Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist

by Patrick Moore

  In early July we confronted the whaling fleet 1400 miles southwest of San Francisco, off Baja California. With our new ship we could stay with the whalers and we were able to successfully interfere with their hunting, reducing the number of whales they killed. The film footage we obtained was broadcast around the world again. We were definitely gaining momentum.

  We were no ordinary cruise ship or freighter, so we could do things our own way. When we weren’t in the thick of battle, one of those things included going for a daily swim in the deep blue waters of the warm Pacific. It was about 6,000 feet deep and populated by flying fish, blue sharks, and sunfish. We would stop the ship at around noon and up to a dozen of us who were not afraid of 6,000 feet of water would leap off the deck while Captain Korotva stood on the flying bridge with a rifle in case he needed to shoot sharks. We were more concerned that he would hit us and wished he would put the gun away.

  One day, as we came to a stop for our daily dip, there happened to be a very large sunfish alongside the James Bay. It was about six feet long and deep. If you haven’t seen a sunfish before, it is a wondrous thing to behold. They are as deep as they are long and quite thin through the middle; in other words they are shaped like a discus, hence the reference to the sun. They have a mouth with no teeth that opens about two inches wide. Their main food is plankton and jellyfish, which they ingest as they move along. The sunfish has a couple of tiny fins and a small tail and a top speed of about two knots, so it could not outswim a human, never mind a shark or other predator. That is why they are composed of not much more than thick skin and bone, so no predator would ever consider trying to eat them. Because they swim slowly, they become a host to various barnacles and algae that attach themselves to the rear and bottom of the fish. In addition they are accompanied by gleaner fish, which wait for bits of food that get past the sunfish’s mouth. They are very much like a floating reef, supporting many other species in a commensural relationship as they ply the surface waters.[1] It was an entire marine ecosystem around a single fish.

  There were only six of us on this swim, one of whom was the lovely Caroline Keddy, who had joined us in San Francisco. In snorkel gear, most of us approached the sunfish with some trepidation, as it was much larger than we were. Caroline was not even slightly afraid and moved right in alongside the giant fish. Perhaps it was because she was a hippy from the Bay and had never encountered a wild animal before. Soon she was touching the sunfish on the face and rubbing its back. The sunfish was obviously pleased with her attentions as it sidled up to her, making no effort to escape. Seeing this the rest of us joined in the love fest, taking turns petting the fish and observing the many species attached to it or following along. But it was clear the sunfish favored Caroline, perhaps because she was the first to make contact, or because the rest of us were not so attractive.

  We lost track of time but eventually George blew the ship’s whistle for us to come back aboard. By now we had drifted about 300 feet away from the ship, so it was a bit of a swim back home. Caroline held back a minute to say goodbye to her sunfish and then joined us as we headed to the James Bay. No sooner had we begun our return than the sunfish turned and with all its two knots of top speed started to follow us. But the fish wasn’t just following us; it was following Caroline. As she emerged from the ocean to climb the rope ladder hanging down the side of the ship, the sunfish looked up at her with its big eyes as if to say “Farewell, I love you.” I am not a sappy romantic by any stretch of the imagination, but this was a very moving event. We marked the chart with the location where a sunfish fell in love with a human being in 6,000 feet of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on July 12, 1977.

  Paul Watson and Bob Hunter pose with a baby harp seal after they stopped the ice-breaking sealing ship in its tracks—probably a Guinness Book of Records first. Photo: Patrick Moore

  Back on task, we followed the Soviet fleet across the Pacific to Hawaii, dogging them all the way. We decided to pull in to Lahaina on Maui, where there was a good group of whale-saving supporters, as Lahaina is a major center for viewing humpback whales in the winter months. We were determined to try to find the Japanese whaling fleet so that we could provide a balance to our focus on the Russians. Reports indicated it was operating just west of the Hawaiian Islands. The U.S. Coast Guard offered to take us up in one of their surveillance planes on a routine mission to see if we could find the fleet. We decided we would move the James Bay to Nawiliwili Harbor on Kauai as we would be closer to the fleet if they found it.

