by Eskil Engdal
The unexpected change of course triggers new speculations on board the Bob Barker. Has the captain of the Thunder received new orders from land?
It could all be a diversionary tactic, whereby they will suddenly put about and sail south again – or in towards one of the small islands in the region, so more supplies and fuel can be brought on board. Do they have contacts on land? Will a boat come out and pick up the officers, leaving the Thunder and crew to their own devices and the whims of the ocean? Are they making their way to port because it is Easter, a holiday, with a diminished level of activity in the ports?
“They speak Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, don’t they?” Hammarstedt asks.
Adam Meyerson has just come up onto the bridge with his usual prediction that the Thunder is about to run out of both fuel and options.
“My prediction is that this is very near to being over,” he says, and continues: “Equatorial Guinea does have a navy so it’s possible they will come out and see what these guys are up to and hopefully arrest them. Equatorial Guinea has been building its naval fleet like mad men over the last two years. It has the biggest navy in Africa.”
Hammarstedt too has a sensation that the chase is approaching its end. He decides to alert the media in Equatorial Guinea about how the hunted vessel could be on its way into one of the nation’s ports. Media coordinator Michelle Mossfield googles “Equatorial Guinea” and “Media”, but the search engine does not give her any answers.
This is because in Equatorial Guinea there are no newspapers. In the capital Malabo, where the decay chews its way up along the walls of the old, pale yellow colonial buildings, giving them the colour of rancid flesh, there is not a single bookstore or newsstand. It is a coastal nation where fish is imported and the farmlands have been invaded by the creeping jungle − a country ravaged by torture, random arrests, ill-fated prisons, isolation, violence, discrimination and mind control. Not a vessel is to be seen in the waters abundant with fish that surround the tiny state.1
“What kind of place is this?” Peter Hammarstedt asks himself.
For Equatorial Guinea’s ruling family the ocean is a threat and an enemy. In the beginning of the 1970s, the country’s dictator, Francisco Macias Nguema, introduced a ban on all fishing. One hundred and forty-five days after he was elected president in the former Spanish colony, Macias appointed himself absolute monarch and called himself “the unique miracle”.
“The Miracle” was the son of a witch doctor. He had never passed an exam and was haunted by inferiority complexes, nightmares and delusions. In a state of combined intoxication and an accelerating psychosis, he made decisions inspired by his own nightmares. In a speech he called Adolf Hitler “Africa’s saviour”. He set the dinner table for dead guests and terrified servants saw Macias having conversations with the ghosts of men he had executed.
All positions in Equatorial Guinea were filled by members of his own clan. Priests were obliged to mention him in their sermons under threat of torture. He reintroduced traditional medicine, closed the hospitals and fired the doctors. He forbade use of the word “intellectual”, shut down the schools, burnt the books and fired the teachers.
On Christmas of 1975 he executed 150 of his adversaries in a football stadium in Malabo. The soldiers were dressed like Santa Clauses and shot their victims while an orchestra played the Mary Hopkins song “Those Were the Days”. Crucified corpses were hung up along the road to the airport as a terrifying warning to visitors. Macias wiped out families and eradicated villages; of a population of 380,000, 70,000 are believed to have been killed and one-quarter of the country’s residents fled the country. Russia, China and Cuba supported the regime of terror, while French diplomats flirted with the dictator to secure the natural resources of that which was called “the most evil place on earth”.
Agriculture operations collapsed, the small cities descended into darkness, and the island residents jumped into boats to escape. Then Macias ordered that all boats were to be sold or destroyed and the population was prohibited from approaching the beach.
It was the start of Equatorial Guinea’s war against the ocean.
In 1979 Macias was overthrown by a coup d’état. Together with a group of his closest colleagues he fled into the jungle with the nation’s cash reserves, somewhere between 60 and 150 million dollars, which he hid in a bamboo hut.
In the subsequent skirmishes with the coup leaders, the hut was burned to the ground with the entirety of Equatorial Guinea’s currency reserves inside. Macias was finally tracked down, brought before a military tribunal and executed at the Black Beach prison in Malabo.
