by Eskil Engdal
The ship is enveloped in fog when he first catches sight of it.
“That’s a fishing boat,” Hammarstedt says.
“Oh yeah,” first mate and second-in-command Adam Meyerson confirms. “It looks very much like the Thunder, Peter. It’s got the same paint configuration and the forward bridge.”
From photographs Meyerson is able to recognize the outline of the vessel now emerging out of the mist, its protruding wheelhouse and the characteristic steep stern of the old trawler.
The jovial first mate grew up with the sea as his neighbour in San Francisco. He sailed from California to Hawaii in a small, single-mast sailboat as a 27-year-old and has been a mate in the employ of Sea Shepherd for five years. At his most intense, he resembles Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, when he pops into room 237 of the Overlook Hotel.
The news begins to spread on the ship. Soon the wheelhouse is filled with crew members and Hammarstedt orders one of them to take note of their position. Then he pulls down the window of the wheelhouse and lifts his binoculars to his eyes. The ship is partially hidden behind an iceberg. Through the binoculars he can see flocks of seagulls diving for the fish waste being thrown overboard. The net floats hang over the rails, ready for deployment into the ocean.
From the bookshelf furthest back in the wheelhouse, Hammarstedt takes down the red folder containing pictures and descriptions of “The Bandit 6” and rapidly leafs through the pages to the picture of the Thunder. Meyerson hangs over his shoulder.
“That’s the Thunder,” Hammarstedt says. He smacks the palm of his hand into Meyerson’s and presses the alarm. Five short blasts. That is the signal to the crew for everyone to prepare themselves.
They have found the ship that nobody has seen for two months, and which has been wanted all over the world by New Zealand, Australia and Norway for extensive poaching of fish. The vessel is the most notorious of them all, the vessel that ministers, bureaucrats and criminal investigators from four continents are hunting for. It has been mentioned in speeches and discussed at seminars, its movements recorded in strategic documents and investigation protocols, and it has been blacklisted and hunted for eight years.
The Thunder is the evasive ship that turns up only to suddenly vanish again, as if it didn’t really exist, but was merely a folktale, Hammarstedt thinks. He knows that the analogy might seem melodramatic, but in the course of recent months, the Thunder has become his own Moby Dick.
“17 December 2014, 2118 hours,” Hammarstedt notes in the ship’s log.
He then sets the ship’s course for his prey.
3
OPERATION ICEFISH
FRANKFURT, 2012/VERMONT, 2014
May 2012. After having presented his identification to the security guard, Peter Hammarstedt was led behind the walls of the more than 100-year-old, high security prison Preungesheim. He had been asked to come right away; therefore only a few hours passed from the time he boarded the flight from Stockholm until he was standing before the prison on the outskirts of Frankfurt city centre.
In one of the cells was his boss.
Paul Franklin Watson had been on his way from Denver to the film festival in Cannes, but when he stopped over in Frankfurt, he was taken aside by the German police and placed under arrest. During the almost 40 years that had passed since he founded Sea Shepherd, Watson had had his regular altercations with the law. While in custody, Watson learned that Costa Rica had circulated an arrest warrant for him through Interpol due to a dispute between Sea Shepherd and a shark fishing vessel ten years earlier.
While the red carpets were being rolled out in Cannes, the Hollywood darling Watson was sitting in solitary confinement in the old prison. To be sure, the activist and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson was also on her way to show her support, demonstrations were taking place outside German embassies and one of the group’s supporters had offered to pay Watson’s bail, but the Sea Shepherd leader was at risk of being extradited to both Costa Rica and Japan. It was the thought of a legal battle in Japan that frightened him the most.
When Watson came out of the cell to meet Hammarstedt, he sat down at the tiny table in the visitors’ area and glanced up at the walls, which were decorated with children’s drawings. Hammarstedt thought Watson appeared collected and unworried.
“In the time ahead, you will represent me in the media and at all events. If anyone should question it …,” Watson said, and then stopping mid-sentence, he pushed a small piece of paper across the table. The text was written in longhand.