  By this time the strain of the voyage was coming to the surface. On our previous expeditions aboard the Phyllis Cormack there were only 12 crew members; the James Bay’s crew numbered 32. We were living in cramped quarters and we were a pretty headstrong bunch. The fact that two of the couples on board had broken up coincidentally and that they were now involved in new relationships, which left jealous exes with shattered hearts and nerves, was complicating personal relations. This is bad enough on land where people can get away from one another. On a ship it is positively suicidal. This behavior was, of course, entirely contrary to standing orders. As a member of the crew selection committee, I had made it clear that if you came on board as a single person you went off single and that if you came on with a partner you left with the same one. But it is not always possible to control affairs of the heart, even on a voyage to save the whales.

  Working seven days a week, we built bunks and galleys for 32 crew members in what had been an empty shell of a ship. By the time we set sail the M.V. James Bay was nicely equipped. Photo: Rex Weyler

  The morning of July 30 began well with reports of a school of dolphins in the outer harbor. We launched our three Zodiacs and sped out to see them. We found at least 50 Pacific white-sided dolphins in the pod and they came leaping toward us and then followed us along for miles. You could literally reach out and touch them as they surfaced right next to the Zodiacs, making rainbows in the spray. It was a magical experience.

  I guess some of the guys needed to let off steam as George, Bob, and Mel had begun to drink straight vodka from the bottle at ten in the morning. They were hooting and hollering among the dolphins when Bob decided to go for a swim off the Zodiac. He picked a bad spot, as he dived into the ocean amid a large coral head. By the time George pulled him into the boat, he was badly lacerated from been dragged back and forth over the coral by the surf. It appeared he had lost a considerable amount of skin.

  This put a damper on the morning’s fun as we rushed Bob back to the boat for medical treatment. Paul Watson’s partner, Marilyn Kaga, was the ship’s nurse, so Bob was delivered into her hands, by this time in considerable pain. Mistaking a bottle of rubbing alcohol for hydrogen peroxide, nurse Marilyn poured it all over Bob’s wounds causing him to go into a catatonic fit of pain. Captain George and Paul got into a shouting match, which ended with George punching Paul in the head: so much for the peace in Greenpeace. As Bob’s eyes rolled back into his sockets, we carried him to his bunk, where he screamed for a very long time and refused to be treated for some hours. Eventually we got some antiseptic cream on his cuts and scrapes and settled him down.

  The pride of the Greenpeace Pacific fleet, the James Bay, on its first voyage to save the whales, joined by the Phyllis Cormack for its second whale campaign against Russian and Japanese whalers. This photo was taken in June 1976 in Sydney, B.C., at the outset of the voyage. photo: Matt Heron

  With our illustrious leader Bob down for the count, Paul Watson decided to lead a mutiny of the crew. Marilyn’s mistake and his beating from the captain embarrassed him. As the rebellion unfolded in the crew’s quarters, George and Mel went back out in a Zodiac with their bottle(s) of vodka. By nightfall, they were raging drunk and decided to go to the little discotheque at the end of the pier. Realizing they would never get past the bouncers, they decided to scale the pier up the pilings from the water. We watched as various patrons repelled them with chairs until they retreated to their boat. Later in the evening they m
anaged to ram and hole a small dinghy tied behind a nice sailboat that was at anchor in the harbor. As the dinghy was sinking, Mel leaped into it with a bailing can only to go down with the ship.

  Things settled down by midnight, but we knew we had to get out of town before daybreak. We cast off at four in the morning and headed back to Lahaina, where our reputation was not so sullied and waited for word of the Japanese fleet. We made a sincere effort, but after two weeks we gave up on the Japanese, and after reprovisioning in Kahalui we headed back for the Soviet fleet, reported by our shore station in San Francisco to be 1200 miles north of Hawaii. This location is about as far as you can get from land anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather changed from tropical to temperamental as we entered the Pacific Gyre, where currents circle, keeping flotsam in their grip for hundreds of years. The Russian whaling fleet appeared before us in a misty-grey sea.

