THE SEA IS calm and Jay Maclean patiently explains that we are going to be getting into the water from the beach via a narrow channel he maintains between reefs. Next, about five feet beneath the surface, we’ll take a reading on the antique thermometer that he uses to measure the water temperature each day. After that, we’ll be free to enjoy the rest of our dive on the coral reef, though Jay—who looks a bit like Woody Allen—thinks he will probably be too cold after about forty-five minutes. At eighty degrees Fahrenheit, the water feels deliciously warm to me, but I’m more accustomed to the fjords of the North Atlantic.
The underwater show is splendid: we are in the Philippines’ Verde Island Passage, in the South China Sea. For coral reef experts, this region is the epicenter of a golden triangle of biodiversity that stretches from the northern Philippines to Bali and the Solomon Islands. A team of Australian researchers has observed the area around Verde Island for the last thirty years, counting—among a thousand other colorful creatures—more than a hundred species of fish along the coastline that Jay and I are exploring at a leisurely pace on this tropical January day in 2017. Looking for nudibranchs, moray eels, and sea turtles, I hold my breath, free diving for much longer than is comfortable, telling myself that I might never see anything like this again, surrounded by an under-water garden whose biodiversity is unmatched anywhere on the planet, and in the company of one of my literary heroes.
Jay is a quiet man who still manages to talk about his feelings, which makes him all the more charming. I know that the idea of being interviewed makes him uncomfortable, but he has been generous enough to invite me to stay for a whole weekend. The wood and bamboo house that he shares with his wife, Margie, is three stories high, surrounded by tropical vegetation, with a view over the South China Sea. I sleep out on the veranda without a mosquito net, the nighttime breeze and a large fan enough to keep the little critters away from me. In the morning, the melancholy song of the bulbul and the smell of bacon wake me from a deep sleep, the first good night’s rest I’ve had in weeks.
After our aquatic adventure and his third coffee, Jay lets his gaze drift over the horizon, avoiding eye contact, and tells me about his life. A native of southern Australia, he studied biology and initially worked for the fisheries management agency in Canberra, a snooze of a job that he soon left for New Guinea and a project developing pearl oysters. The work was fascinating, the country dangerous, and Jay enjoyed the adventure, but his wife—pregnant with their third child—did not. They returned to Sydney, where Jay joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Outside of work, he played in a rock band, painted, and wrote short stories “just for himself” in a style tinted with his self-deprecating sense of humor and a very British sort of melancholy. Spotting his talent, some shrewd manager named him editor of the fisheries department’s publications. “The previous person there acted as a post office; just took all the papers from the scientists and sent them off to the journals. When they came to me with their papers I said, ‘I’m not gonna send this, it’s not in the right format, it’s just not good enough.’ I liked working on the manuscripts and making them more readable.” This kind of job has disappeared from most research institutions, but for many years, scientific writers were employed full-time, the idea being that science types can barely string three words together, which is sometimes true. In the United States, that was how Rachel Carson, author of The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, initially earned a living while she wrote her now-famous books in her spare time.
Jay is a worthy follower of Carson’s tradition: “The word got out that someone was helping with writing, and before long I had a room full of papers,” he says. Daniel Pauly, during one of his whirlwind tours, passed through Sydney in 1979, soon after he started at ICLARM. As was his custom, he dropped by to nose around the local fisheries department and noticed a bearded man next to a chalkboard that contained a waiting list of about a dozen publications. “We could use someone like you in Manila!” Daniel exclaimed. Jay didn’t hear anything else from Daniel, but a few months later, entirely by chance, he saw a job posting in the ICLARM bulletin that matched his talents suspiciously well. He applied and went to Manila for an interview. “I didn’t want to move to Manila after that,” admits Jay. “When you come from a country like Australia where everything is quiet, it was nerve-racking to see policemen with guns outside every building, quite the same as it is now. I was staying in the Mandarin Hotel, near the office, which was the big hotel in those days, and there was a shoot-out in the lobby. It was like the Wild West.” Jay returned to Sydney and after not hearing anything for another two months, he received a simple message: “Come as soon as possible.”
“I wasn’t very motivated,” Jay remembers, “but when I went back to Australia, the same week, there was a big shooting in the Supreme Court in Melbourne. That convinced me that no country was really safe.” In the interim, Jay had separated from his wife, and, with no attachments, he left for the Philippines. At ICLARM, Jay and Daniel hit it off, to Jay’s relief: “Daniel does not like small talk. He’s very quick in judging people, sometimes wrong, usually right, and once he has established what you are, he’ll either talk or walk away. Once he decides someone is a lightweight, he will move on. He’s sociable when the topic interests him. But otherwise, he goes away and reads a book.”
At ICLARM, Jay joined a lively team where Roger Pullin, the new director of aquaculture development programs, had also just been recruited. “The 1980s were magic, although the music wasn’t as good as in the sixties,” muses Roger, who grew up in the north of England in the middle of Beatlemania and founded ICLARM’s rock band with Jay. “At ICLARM, we had amazing support staff—secretaries, program assistants, research assistants—all people who were not only very pleasant to work with, but were competent and hardworking.”