“Peter will represent me. Paul Watson.”
Hammarstedt was already a loyal veteran. He had taken part in all of Sea Shepherd’s large-scale campaigns since 2003. For ten Antarctic summers he had chased Japanese whaling ships through Antarctica, and had spent almost five years at sea. He always obeyed the lines of command and had proven fearless. When he left the prison, Captain Peter Hammarstedt was Sea Shepherd’s new front man – the Commander.
After eight days in prison Watson was released on bail in the amount of EUR 250,000 and placed under house arrest in a flat in the Bornheim district of Frankfurt. Every morning at noon he walked over to report to the local police station. He stepped down from his positions of president of Sea Shepherd USA and the captain of the flagship SS Steve Irwin. Now he had received a tip that Japan wanted him extradited and he was convinced that the nation would not give him a fair trial. There were also rumours circulating that the mafia in Costa Rica had put a price on his head of 25,000 dollars.
Watson killed time in the evenings by walking along the bank of the Main River. And planning his upcoming escape.
One evening in August he shaved off his beard, dyed his chalk-white hair and disappeared in a car over the border to the Netherlands. He felt ill and weak from an infection in his leg, had neither a passport nor a cell phone, and didn’t dare use his credit card.
On the coast of the Netherlands Watson was met by the sailboat the Columbus. The Sea Shepherd logo was covered up so the boat wouldn’t attract needless attention. After the Columbus had sailed out into the English Channel and onward into the Atlantic Ocean, four months would go by before Paul Watson appeared again in public.
In the Southern Ocean.
When the German police realized that Watson had escaped, Japan also requested that Interpol issue a Red Notice – the type of notice issued for war criminals and murderers. With two Interpol notices hanging over his head, Paul Watson had extremely limited freedom of movement.1
In the summer of 2014 Watson lived on a farm in Woodstock, Vermont – an unreal place, a rolling, green landscape surrounded by maple trees, and classical farmhouses with colonnades and big windows in a resplendent New England style. In the midst of all this there was a Japanese Zen garden, a teahouse and a Buddhist meditation temple that was a meeting place for a group of resident monks. On an open field a cluster of standing stones had been arranged in a circle – a copy of Stonehenge. From the property Watson could see all the way to the majestic White Mountains in New Hampshire. There was also a small lake on the property, in which nobody was allowed to swim since the guests’ suntan lotion could harm the frogs that lived there.
This surprising corner of the American dream was owned by the billionaire Pritam Singh – born Paul Arthur Labombard in an impoverished industrial town in Massachusetts. After having run away from a neighbourhood fraught with alcoholism and poverty, he reappeared as a radical student activist and later as a spokesperson for Sikh rebels in northern India. Back in the USA, on borrowed money and with a powerful desire to accomplish something, he fought his way up the ladder of the construction industry. Before long, the left-wing radical with clear blue eyes, a bristly beard and turban was one of the largest property developers in Key West on Florida’s southern tip.
There, by chance, he met Paul Watson. Pritam Singh was quickly incorporated into the movement’s entourage of high-p
rofile celebrities. He part-financed Sea Shepherd’s flagship the Steve Irwin, named after the Australian environmentalist and crocodile hunter who was killed by a stingray, and took the position of vice president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Paul Watson understood the value of connections with celebrities from the business and entertainment worlds. They had the power of seduction mixed with wealth. Or as Watson expressed it: “With two James Bonds, Batman, Captain Kirk and MacGyver on the board we are invincible.”2
In Vermont on this warm midsummer evening, Watson was the host of Sea Shepherd’s first global conference. The 250 guests, the majority dressed in black, were blessed by local Mohawk Indians. Seminars were held on the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, sharks in China, meditation and veganism – and demonstrations of drones. Captain Peter Hammarstedt gave a lecture on the whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean.