  As we had done a few dozen times before, we launched two Zodiacs, this time into unusually rough seas. Paul Spong and I were the operators, with Fred Easton on film and Rex Weyler on stills. We no sooner got alongside a harpoon boat than the fog set in, obscuring our mother ship that was now about three miles distant. We decided to stay with the whaler and this was our mistake. Within 15 minutes we had completely lost our bearings, the fog had become thicker, and we were realizing we only had an hour of daylight to get back to the James Bay. In addition we had left our ship in the sunshine with light clothing, no survival suits, no radar reflectors, and no food. Some eco-navy.

  As panic set in, Paul Spong tried to use his portable radio as a radio direction finder but this didn’t help. Among us we reconstructed our route away from the James Bay and determined in which direction we should travel. It took nearly that whole hour, but as dusk was falling we first heard the foghorn and then saw our ship coming through the mist. That was the closest I had come to being lost and dead 1200 miles from the beach. Eileen and Bob and the others raised up a considerable whoop as we came into view. The Rainbow Warriors had karma working for them that day.

  Seal Campaign 1977

  Our second seal campaign, in early March, 1977, was by far the most bizarre scene I have been in, and I have been in some pretty bizarre scenes. First, Paul Watson (again the somewhat self-appointed leader of the campaign) decided to base the expedition out of the north shore of Quebec in the village of Blanc Sablon. Apparently this was to avoid hostilities in St. Anthony, but that’s where all the North American media were based. Paul had managed to convince the Swiss animal-rights activist Franz Weber to bring about 80 European journalists, many of them top-flight, to join us in Blanc Sablon. The only public lodging in the village was a motel with beds for 30 in 10 small rooms. I was glad I’d packed my sleeping bag as we managed to cram more than 100 bodies into the place, including Weber and his journalists, 15 Greenpeacers, our helicopter pilots, and a few others I can’t recall. Weber had failed to find a helicopter company that would rent machines to him, so he had no way of getting the journalists out to the ice. As in the previous year, the Greenpeace crew established a base camp on Belle Isle, but this time it was bigger and better equipped. Paul, who seemed to think his actions were the most important part of the campaign, initiated things by nearly getting killed and putting the other crew members at risk of injury or death.

  Paul had led a small group to the ice in two helicopters, where they encountered very difficult conditions. There were 12-foot swells under the ice floes, so the entire seascape was in motion. Landing more than a mile from the sealing ships, Paul raced ahead of the crew. Our physically fit lawyer, Peter Ballem, was the only one able to keep up to him. Paul approached a sealer who was skinning a seal pup, grabbed his hakapik and threw it into the water in a gap between the floes. Then Paul threw the sealskin into the water. Peter warned him this activity was unlawful. The sealer had the sense to ignore Watson instead of skinning him. These kind of extreme tactics had not been discussed with the crew, never mind our board of directors. Then Paul really went over the top. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs and attached himself to a cable that was about to haul a bunch of sealskins on board a sealing ship. The sealers saw they had a live one and began to winch the skins in, dragging Paul along the ice. About 20 feet from the sealing ship, the solid ice ended and Paul was dragged into frozen slush. The sealers were jeering like fans watching gladiators eaten by lions. The winch operator purposely lifted Paul 10 feet above the water and then dropped him back in. Then the handcuffs broke loose and Paul was floundering in the frozen sea; he would only last five minutes. Peter had dragged a small inflatable skiff across the ice in case they encountered a wide lead between the floes as they approached the sealers. He got in it and pushed himself across the open water toward Paul, which meant getting soaked to the waist himself. A big man, Peter managed to drag Paul, a big man too, into the inflatable and got him back to solid ice, where he laid, screaming obscenities at the sealers. Peter pleaded with the sealing crew to take Paul aboard or he would surely die of exposure as the helicopters were more than a mile away and Watson was already turning blue. The sealers eventually realized that it would not look good if they killed someone, so they winched Paul aboard in a stretcher, landing him face down in a pile of bloody sealskins. Peter also boarded the ship, where he and Paul would remain overnight.