His nephew Teodor Obiang Nguema took the throne as the country’s new dictator. In the course of President Obiang’s more than 30-year reign, “members of the inner circle have amassed unparalleled wealth through corruption in the form of extortion, embezzlement and theft”.2
In the mid-1990s the country established an international ships register, probably to satisfy the Obiang clan’s insatiable appetite for foreign currency. The register, which was administered from Cyprus and Miami, swiftly attracted a small fleet of blacklisted vessels.
According to Lloyd’s List, as many as 40 ships were sailing around with forged papers from Equatorial Guinea. The US coast guard considered every ship with the country’s flag to be suspicious and immediately boarded such ships were they to sail into US waters. In an alarming number of cases, the coast guard found serious violations of international standards. But it was the tragic fate of the four-masted schooner the Fantome – “The Phantom” – which would make Equatorial Guinea’s shoddy flag of convenience famous all over the world.3
Built in 1927 by the flamboyant Duke of Westminster as the Flying Cloud, the ship was one of the last great traditionally-rigged sailing ships – and one of the most luxurious privately owned yachts in the world. The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis purchased the yacht as a wedding present for Princess Grace of Monaco, but Onassis never received an invitation to the wedding, so instead he left the boat to rust away in an anonymous port in Germany. Finally, the Fantome ended up as a charter boat for luxury tourists in the Caribbean – and with a home port in Africa’s sweaty armpit: Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.
The last time anyone saw the proud rigging of the Fantome standing tall on the horizon was 28 October 1998. As the ship departed from port in Omoa, Honduras for a six-day cruise in the Caribbean, the tropical storm Mitch was building up more than 1,600 kilometres away, but it was moving with a violent and unpredictable force. The Fantome returned to port to let its passengers disembark before it plunged north towards the Gulf of Mexico in search of shelter from one of the most deadly and destructive storms ever to occur in the Western hemisphere. Ashore, it could risk being crushed while docked; the chances of managing the hurricane were greater at sea. But it was as if the hurricane was following in the wake of the schooner. The Fantome quickly ran into winds of 160 kilometres an hour, 12-metre waves ploughed across the bow, from the bridge the captain stared straight into the eye of the storm.
The ship and the crew of 31 were never found and the automatic emergency beacon was never activated. A few weeks later, after the hurricane had died away, some pieces of life rafts that had been torn to bits were found, along with parts of a wooden stairway and life vests with the inscription Fantome, Malabo.
After the wreck, the owner, Windjammer Barefoot Cruises in Miami, admitted that they had registered the ship in Equatorial Guinea for tax reasons. In Equatorial Guinea’s name, the captain and the officers had received a licence and the required certifications without having passed a single exam. Everything was handled by an agent in Miami.
It was the flag state’s responsibility to investigate the wreck; it was never done. Equatorial Guinea’s representative in Miami made reference to newspaper articles and a report from the American coast guard. That would have to do. In the years following the Fantome tragedy, the
toothfish poachers began registering with the bandit regime in Equatorial Guinea. The Kunlun was added to the register in 2004, at the time under the name the Thule, before the ship disappeared again two years later. But the shipping company still continued to use the flag, in all likelihood because they did not believe that Equatorial Guinea would react. When the Sam Simon discovered the ship in the Southern Ocean, the name plate was clearly legible: Kunlun, Malabo.
For the investigators of Interpol and the bureaucrats following along with the chase from land, it will be a nightmare if the Thunder sails into Equatorial Guinea. Then the ship will very likely slip through the fingers of the judicial system once and for all.
For Hammarstedt, the nightmare has a different quality. The worst scenario would be to chase the Thunder into a port where he and the ship will be put under arrest, while the officers of the Thunder will be free to saunter away from the quay and board the first flight to Spain.