The whale defence movement constituted Sea Shepherd’s history and was its signature cause. After having left Greenpeace because he felt the organization was not sufficiently militant, Paul Watson purchased a 20-year-old trawler, christened it the Sea Shepherd and set out to hunt for the whaling vessel the Sierra. The Sierra was an uncannily effective hunter, said to be behind the slaughter of as many as 25,000 whales. When Watson found the ship in the waters between Spain and Morocco, he gouged a three-metre large hole in the hull of the whaling ship with his own bow.
It was a foretaste of what was to come.
In 1992 Watson and his fiancée, the former Playboy model Lisa Distefano, tried to sink the whaling ship Nybræna while it was docked alongside the quay in Lofoten. The sabotage earned Watson a sentence of 120 days in jail, but he was released when the Dutch authorities refused to extradite him to Norway.
In an open letter to the Norwegian people Paul Watson claimed that he had sunk eight ships and damaged eight more. In the letter he also gave an account of the movement’s ideology: Sea Shepherd did not submit to anything but what Watson called the laws of nature.
“The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is a law-abiding organization. We rigidly adhere to and respect the laws of nature or lex natura. We hold the position that the laws of ecology take precedence over the laws designed by nation states to protect corporate interests … The smell of guilt is already a stench in the nostrils of God,” he wrote.3
For Watson there was no point in sinking a ship unless you could show the world what you had done. In response to the reality series Whale Wars, which depicted Sea Shepherd’s fight against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, the influx of funds and volunteers to the organization increased dramatically. Due to the success of the Animal Planet series, the whaling campaign overshadowed everything else Sea Shepherd did.4
Now Peter Hammarstedt wanted to do things differently. During the former expeditions to Antarctica, he often saw gillnet floats that fleets of toothfish poachers had left behind, before disappearing into obscure ports in Southeast Asia. Hammarstedt wanted Sea Shepherd to change its profile, abandon the whaling campaigns and become known as a protector of the untouched Antarctic.
In Vermont, in the combined meditation room and library with the high ceiling, Peter Hammarstedt took Paul Watson by the arm and requested a chat. The UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague had ordered Japan to stop its whaling activities in the Southern Ocean and a portion of the Sea Shepherd fleet was standing idle.
“What do you think about our taking on the hunt for illegal fishermen in Antarctica?” Hammarstedt asked.
“Do you think it’s possible to find them?” Watson replied.
“I’m sure of it,” Hammarstedt said.
“OK,” Watson replied.
Four months later, the captains Peter Hammarstedt and Siddharth “Sid” Chakravarty were sitting in a hotel room in Wellington. Operation Icefish had been publicly announced. Down in the harbour the campaign vessel the Sam Simon was ready to set sail for the Southern Ocean. For weeks Captain Chakravarty had been travelling around visiting ship graveyards in Mumbai in search of parts for the powerful winch he must build on the Sam Simon to haul up the kilometre-long gillnets he expected to find. The Bob Barker, with its large fuel capacity, more powerful engine and a hull reinforced to withstand the ice, would find and pursue the ships.
That was the simple plan.
“For how long will you follow them?” Chakravarty asked.
The question came as a surprise for Hammarstedt. He had no ready answer.
“For however long it takes?” Chakravarty asked.
“Yeah. For however long it takes,” Hammarstedt answered.
4
THE OCCUPATION
HOBART/THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
“Oh, no! Not the Sea Shepherd-crazies.”
That was the first thought that flashed through Martin Exel’s mind when he heard about Operation Icefish.
As general manager of environment and policy for the fishery giant Austral Fisheries, he had lived and breathed for the Patagonian toothfish for more than 20 years.
Exel had administrated a secret intelligence network to confront and stop the pirates; he now operated a fleet of legal vessels that fished toothfish in the Southern Ocean. At Austral Fisheries, Sea Shepherd was commonly viewed as a gang of crazy, unscrupulous assholes – Paul Watson was a man who made a fool of himself with deranged initiatives and lived in an alternative universe. Martin Exel was convinced that Sea Shepherd would attack the legal toothfish ships, spray down the hulls and generally speaking raise hell.
