The Coral Triangle is the most biodiverse marine environment on the planet. It covers the waters of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste, the triangle of ocean that contains seventy-three percent of the world’s coral species, six of the seven known marine turtle species, and over three thousand species of fish. It is the centre of global marine biodiversity in the specific sense that marine biologists use the term: the place where more living species per square kilometre exist in the ocean than anywhere else on Earth.
The member from Singapore who has been diving in the Coral Triangle on the day boats from the Batam resort or the Bali liveaboard knows what the Coral Triangle contains. They have not been in it in the form Discovery provides.
Discovery anchors in the Coral Triangle for the Indonesian chapter of the circumnavigation. Not at the resort island with the day boat access to the managed dive sites. At the anchorages in the interior of the archipelago, the Raja Ampat bays that the resort day boat visits between ten and two and that Discovery is anchored in at six in the morning when the current is optimal and I am already in the water with the first members of the day.
The Banda Sea seamounts that the liveaboard fleet visits from Ambon and that Discovery reaches from its own anchor, with full tanks from the onboard compressor, without the liveaboard’s departure and return schedule that determines when the diving happens rather than what the conditions are when the diving is best.
What the Asian Member Brings That Others Do Not
The Asian member who joins the Coral Triangle chapter brings something that the European member who has never been to this part of the world does not bring: the specific cultural and historical knowledge of the region.
The Indonesian archipelago, the Banda Sea spice island history, the Malay maritime tradition, the specific relationship between the Asian civilisations and the ocean that produced the boat-building cultures of the archipelago, this context is not the background knowledge for the Asian member. It is the lived knowledge of the person whose region this is and whose understanding of the ocean they are sailing through is the understanding of the person whose history was shaped by it.
The dinner in the Banda Sea anchorage with the member from Jakarta who understands what the nutmeg plantation on the hillside above the bay means historically, and the member from Amsterdam whose country’s East India Company went to war to control it, and the member from Tokyo whose country’s wartime Pacific strategy passed through these same waters, this is the conversation that the offshore context enables and that the shared offshore experience grounds in the present rather than the historical.
The Naora Coral Triangle chapter is not for the European who wants to see Asia from the boat. It is for everyone who has something to bring to the table in the anchorage below the nutmeg hill. The Asian member has more to bring here than almost anyone else on the boat. The table is waiting.
