one of the scarcest books in the history of coral reefs. 
Apart from the fonnal paper sessions, there were wide-ranging evening 
discussions and a final plenary session. I had drafted five recommendations resulting 
from the symposium, and these were unanimously adopted. The most important of these 
was the fifth: "That in view of the success of the Mandapam Camp International 
Symposium on Corals and Coral Reefs, such meetings should be held at intervals of 
three years at centers of reef studies." A Continuing Committee on International Reef 
Symposia was elected mrith myself as chairman; its iiiembcrs ~n!cluded Micliel Pichon 
and Frank Talbot, and anyone who could provide input. There were two other 
dm elopments from this meeting. One was the syn~posium I organized in ~Vay 1970 
under the aegis of the Royal Society and the Zoological Society of London on Regiorla! 
Variation in Indian Ocean Coral Reefs, at which many of the Mandapam people 
(including Dr. Pillai) camc together again; this was published in i 971.  The second was a 
volunle sponsored by UNESCO, Cord Reef Keserrrch Methods, edited by myself and 
Bob Johannes, which was published in 1978. This is still quite widely cited but is in 
urgent need of revision. 
There then ensued a two-pronged line of development. First, our Continuing 
Committee had no fonnal status in the scientific world: it had a purely ad hoc origin and 
to be effective had somehow to be linked with entities having a formal connection with 
the International CounciI of Scientific Unions (ICSU). My first thought was the 
Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), of which George Hemmen was 
secretary. SCOR was meeting in Oban, Scotland, in 1970, and I went there to make the 
case for the Continuing Committee to be a SCOR subcommittee. Either because of or in 
spite of the diversity of H~ghland malts available at the meeting, SCOR did not take the 
bait: oceanography was a blue-water operation, and they did not want to get involved in 
coastal shallows. George and I consulted on where to go then. The International 
Association of Biological Oceanography (IABO) was meeting in Kiel at the end of 
March 1971. There was a small problem with this: we were expecting our second child 
at that time. My excellent wife understood the gravity of the situation absolutely: it 
could be make or break for the Continuing Committee. She did her valiant best. I was 
present at the birth on the morning of 28 March; I landed in Hamburg that same 
afternoon and was in Kiel by the evening. George Hemmen again showed his magic. 
The next day he brought the chairman of IABO, Professor Hempel, out from one of the 
sessions. The three of us conferred in the rather chill sunshine, and the deal was done. 
Thus was born the IABO Coral Reef Committee as well as our son. (Parenthetically, I 
might say that having named our daughter Aldabra, I had in mind that the son might be 
named Diego Garcia. It was pointed out to me with some force that if that happened he 
would never be able even to cash a check. So he is simply Michael-just as well given 
the gigantic military development Diego Garcia has become and the uses to which it has 
been put). The IABO Committee was vital to establishing the international credentials of 
the coral reef community. I chaired it for several years, and then it was taken over by 
Bernard Salvat, who certainly realized its inmense significance. 
The inmediate outcome of this was that it was now possible to pursue the idea 
of further international symposia with some authority. At Mandapam I had discussed the 
possibility of the Great Barrier Reef with Frank Talbot, who was then director of the 
Australian Museum in Sydney. The Great Barrier Reef Committee in Brisbane had 
recently taken on a new lease of life. I found it necessary to go to Australia on several 
occasions in connection with the detailed planning of the Royal Society and Universities 
of Queensland Expedition to the northern Great Bamer Reef, which occupied the 
second half of 1973. The University of Queensland at Brisbane was a leader in this, and 
its representative, Dick Orme, also came to Cambridge. A specific invitation was made 
for the Australians to host what was mow being called the Second Inten-national Coral 
Reef Symposium. They agreed to do so, and in no half-hearted manner. They proposed 
to charter a cruise liner and sail from Brisbane north to Lizard Island and back, thus 
giving members the chance to see new reefs and islands every day. I was rather 
staggered by this because the financial inlplications were alarming. Such liners had to be 
chartered long in advance, and in this case before anyone had been asked for registration 
fees. My wife was alarmed that we might lose the house because of it. But the 
university was behind it and a substantial donation was received. Great credit must go to 
David Montgomery, long-time secretary of the Western Society of Narturalists (WSN) 
as well as a teacher at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. At 
the outset he was able to guarantee a block booking of WSN members. David was 
himself an indefatigable meeting organizer, and many will remember his meetings on 
Indo-Pacific marine biology, based on Guam, and on marine biology and evolution in 
the Pacific, in New Zealand, and the really extraordinary pan-Pacific field trips (Fig. 8) 
he built into them. Sadly, he died in 1993. 