Roger, who had left a tenured position at the University of Liverpool, never regretted his jump into the unknown. “We had far more support and freedom than in academia. It was very fertile, especially for Daniel,” notes Roger. “Daniel was breaking new ground,” Jay adds, “and finding new methods that people could apply to any fish in any place in the world.” “Of course, we were all run ragged, working very hard, and applying for funding was a big part of the job,” Roger admits. Their search proved fruitful, however: ICLARM soon received an annual budget of six million dollars, including two million for Roger’s aquaculture programs in developing countries. Even then, there were already serious doubts about the capacity of wild fisheries to feed the ever-growing human population, and aquaculture was put forward as the miracle solution.
Jay, for his part, left the fish alone and got down to writing. “First I upgraded the ICLARM newsletter, making it more interesting by putting in some articles and by getting people to write different things.” Jay also organized and edited three publication series: the ICLARM Technical Reports, ICLARM Studies and Reviews, and ICLARM Conference Proceedings. These thousands of pages would become the privileged means of distributing scientific texts produced through their research programs, including the one on San Miguel Bay. “Daniel was lucky that we had this publishing machine and a pretty good distribution system—plus, we were sending out all the stuff for free. We had a big audience, in a way, and that really helped Daniel a lot,” Jay concludes. Meanwhile, Daniel, who had only published three texts per year in the 1970s, churned out ten in 1980, twenty-one in 1982, twenty-five in 1984, and thirty in 1987, most of them as first author.
Working alongside Daniel and Jay was another person of letters: Leticia Dizon, who had studied English literature at the University of the Philippines and joined ICLARM in 1977. She worked as an editorial assistant and program manager for Daniel. “Being Black in a US organization, you have something to prove. He just worked, worked, worked. But he was kind, and we adored him,” she recalls. This opinion is backed up by everyone I meet during my research in the Philippines. According to Annabelle Cruz-Trinidad, his assistant starting in 1987, “Daniel used to give out really difficult tasks around five PM; the staff would dread that moment, but he would call us ‘marvelous’ in the most charming way. Even if he was pushing people too hard, they wouldn’t mind because he was pushing himself, too, working harder than everyone.” Jay adds, “When he wants something, he sometimes resorts to the injured-bird tactic, as he calls it himself, when his voice breaks to just that extent that it sets off your emotions, like a tuning fork on a sounding board.”
During break time, philosophical debates ensued. “Daniel saw a book about angels on my desk,” Annabelle recalls, “and after that, he always tried to get into discussions about God and the Pope, and how much he hates the Pope, but I respected him as an atheist, and as a person I knew he was wonderful. And I knew he was a leftist, but at the time he was a ‘pure scientist.’ It wasn’t until later that he became more involved and started working with people, NGOs, who can communicate the message.” They also talk to me about Daniel the jokester, though his colleagues didn’t let themselves be outdone: Leticia was pregnant with her second child when Daniel, a young parent himself, gently poked her swollen belly. “‘Don’t do that, or I’ll name it after you!’ And this is why my son is called Paul Daniel,” she tells me, laughing.
This good humor also included the group of coworkers with whom Daniel, Sandra, and their children spent their weekends by the sea, one of the few leisure activities Daniel allowed himself during their years in the Philippines. In the 1980s, their circle mainly included Jay and Roger, who had married island beauties Margie and Tessie—the latter being none other than the actress Tessie Tomas, who played Imelda Marcos onscreen and hosted a popular talk show on national television. Margie and Tessie’s high-society flair brought out Daniel’s dubious sense of humor: when Jay introduced Margie to him for the first time, at a reception, Daniel looked over her daring black dress and asked her if she was in mourning. Margie would learn to tame the beast, however, and they all met up in Anilao—a few hours south of Manila, on the Verde Island Passage—on a regular basis. The three families shared the rent on a group of bungalows, their base camp for hundreds of diving excursions. A weekend in Anilao usually involved four dives, two on Saturday and two on Sunday, before heading back to Manila over the dirt roads. Daniel only went on the morning dives, preferring to spend his afternoons in the shade, sitting on a rock on the beach. He wrote or edited one or several manuscripts, pinned firmly to his signature yellow clipboard, pencil flying across the page and one hand nervously twisting a lock of hair.
Daniel’s first dive dates from his time in Kiel, but it was his Filipina student Annadel Cabanban who took him on his first tropical outing. “He lent me some money to register for my first diving course, and as a thank-you, I took him on his first dive. He was so focused on the technique that he barely looked at the fish. Later, he told me that when we reached twenty meters [sixty-six feet], he looked up from the depths and thought, ‘Daniel Pauly, are you scared?’”
He would, however, look down his nose at the joys of coral reef diving for many years. Once, he gloomily told Jay that “all I see down there is conflict, fish spending their time chasing each other and fighting—I’m swimming through the tragedies of the deep.” It took him some time to accept diving’s recreational value—and to pass his certifications. As Jay tells it: “It goes without saying that Daniel’s diving followed the same absentmindedness as his terrestrial pursuits. His near-legendary exploits sometimes brought him into close proximity with ‘Z’—the fisheries scientists’ term for ‘total mortality.’ This could include becoming separated from his buddies during dives and causing them to search the sea bed fruitlessly, while he was bobbing at the surface, having either forgotten to open the air valve properly, used an empty tank, or used a full tank in record time, or filled his buoyancy jacket with air by mistake, or simply because he left the group unannounced. Or he’d bring his son’s or daughter’s equipment by mistake, and their masks would be too small and would leak, or in any case, they did not have prescription lenses like his own, and he would have to be led through the dive like a blind man.”
“But we love him,” Jay concludes, “And I think I can speak for many people who have helped repair his broken wings from time to time in saying we still love him.”