ESMOND BRADLEY MARTIN,

The wildlife conservation world lost one of the leading researchers into the global ivory and rhino horn trades in early February this year, tragically murdered in his home in Nairobi during an apparent robbery.

Esmond and his wife Chryssee worked as a team in the 1960s and 1970s, researching the maritime trade in the Indian Ocean, which culminated in the book Cargoes of the East. Later, they published several books and pamphlets together on the histories of eastern African Swahili towns.

In 1967, the Martins moved to Nairobi, where they entertained academics, conservationists, wildlife officials and politicians. Anyone of interest would receive an invitation to dinner, where Esmond would pick their brains over a sumptuous meal.

Esmond began focusing on wildlife trade in the late 1970s when he discovered that ivory and rhino horn were increasingly entering the trade chains he’d been studying. He carried over the quantitative methods that he had been using for carpets and mangrove poles to tusks and rhino horns.

In 1999, he and I launched a series of regional ivory trade studies, the first of which was published in BBC Wildlife with the appropriate headline ‘Adding up the ivory’. These detailed studies of the scale and extent of the ivory markets in Africa, Asia and beyond woke the world up to the fact that the trade ban (introduced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) was not working.

His contribution to our understanding of illegal wildlife trade has been immense, and his loss immeasurable. Dan Stiles