The Great Barrier Reef Symposium was an amazing success; it was also 
astonishing that no one was drowned as hundreds of people leapt into the sea every day. 
On one occasion while Dick Orme was at our house in Cambridge I sent a letter asking 
Prince Philip i fhe would lend his name to the venture; his reply opens volume 1 of the 
proceedings. It was also remarkable to have on board two members of the 1928-29 
Expedition: Sir Maurice Yonge and Alfred Steers. After that the International Symposia 
developed their own momentum. Bob Ginsburg organized the third in Miami in 1977, 
Ed Gomez the fourth in Manila in 1981, Bernard Salvat the fifth (Fig. 9) in Tahiti in 
1985 (sadly the last to be attended by Ray Fosberg and Marie-HClkne Sachet), and these 
were followed by Townsville, Australia, in 1988, Guam in 1992, Panama in 1996, and 
Bali in 2000. The Panama meeting (the last that has published its proceedings) attracted 
nearly 350 papers. Mandapam now seems a very long time ago. But great credit should 
be given to the fundamental role played by S. Jones and Gopinadha Pillai for starting 
the ball rolling over 30 years ago. 
The IABO Coral Reef Committee was instrumental in getting this series of 
meetings off the ground, but more needed to be done to structure coral reef science. 
During the 1970s a small group of British reef scientists met regularly at Churchill 
College, Cambridge, where I was a Fellow, to review how reef science could be 
encouraged. We convened a much larger meeting, also at Churchill, in 1979; it was 
Figure 8. A seminar on one of D a ~ c  Montgomery's Figure 9. Dancing at the final dinner party of the 
field trips in Fiji Fifth International Coral Reef Congress in Tahiti. 
1985. 
attended by a number of people from Europe. Barbara Brown at the University of 
Newcastle-on-Tyne was a major driving force behind these developments (Fig. 10). We 
had the advantage too that her husband Richard Dunne was a naval lawyer with 
experience in drafting legal documents. A second meeting was held in Cambridge in 
December 1980, and at this the International Society for Reef Studies was founded. This 
in the long term made the IABO 
Committee redundant, though both 
coexisted until 1996. I was the first 
president of ISRS. 
The society had two main 
initiatives. One was to hold annual 
meetings at mainly European locations. 
After Cambridge, there was one in 1981 
at York, in 1982 at Leiden, in 1983 at 
Juan Les Pins, in 1984 in Miami, in 
1986 at Marburg, in 1989 at Marseille, 
in 1990 in Noumea, French Caledonia, 
in 1991 at Berkeley, California (I had 
moved there from Cambridge in 1988), 
in 1993 in Luxembourg, in 1994 in 
Austria, and in 1995 at Newcastle-on- 
Tyne. Of course, 1996 was the year of 
Figure 10. Engaged in field work with Barbara the Panama Symposium (at which my 
Brown, one of the founders of the International wallet was stolen, including all credit 
Society for Reef Studies. cards and the Green Card. Try entering 
the United States without that critical documentation. I called my wife and asked her to 
block all the credit cards. She attempted to do so, but a number of credit card operators 
refused to accept her instructions: apparently i t  is a coinnlon trick in North America for 
disgruntled wives to call the company as soon as the husband is out of the door and 
cancel all his cards. So at vast expense I had to do it myself from Panama. One 
continuously learns life's strategies.) 
The second initiative was to have a journal devoted to coral reef science. Frank 
Talbot started this process after disc~issions with Konrad Springer before the Miami 
meeting in 1977. It was felt at that time that the idea was son~ewhat premature, but by 
the time of Manila in 1981, the council felt more confident. Springer was again 
approached and agreed to publish a journal under the title of Corcrl Reefs, under what I 
thought were extraordinarily generous terms. They knew very well that it takes time to 
establish an interdisciplinary journal and were prepared to take a loss for the first 
decade. It began slowly: it constantly amazed me that ISRS members continued to give 
their papers to journals in their own special field rather than to Cord Reefs. It was also 
a major task to get such a journal going. Volume 1 ,  number 1 appeared in 1982. I served 
as coordinating editor for a decade until Richard W. Grigg took over in 1992. Those 
early years were only made possible by the extraordinary efforts made by the subject 
editors and reviewers. It has taken 20 years, but Coral Reefs is now established and 
thriving. Its papers come primarily from the United States and Australia, and then a long 
way behind from Britain and France. 