  Because he raced ahead and acted unilaterally, Paul had failed to have his actions documented on film, a key purpose of the expedition. Rumors about his fate flew around overnight. Some journalists reported that Paul’s arm was broken or that he was possibly dead. When he appeared the next day after having been flown to the hospital in Blanc Sablon and released, he looked perfectly fine. This resulted in a credibility gap with the media, we had no film to show what really happened and the whole episode became an embarrassment. Meanwhile the 80 European journalists were getting antsy, as not one of them had made it out to the ice. Paul, who had signed the charter contract on behalf of Greenpeace, had control of the only two helicopters and had now holed himself up in his motel room, obviously traumatized by the recent events. With our erstwhile leader incommunicado, I had to play my hand as representative of the Greenpeace board, as I was vice-president and organizationally senior to Paul. Bob Hunter, who stayed behind during this campaign, had insisted I go along to keep an eye on Paul and to take control if necessary. It had become very necessary. The media were so desperate for a story that one German film crew hired a local man to pose with a stuffed seal pup as if he were about to club it to death. This made the wire service as if it were the real thing.

  Bob Hunter, myself, and Matt Heron strategize on the movements of the Soviet whaling fleet. Twelve hundred miles north of Hawaii the weather was foggy and foul. Photo: Rex Weyler

  In the middle of all this, we learned that the French actress Brigitte Bardot had arrived in Blanc Sablon with a six-person film crew and her Polish sculptor boyfriend, Mirko Brozek. They had flown in unannounced and had rented a vacant house in the town. The European media went into a complete frenzy as the world-famous beauty arrived for a media conference at our motel, denouncing the Canadian government and vowing to campaign until the slaughter ended.

  The Bardot party had also been unable to find helicopters for rent, so now there were 15 Greenpeacers, Franz Weber, and his 80 European journalists, and Brigitte Bardot, with a top French TV producer and full film crew, all vying for eight seats in our two small helicopters. The media were calling for Watson’s and Weber’s heads. Then our helicopter pilots informed us that Bardot’s producer, Henri, was negotiating directly with them to fly Brigitte and the film crew out to the ice. “He says Brigitte will sit beside us in the helicopter,” one of our pilots swooned. Brigitte had been uncharitably described as an “aging sex kitten” in one Canadian paper’s headline, but believe me she looked stunning for a woman in her early 40s, or indeed of any age. Our pilots were leaning toward breaching our contract, leaving us with no helicopters to get our expedition out to the ice. Peter Ballem and I decided to take matters i
nto our own hands. We borrowed a snowmobile and made our way to the house that the Bardot party had rented.

  Henri eventually greeted Peter and me through a small crack in the doorway. We explained that the helicopters were ours but that we were willing to try to work out an accommodation. At first Henri responded negatively, but we insisted so he went to speak to Brigitte and she gave the nod. There we were sitting around the kitchen table with Brigitte Bardot in an isolated community on the North Shore of Quebec. It was a bit disarming, but we had business to do. It turned out that Brigitte didn’t want to see the seal hunt; she just wanted to be photographed with a baby seal. I proposed that we share the helicopters the next morning, taking Brigitte and a bare-bones film crew along with some of the Greenpeace team. We decided we would make a stop at the Greenpeace camp on Belle Isle to introduce Brigitte to the expedition members. Then one helicopter would find a baby seal on the ice for the photo-op while the other would look for the sealing ships. It was a good compromise even though it did nothing to help Franz Weber and his 80 journalists, who were now in full mutiny.

  That evening we had a large party. By then Brigitte had realized that Peter and I were cool, and as the beer and wine flowed we engaged in an animated discussion of everything from the seal hunt to the latest movies. Paul Watson finally emerged from his lair and joined the festivities. He agreed to come with us to Belle Isle in the morning.

  The weather forecast was not particularly encouraging as we lifted off at 6 a.m. Halfway to the base camp we found out why. It was blowing snow and the wind was picking up fast, so we stayed low to the water over the Straits of Belle Isle. When we came up against the 800-foot cliffs of Belle Isle, we went into a steep ascent into the clouds; but there was still some visibility. We came up over the top of the island, now trying to get our bearings on this huge rock in order to locate the base camp. Within minutes we found ourselves in the midst of a squall with blinding snow, a “whiteout” as they call it in helicopter school. In this situation there is only one option: land the helicopter now. Whiteouts have the effect of completely disorienting the pilot so that he doesn’t know up from down. Our pilots were probably being heroic because they had a beautiful VIP on board, but they did get us safely on the ground in challenging conditions.