35
MAYDAY
GULF OF GUINEA, APRIL 2015
Darkness has descended abruptly upon the Gulf of Guinea, and at a mere 5 knots the Thunder glides like a shadow into the night. Earlier in the day the Thunder and the Bob Barker crossed the equator, at lunchtime an airplane appeared on the radar and a few hours later they passed a pod of Risso’s dolphins.
As the watchstander team on the bridge of the Bob Barker is preparing for another hot and uneventful night, they suddenly see that a light is switched on near one of the bulkheads on the Thunder’s quarterdeck, and then several cones of lights dancing restlessly across the blacked out deck.
“19:03 – Activity observed on Thunder. Moving flashlights and unusual deck lights on,” quartermaster Alexis “Lex” Rigby writes in the ship’s log.
Then she asks Captain Hammarstedt and first mate Adam Meyerson to come to the bridge.
“What do you think, Adam?” Hammarstedt asks.
“They are definitely up to something. Anything else on the radar?” Meyerson asks.
“Nothing,” Rigby replies.
Ever since they left the Antarctic, Hammarstedt and Meyerson have been concerned about the Thunder receiving assistance from another vessel. The name and position of all ships that come within range of the radar are recorded in the logbook. So far only a few commercial ships have passed. They are closer to land than they have ever been in the course of the chase.
The past few days Hammarstedt has been feeling uneasy. He has just sent an email to Interpol and explained that they are located less than a day’s sail away from both Annobón in Equatorial Guinea and the tiny island state of São Tomé and Príncipe.
“I strongly suspect that the FV Thunder will make port call in the next coming days,” he warned.
Will this be the night when he will really be tested? Are the crew of the Thunder preparing for a rendezvous with another ship? Or are they going to dump the fish they have on board before going ashore?
“Maybe they are getting ready to fish again,” Meyerson says.
He navigates the Bob Barker closer to the Thunder and passes around a powerful set of night vision binoculars to see whether anything is being thrown over the side. They believe there is a conveyor belt running from the rear hatch of the Thunder. When the nets are hauled in, the fish is transported through the ship and into the fish factory. Have they put this conveyor belt into reverse to discharge the frozen fish back into the ocean? But the only movement to be seen on the quarterdeck is that of the cones of light and diffuse shadows.
“If you are concerned that they are going to throw something in the water, you can just shine a spotlight off to port. Don’t know what good it is going to do. If they throw frozen stuff over, we’re just going to pick it up and throw it back on, you know what I mean?” Meyerson says.
“The fish is just going to sink. It is frozen. Not much we can do,” Hammarstedt says.
“Look what a light does to us,” Meyerson says and quotes Luke the Evangelist: “Remain vigilant at all times.”
“Let’s get to half a mile and sit there. Keep an eye on them, see if there is any activity on deck,” Meyerson says.
“19:42 – Suspicious activity continues on aft deck. Media alerted and on standby,” Lex Rigby writes in the logbook.
Then Hammarstedt goes to bed.
He is sick and tired. He downs a cocktail of painkillers and two types of antibiotics in an attempt to wipe out a powerful infection. He daydreams that he is home in his flat in Söder in Stockholm, fantasizes about lying on solid ground and hearing the rain pound against the roof, but he has promised to follow the Thunder to the bitter end. Sea Shepherd’s entire credibility is on the line. “We will not back down,” is one of the organization’s slogans.
He is unable to sleep; he has a gnawing, uneasy feeling that at dawn something is going to happen.
In the darkness of the great cabin, he relives the most brutal duel he has ever taken part in throughout his many years with Sea Shepherd. Amidst icebergs and turbulent seas in the Antarctic in February 2013, he navigated the Bob Barker in between the floating whale factory ship the Nisshin Maru and the tanker the Sun Laurel. The tanker was going to refuel the queen vessel of the Japanese whaling fleet. Hammarstedt wanted to block it. Nobody would change their course and when the Bob Barker glided into the wash of the ten times heavier whaling vessel, Hammarstedt lost control. In the turbulent ocean the agile Sea Shepherd vessel slammed into the side of the Nisshin Maru.