When he asked other environmental organizations for advice, they stared at him in terror and told him to stay away from Sea Shepherd.
The publicized Sea Shepherd expedition could end in a commercial disaster for Austral Fisheries. Sea Shepherd’s massive media machinery would frighten luxury hotels and top restaurants all over the world, deterring them from serving Patagonian toothfish. Martin Exel saw no other solution but to meet Sea Shepherd halfway and arrive at a form of collaboration.
“The task of searching for one or two ships in the Southern Ocean is almost impossible. We have been chasing these vessels for 20 years and know how complicated and costly it is,” he explained in a meeting with Jeff Hansen, the director of Sea Shepherd Australia.
In the early 1990s, Austral Fisheries sent its flagship, the 85-metre-long Austral Leader, on a series of expensive and disastrous expeditions to the Antarctic. The hope had been of finding schools of hake. Every day the company lost large amounts on the search, which did not reward them with anything but empty nets. In their desperation they scrutinized the maps for places where they could commence regulated fishing activity and finally they found their way to Macquarie Island, halfway between Australia and Antarctica. Out of the depths a species emerged that was virtually unknown in Australia, the Patagonian toothfish. But the Australians were too late: the toothfish stock had already been over-fished by Russian vessels.
Austral Fisheries continued its expeditions deeper and deeper into the Southern Ocean, all the way to the volcanic island Heard Island. There, the Austral Leader sailed straight into a fleet of Argentinean pirate ships. When the Icelandic shipmaster navigated his way into a confrontation with the Argentinean ships, the battle over the toothfish commenced. After having threatened to arm its own ships, Austral Fisheries initiated a highly unconventional and costly intelligence operation to thoroughly investigate the illegal fleet and its owners. The company hired former elite soldiers to acquire information. In Perth they set up a direct line for anonymous tips, they put up posters in ports and offered a reward of 100,000 dollars for information about the toothfish pirates. Eventually they had a network of secret informants all over the world on their payroll. It was a gamble with high stakes and enormous risk. The cover of one of the secret informants was blown and he was beaten up so badly that he was hospitalized for three months. What they first believed to be a gang of opportunistic amateurs, turned out to be a well-or
ganized and cynical crime syndicate. The pirates hired private security companies which kept every single patrol ship under surveillance. When a French patrol vessel refuelled in Réunion on its way to the Antarctic, the pirates knew that it would take four days before they reached the fishing banks and notified their ships.
The management of Austral Fisheries compared the situation in the Southern Ocean to an invasion that challenged both the nation’s sovereignty and its financial interests. Between 40 and 100 pirate vessels were pillaging the region, many with Spanish and Norwegian backers. When the Australian authorities sent ships to Antarctica to hunt for the pirate fleet, it was the country’s first armed operation in the region since the Second World War. Operation Dirk took place 4,000 kilometres from the Australian mainland and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. In one of the most peaceful regions of the world something was taking place that resembled a war, even though the Antarctic Treaty prohibited all military activity.
When the patrol ship the Oceanic Viking, equipped with two 50 calibre machine guns, arrived at Prydz Bay in December 2006, it ran into the pirate vessel the Typhoon 1, the ship that would later come to be known as the Thunder.
5
HOT PURSUIT
THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, DECEMBER 2014
“I wanted you to be the first to know.”
The Sam Simon has just set sail from Wellington to join Operation Icefish when Captain Sid Chakravarty receives a phone call from the Southern Ocean. It is Peter Hammarstedt.
“I have in front of me the Thunder, I believe. We got several fishing buoys in the water. We got a visual ID on the vessel. They are 5.7 nautical miles away. Based on its superstructure and its profile it has got to be the Thunder,” he reports.
After having concluded his conversation with Chakravarty, Hammarstedt quickly climbs down the stairs from the bridge, trots through the messroom and into the lounge. He enthusiastically informs the crew of what lies in front of them.