Acknowledgements 

I gratefully acknowledge the help given me in the writing of this book by the following:

Anna Badini, Anabel Briggs, Paul Brown, Peter Chaplin, Mario and Roberta D’Itria, Frank Donn, Earthtrust (Hawaii), the scientists and crew of the R/V Farnella, Stephan Feuchtwang, Bill Foster, Luis Go, Abdurrahim Hasim, Ellis Hillman, Frank Sionil José, Abdurahim Kenoh, Cdr Reuben S. Lista (Philippine Navy), George May, James May, John May, Anita McConnell, Gilbert Tait, Saladin S. Teo, Marcello Vanni, Ian West.

I would like to thank the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, Deacon Laboratory, and especially Mike Somers and Tony Rice for their courtesy and help. Above all, Quentin Huggett has been unfailingly patient and generous with his time, a prodigality which it is a pleasure to acknowledge.

My agents deserve – and get – my very warmest thanks for their tireless support and help, as does Patricia Reynolds.

This book’s commissioning editor was Richard Cohen, and I am conscious that it owes everything to his original encouragement. To that extent it remains his. The task of taking it on fell to Neil Belton, my present editor. I could not have wished for a more sympathetic and astute interpreter of a project whose intentions must initially have appeared idiosyncratic and opaque.

Finally, my gratitude to Mark Cousins is not easily expressed. One hardly thanks a friend for friendship, but one might well wish to put on record the affectionate recognition of a great debt. The entire book was written very far from his scrutiny, but scarcely a line without awareness of his presence. Private congruences apart, there was for me an especial punctuality about his public lectures at the Architectural Association in London, 1990–1, which had a profound effect on this book, just as the lectures had on all who heard them.

The above persons are exonerated from all responsibility for any errors of fact, judgement and taste, which are entirely my own.

Illustration acknowledgements

1. from Zetetic Astronomy (1873) 2nd edition.
   British Library, London 
2. Private Collection 
3. (i) & (ii) from The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs by Charles Darwin, (1880)
   (iii) & (iv) from Corals and Coral Islands by James Dana, London (1872)
4. from The Christian Miscellany (1860)
   Mary Evans Picture Library  
5. from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne, (1870)
   Mary Evans Picture Library  
6. Miraculous Draught of Fishes by Gustav Doré
   Mary Evans Picture Library
7. from Concise Oxford Atlas (1952)
   Oxford University Press