We get news that Nico left Nosybe, Madagascar in the ship Ceres at 5am. Hartmut says the sail should take four or five days, bringing him to Victoria by Wednesday 6th or so. Gabriel Despaigne, Peter Goreau, Frank Gutzeit arrive on the Air France flight.
Frank has been a key man in organizing much of the logistics and equipment for Saya 2002. He is an architect with his own practice in Hamburg. He met Wolf in the early '90s while studying at Bremen University, and in '97 worked on the Biorock project in Ihuru Athol in the Maldives which delivered such spectacular results after the bleaching and mass mortality of '98 . Frank is in his mid 30s and married with two daughters under 4. It's the first time he's been away from the girls.
Gabriel is a 29 year old diver and student in environmental law at the University of Panama. He is president of the Oceanic Association of Panama. "We set up environmental protection projects, teach people how to take better care of their marine environment, and lobby the government for sustainable development of marine resources".
To earn a living - not an easy matter in Panama - he works as a Divemaster with tourists, and sometimes as a diver on marine engineering and recovery operations. He is around 5 foot 2, but powerfully built, with dark eyes, dark olive skin and strong Central American features.
Gabriel is also involved in the Iniciativa de la Sociedad Civil por el Ambiente (Civil society initiative for the environment), a coalition of voluntary groups in Panama, which mobilizes coalitions of union, environmental, social justice, church, and other groups to protest environmental abuses and protect the poor.
At present, those who suffer the consequences of environmental damage have little recourse under law. One of Gabriel's ambitions when he qualifies as a lawyer is to address this injustice.
Before he met Tom and Wolf at the 8th [?] International Coral Reef Symposium in Panama in 1996 [?], Gabriel and his colleagues had already built an artificial reef near Portobello in Panama. A 4-storey structure made of scaffolding, it had become a haven for lobsters, king crabs and many fish species that were seriously over-fished.
"I heard Tom speak at the Symposium and it all clicked", says Gabriel. Soon, they were accreting on the structure at Portobello, using solar panels as a power source, with excellent results.
"In our association we had been trying to figure out a way to help corals grow. People were taking coral for calicanto [a building material made by melting corals down]. In Portobello, the government dredged hundreds of metric yards to rebuild old Spanish buildings. It was a massacre. Tom almost cried when he saw it. You could see that the corals were alive when they were taken".
Since about '97 Gabriel has been working with Tom and Wolf on coral nursery and restoration projects with the Kuna Indians in their homeland of Kuna Yala (San Blas in Spanish) - a sovereign indigenous territory within Panama on the Caribbean against the border with Colombia. "Our coral nurseries in Kula Yala are a big success. You can really see the life coming back".
The Kuna have an exploding population."Often they get married at 13, and by the time they are 25 they have six or seven children", says Gabriel. Almost everybody lives from collecting lobster, king crab and fish, which are dependent upon the rapidly deteriorating reefs. They have the highest rate of poverty in the country, with consequent health problems. They know they have a problem and they want to solve it.
"There is enormous resentment of the Europeans, and they fight back. They protect their land and sea with their own well-armed police force. But we have built up a very good relationship with them. This is because we are not trying to take anything away from them. We give all our time, effort and materials for free. They know that. Tom's relationship with the Kuna goes back ten years or more. He has been in continual dialogue with many of the Sailas" [elected village chiefs].
Gabriel contrasts their good relations with the failure of the Smithsonian Institution. Enraged by the arrogance and high-handedness of that premier US science body, the Kuni recently threw them out.
Peter, Tom Goreau's brother, is a geophysicist. He is coming to Saya to help with underwater construction (he's a bear of a man, more than twice Tom's weight, with a huge bushy beard), to cook and to write poetry.
Born in Jamaica in 1951, he graduated in geology from Bristol University, England, in 1975, and completed a PhD in the geophysics of the northern Caribbean at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts a few years later. In 1977 he was part of a survey team led by John Slater of the SW Indian Ocean triple junction (where the African, Indian and Australian continental plates meet), a few hundred miles from Saya. He then taught geophysics in the US for a number of years.
"The seas are the family trade", says Peter. "These days I am at least as interested in writing poetry about scientific subjects as geophysics". I recall an essay by Richard Feynman from the 50s or 60s in which he criticizes poets for their lack of interest in science. Phenomena such as deep time, stretching hundreds of millions of years and more into the past, would be a wonderful subject for poetry, Feynman suggested. "Yes", says Peter,"it annoys me that so many poets would rather write about things that never will exist than the amazing things that have done and do".
That afternoon, Gabriel and Roman work on the Johnson 35 outboard motor for some hours. It has major problems - something we cannot afford in what is to be the workhorse among the tenders to the boats at Saya.
Towards the end of the afternoon I drive with Tom, Peter and Steve up to Venn's Town, a ruined Anglican mission high on the saddle of the island. A double avenue of massive buttressed trees leads like a cathedral aisle to a lookout point to the West. Giant fruit bats fly around the surrounding peaks.
Here, from 1835 onwards, the children of slaves, freed by the Royal Navy from Arab dhows plying the East African coast, were educated in Victorian values before, er, being sent to work on the plantations. The indented coast is over a thousand feet below. From this height a gold and blue sea stretches for an enormous distance. High piles of fair weather clouds with colours beyond naming recede almost endlessly.
In the evening, the Goreau brothers tell some of the family history. Tom and Peter's grandfather Fritz was a photographer who spent much of his professional career with Life magazine. He photographed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, among others (the latter at the time of the first nuclear chain reaction in Chicago in 1942), and took pictures of the first nuclear explosion at Alamagordo, New Mexico in 1945. After the war he did the first aerial and underwater photographic survey of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, working with the great pioneer of coral reef science, Sir Maurice Young of Cambridge University.
Fritz's son Thomas (Tom and Peter's father) was a pioneer in the use of SCUBA for the scientific study of coral. In the late 1940s, when SCUBA was still a military secret, Thomas Goreau, a medical doctor and specialist in respiratory medicine, made important technical advances in SCUBA such as re-breathers. He went to conduct extensive surveys of coral in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Sir Maurice Young adopted Thomas as his intellectual heir.
Young Tom and Peter were often in the boat when their father dived. "When my father started diving you could see 150 to 200 feet down in the water", says Tom. "Now those waters are dark and green. Every reef had huge groupers and other carnivorous fish up to 400lb. Within two years these were all gone [to spear fishermen, also using SCUBA]. Now no carnivorous fish reaches breeding age. If you dived around Jamaica you could see stag-horn coral all round the island at one depth, elk-horn at another. Now that is all gone".
"Most of the people controlling funding in this field have never seen the reefs before human intervention did so much damage" says Tom. "Our father saw it all, thirty years ahead of anyone else. But nobody wants to pay attention to what he found. It's like the Yellow Emperor in China, who ordered that all the books be destroyed, and then had all them rewritten in his own name ".
Fritz helped his son Thomas to a job that probably killed him. In the 1950s, the US was testing nuclear weapons in profusion across the Pacific. The military wanted to know the effects on coral reefs. Thomas was one of the first divers in the water to record results. "In some cases" says Peter, "the bomb would just fizzle. Large amounts of plutonium would be dispersed in the lagoon. The divers would plop right in". Thomas Goreau died of cancer in 1970 at the age of 45. Maurice Young, active in coral science since the 1920s, paid tribute to his great student.
Caspar Henderson
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