The purpose of Coral Reefs was different from that of the Atoll Research 
Bulletin. The latter had always been a journal of record-descriptive of reefs and 
cataloguing their plants and animals. This purpose it has served for 50 years, during 
which it has published almost 20,000 pages in 500 numbers. Ray Fosberg invited me to 
join the editorial board in 1969 and subsequently Ian Macintyre (1974), who is now the 
editor-in-chief. Many of my longer papers were published in it. Coral Reefs was to be 
more process oriented, quantitative, and experimental. It is amazing to see it so succeed. 
The other ISRS publication, which has Iikewise flourished, is Reef Er~cozrilter, the 
newsletter. I was at first not particularly enthusiastic about this, knowing the level of 
commitment required. And there were at that time other reef newsletters in circulation. 
Indeed in its early years its appearance has been termed sporadic. But now it is one of 
the most interesting newsletters there is. 
I think I have now said enough. I am fully aware that coral reef science has 
moved on spectacularly since those early years. The International Coral Reef Initiative 
in 1995, the International Year of the Reef in 1997 (which Bob Ginsburg did so much to 
promote), and the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (with Clive Wilkinson as a 
major promoter) have truly transformed and internationalized the way that coral reef 
studies are done. I have no doubt that had I not been around, the International Coral 
Reef Symposia, the International Society for Reef Studies, and Coral Reefs would all 
have come to pass. Likewise, the Atoll Research Bulletin was thriving before I came 
along and will be long after I have gone. I simply happened to be around at a 
particularly fruitful time to make things happen, and also the testosterone was flowing 
freely over the years. It has been my privilege to have known some of the great spirits 
of coral reef science: Maurice Yonge, Frederick Russell, and Alfred Steers from the 
Great Barrier Reef Expedition; Seymour Sewell of the John Murray Expedition; Hany 
Ladd and Josh Tracey from the drilling operations; Tom Goreau in Jamaica-the great 
names from the past. 
1 want, however, to enter one caveat. In 1960, in Belize, 1 was told by two 
elderly American doctors on South Water Cay that I faced a dismal future (given my 
coloring) if I continued with a life of cavorting on tropical beaches. Of course I 
disregarded them. And of course they were right. Ten years ago, I had my first 
substantial surgery for skin cancer, and this has continued every year ever since (Fig. 
11). It is the case that at that time the lotions available were purely aesthetic; there were 
Figure 11. Advice to those entering coral-reef 
studies: always, but always, wear a hat. Four 
surgical portraits out of many from the last decade. 
no such things as sun protection factors. 
That is no longer the case. The fact is 
that once it begins i t  is too late to do 
much about it. Three years ago I had a 
virtual world record aggressive tumor on 
the top of my head. I t  took skin grafts 
and seven months of daily dressings to 
heal. We got fed up with it-I went to 
Harvard to work on the Agassiz archives 
and then we went to retrace Humboldt's 
steps in highland Ecuador (even staying 
at haciendas where the great man 
himself had stayed, as indeed had La 
Condamine). But it was all rather 
tedious. On the day I finally abandoned 
the daily dressings we went down to the store to buy a chicken. It was custon~er 
appreciation week in that particular chain, when the staff were supposed to engage in 
meaningful conversation with their customers We got to the checkout and the chap at 
the till said, "Have you been chased by a bear or something?" Then he said, "But you 
must be all right, then-when I'm not here I work as an undertaker, and everyone I've 
ever seen who looks like you has been dead." I am not normally lost for words and 
could only ask for my chicken. 
These difficulties were compounded by the onset of senile diabetes. Predictably, 
this affected the lower extremities, which needed special care. Four years ago, I was at 
the University of California Research Station on Moorea (Fig. 12) and staying in a very 
elegant guest house. There were a lot of rats around after I had gone to bed, and I 
constantly kicked them away. But then I fell asleep. At three in the morning I got up to 
go to the washroom and when I put the light on was appalled to see blood all over the 
floor. It was the time of the 0. J. Simpson trial and that gave me pause. Rats had eaten 
deeply into my right foot--deep holes into raw flesh. I dressed the wounds as well as I 
could and went back to sleep. Whereupon they did the other foot. The next night they 
had a go at my head, though there isn't much to eat on the scalp. When I finally got 
home, my wife said the top of my head was covered with tooth incisions. I had the great 
pleasure of faxing my physician who was tending the diabetes to announce, "Deeply 
regret, feet eaten by rats." 
