ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book arises from travels that have taken me to every ocean of the
world, supported by the kindness of friends and strangers. There are too
many to thank individually and, in some cases, I never knew their
names. I think, for example, of the Chilean lorry driver who stopped to
ask what I was doing on a remote and fearsomely steep mining road in
the Atacama desert. When I told him that I was looking for golondrinas
de mar (storm petrels), he directed me to a salt mine, a visit that indi-
rectly led years later to the discovery of a new colony of a barely- known
species. I think too of the Greek captain of the Ithaca Reefer, the tramp
steamer on which I first travelled to the Pitcairn Islands. Because I never
grasped his actual name, he became Captain Archimedes in my mind,
and encouraged me to eat lambs’ brains when the ship’s company cele-
brated St. Nicholas’ Day. I desisted.
But there are also the people and organisations that have provided
longer term support. Chief among these are the Departments of Zool-
ogy at the Universities of Oxford and then Cambridge that, for 40 years,
have furnished me with a home base from which to set forth to explore
our wonderful world, and a desk at which to write up the results of
those explorations. Colleagues at those Departments have been contin-
ually curious and supportive. This was no less true of members of the
Percy FitzPatrick Insitute, University of Cape Town, through which I
experienced the rumbustious Southern Ocean, the domain of albatrosses
and penguins.