In the collision the Bob Barker listed dramatically to one side and for a few slow seconds it seemed that the ship would be vanquished by the colossal forces of the sea. Then the Bob Barker straightened up and remained jammed in between the whaler and the tanker while the water cannons on the Nisshin Maru poured water down the Bob Barker’s smokestack in an attempt to drown the engine. Finally, the captain of the Sun Laurel manoeuvred the tanker out of harm’s way.
Pictures of the collision in the Southern Ocean are hanging on the walls of the Bob Barker’s lounge. The series has become a veritable symbol of the swift and trim ship’s role in Sea Shepherd. But it was a battle that Hammarstedt would prefer not to relive; the collision and the turbulence produced by the duelling ships’ movements and the propellers’ heated revolutions had been so violent that he had problems walking for many days afterwards. If a ship arrives with fuel for the Thunder tomorrow, the crew will expect him to lead them into another uncompromising confrontation. And he is now in a part of Africa where help is very likely far away if something catastrophic were to occur.
Before he falls asleep, he thinks of Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of the wild African coast that lies in wait to the east.
“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out’.”
Tomorrow is D-day, Hammarstedt thinks. And nothing will ever be the same again.
The first rays of sunlight throw a warm, reddish-brown glow across the ocean as a new watchstander team comes up onto the bridge of the Bob Barker.
The officers have been following the Thunder through the binoculars all night. Now it’s the Communications Officer Stefan Ehmann who discovers something strange – from a distance it looks like there are small figures, each wearing a bright orange coloured garment of sorts, moving about on deck. And something is hanging over the side: a jack ladder, the rope ladder that is used when someone is going to board or disembark from a ship while at sea.
“All right, I want you to get Peter,” the third mate Anteo Broadfield orders.
Are they planning to put a dinghy into the water? They are now within the exclusive economic zone of São Tomé and Príncipe, but still far away from shore and they won’t be able to make it there in a dinghy. Is another ship coming to pick up the crew? No other vessels are visible on the radar screen
and the dinghy on the Thunder is still hidden beneath the blue tarp.
“There is nothing on the radar, mate. I’ve gone up and down on the range scale,” Anteo Broadfield says as Peter Hammarstedt comes up onto the bridge and takes hold of the binoculars.
“How odd,” Hammarstedt says.
On board the Thunder the day begins as usual but several of the crew also have the feeling that something is about to happen. But what?
Captain Cataldo is usually sulky and aloof and never calls the crew in for a meeting in the messroom to inform them of what he is thinking and planning, but the past few days he has been even more reserved and secretive than usual. Now and then he has taken a couple of the Spanish officers with him into the communication room on the bridge. Then they have shut the door. Several of the other officers have noticed that the Thunder had its course set for São Tomé. The fuel tanks are almost empty, they have less than 15 tons left, enough for two days propulsion at 10 knots.
When a few days earlier the cook was told to make a shopping list, they understood that they were approaching the end of the voyage and that they would soon sail into the closest country, the tiny island state of São Tomé and Príncipe.
During the first hours of the morning it is Cataldo who stands lookout. He comes to the bridge wearing a new, clean T-shirt he bought at the tax-free shop in Singapore. A new shift will start at eight o’clock. Seated in the messroom are the head of the fish factory, the Chilean José Rubincio Carrion Alvarado, and a couple of Indonesian crew members. They eat and drink coffee and tea. There are still plenty of provisions in the galley.
Then they hear the ship’s alarm. Captain Cataldo comes running down to the messroom and asks Carrion to wake up the engineer Luis Alfonso Morales Mardones and the rest of the crew. The Chilean Mardones had a shift in the engine room until four o’clock in the morning. After his shift he lay in his berth watching a film. Now he gets to his feet, puts on his life vest and baffled, goes up on deck. Another of the ship’s engineers, a 32-year-old Indonesian, was awakened by the alarm. He climbs down the stairs to the engine room and sees that the main engine is half submerged in water. Chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey and first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández are down in the engine room. They ask him to come on deck immediately. What has happened?