The following year there was a meeting in Honolulu I needed to go to, but I 
chose to go to Midway for the albatross 
nesting (years before I had been on Kure 
when the plane taking me in had gone 
into a flight of albatross and disabled its 
engines; I have pictures of disn~embered 
albatross all along the runway). I ran 
round Midway like a lunatic and 
inevitably got a deep foot infection. I 
inanaged to get back to California and 
had a week in the hospital where they 
got on top of it (my brother lost his leg 
in similar circumstances). Then the foot 
rotated irreversibly. under what was 
called Charcot's Syndrome. It is amusing 
to ascertain that he described this as 
diagnostic of paralytic syphilities in 
Paris at the end of eighteenth century. 
Well, there aren't too many of those 
around these days, even in Paris, but it 
evidently is the chief reason for diabetic 
amputation. My good students T. 
Spencer and S. Brooks were so intrigued 
by all this that they went to Paris to 
search out Charcot and indeed found his 
Figure 12. Surveying rhe reefs with a Topcon Totai tomb in a cemetery on Montpamasse Station, Moorea. 1994. 
near the Sacre Coeur. The message of all 
of this is, as the greatest of American geographers, Carl Sauer, said: "Do your fieldwork 
while you can, because otherwise it will be over before you know it." and my doctor 
issued an edict forbidding me to ever be out of sight of a major hospital. One cannot 
change one's life style just like that. A year ago, however, I was on Aldabra and went 
ashore under circumstances that when I 
was in charge there I had forbidden. But 
now, most of the time I am in the library 
(Fig. 13) or the map room at home, 
piecing together the early history of 
coral reef science that I have outlined 
above and trying to complete literally 
dozens of papers that have never got 
beyond the revision stage. And I have 
already bought my tickets to continue 
the fortieth year resurvey of Rendezvous 
Figure 13. The end of the road? The coral-reef Cay in Belize. 
section of my library. I have to say that coral reef science 
has been extraordinarily good to me, and 
also that there has been recognition of my work over the years in the Caribbean (first), 
the lndian Ocean (second), and the Pacific (third). For the Caribbean work, 1 had the 
Ness Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1965 and the Prix Manley-Bendall 
from the Institut Oceanographique de Monaco and the Socikte Oceanographique de 
Paris in 1972. For the lndian Ocean work I had the Livingstone Gold Medal of the 
Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1981. Then for the Pacific work there was the 
Herbert E. Gregory Medal of the Pacific Science Association in 1986 and the Davidson 
Medal of the American Geographical Society in 2000. I was appointed an Officer of the 
Order of the British Empire by the queen in 1979 (Fig. 14), and a Fellow of the 
American Association f ~ r  the Advancement of Science in 2000. I particularly treasure 
the first award of the Darwin Medal of the International Society for Reef Studies in 
1988, and indeed the Founder's Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1979. 
Figure 14. My appointment as Officer of the Order of the British 
Empire (O.B.E.). 
Envoi: 1 would like 
to end these 
reminiscences Lvith words 
from the prologue to 
volume 1 of the 
autobiography of Bertrand 
Russell in 1967 (1 would 
like to quote the entire 
passage but would run 
into copyright problems, 
which I do not have time 
to sort out). It may seem 
impertinent of me to 
claim Russell's words for 
myself, but they are so 
true. "Three passions, 
simple but 
overwhelmingly strong, 
have governed my life: 
the longing for love, the 
search for knowledge, and 
unbearable pity for the 
suffering of mankind." 
Russell describes the first 
of these, and then goes 
on: "With equal passion I 
have sought knowledge. I 
have wished to 
understand the hearts of 
men. I have wished to 
know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by 
which number holds sway above the flux." And then he continues, quite amazingly for 
the author of Pritzcipici Muthet?~riticci and so many other great philosophical works: "A 
little of this, but not much, I have achieved." Every coral reef scientist-indeed every 
scientist-can only echo this. Little by little, you expand the frontier with the unknown, 
find out more about the natural world of the reefs, and try to make a difference. And the 
difference comes with one's interactions with the closest colleagues and life-long 
friends, and with the extraordinary students one has been privileged to know. They 
know who they arc and I cannot attempt to name them here. 
Russell ended his prologue with these words: "This has been my life. I have 
found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if chance were offered me." So 
would I though I am sure that all of us could do it better the next time around. 
I would like herc to publicly acknowledge thc cnormous debt 1 owe in all these 
procedures. First, to George Hemmen, David Griffin, and Len Mole at the Royal 
Society; second, to my school teachers who pointed my ambitions to the study of the 
tropical world; third, to my most extraordinary students: and finally. to all those folks 
from all walks of life who around t'le world over so many years have enabled me to 
follow my star. It has been my privilege to know so many who have been and are indeed 
becoming the salt of the earth. I am acutely aware that without many of them I would no 
Ionger be here. There could be no greater debt. So many expeditions, so many projects, 
so many papers, so much laughter. It has been fun.