Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (14 page)

The first local environmental group in Vancouver was SPEC (Society Promoting Environmental Conservation). Founded by nature lovers Gwen and Derrick Mallard, it gained public support and soon was able to hire a full-time executive director. Gary Gallon was pretty much a thinking person’s hippy like Bob and Paul and I, so we got along famously. Gary offered us office space in his building to organize our voyage to save the whales. He taught us a lot about being organized in a business sense. Gary was the first environmentalist I knew who took off his tie-dyed shirt, put on a jacket and tie, and went downtown to knock on CEOs doors to preach ecology. For this I dubbed him the first “ecocrat.”

The
Phyllis Cormack
and the Vega in Winter Harbour, May 1975, ready for action against the Russian and Japanese whaling fleets. One month later our voyage would be broadcast around the world. Photo: Patrick Moore

While Bob was putting the campaign together, hiring captain John Cormack again and raising funds, Paul Spong traveled to Oslo, Norway, the headquarters for the International Whaling Commission. Posing as a whale scientist (not a bad disguise as that’s what he was), he gained access to the records of the Soviet and Japanese whaling fleet’s movements over the years. At this time, in the mid-1970s, they were the only two countries operating deep-sea factory whaling fleets. It turned out that the Japanese fleet spent nearly all its time in the Western Pacific, west of Hawaii, but the Soviet fleet regularly operated off the coast of California in June. Amazingly the American public remained completely unaware that Russian harpoon boats were killing endangered whales just over the horizon off the California coast. This was before the 200-mile limit was established under the UN Law of the Sea treaty, so it was technically legal for other countries to fish and hunt whales up to 12 miles off the coast. There was no way the
Phyllis Cormack
, an 85-foot halibut boat, could really go deep-sea; but there was a chance we could intercept the Soviet fleet 30 to 100 miles off the coast of California. Talk about tilting at windmills—a tiny fishing boat up against the might of the Soviet empire in the biggest ocean on Earth. How were we going to do it? We were going to place ourselves in front of the harpoon boats to protect the fleeing whales as they were chased at 15 knots in rough seas.

Eileen and I were still living and working in Winter Harbour when the campaign was first being organized, and I suggested to Bob Hunter that our coastal village would make a good base to train the crew in preparation for the confrontation with the whalers. He agreed.

On April 27, 1975, the
Phyllis Cormack
, with the Kwakiutl Sisiutl symbol painted brightly on its single sail, departed Vancouver amid much fanfare with the promise to save the whales. The expedition arrived in Winter Harbour on April 29 and over the next six weeks we hosted the crew. We were joined by the 26-foot sloop
Vega
, formerly owned by David McTaggart and recently acquired by Greenpeace supporter Jacques Longini. I was assigned the task of training the mostly inexperienced crew members in seamanship and small craft operation.

Paul Spong was correct in observing that we were the only environmental group that knew how to put together an ocean expedition. But on the first voyages to Alaska and Mururoa we had remained on the “mother ship” as our main boat came to be called. This time we intended to put people into small rubber inflatable boats, known as Zodiacs after the popular French brand. This would require launching three Zodiacs from the deck of the
Phyllis Cormack
in rough seas and then maneuvering them in front of a harpoon boat while it was pursuing whales. One Zodiac would carry the cannon fodder, an operator and passenger, who would try to get in between the harpooner and the whales to shield them. The passengers in the other two Zodiacs would be a still photographer and a movie cameraman. The logistics of doing this would be difficult enough on a millpond; trying it in typical ocean conditions off Cape Mendocino could be suicidal.

It turned out that Bob Hunter got the idea of using Zodiacs from the photos Anne-Marie Horne shot while the
Vega
was being boarded at Mururoa atoll during the anti-French nuclear testing campaign. It was the French commandos who knew how to run Zodiacs, not us, but we could learn.

Bob asked me to join the crew as first mate, so in April I left my job in my dad’s logging camp and after six weeks of training we headed for our rendezvous with the whalers. It is not easy to find a whaling fleet in the Pacific Ocean. We knew where the whalers had been in early June for the past 10 years, but even that was an area of about 250,000 square miles.

Our best bet was to listen for Russian voices on our marine shortwave radio and then use a direction finder to determine their position. After a couple of false alarms, we picked up the crackle of Russian voices and sailed toward the signal. Early on June 27, I was the first one to spot a Russian harpoon ship on the horizon. Then the huge factory ship and seven more harpoon boats came into view. As we steamed toward them, the first thing we came across was a dead sperm whale that had been harpooned and marked with a flag, a radar reflector, and a beacon so that it could be rounded up later. We had come across the Soviet fleet during the thick of a hunt.

The dead whale was small, a baby well under the size limit set by the International Whaling Commission. We launched a Zodiac and Paul Watson got on the back of the whale so we could document its size in comparison to his. We then began to move closer to the whaling fleet.

The eight harpoon boats were operating like a wolf pack, using their sonar to track the whales underwater after they sounded. When the whales surfaced, the boats were right on top of them. At first the whales just sounded again quickly before the gunners could take aim. But they couldn’t catch their breath, so after a few dives they had to stay on the surface to breathe. Then they would end up fleeing as fast as they could on the surface, eventually tiring and being gunned down one at a time. A favorite trick of the whalers was first to kill the dominant male, causing the females in the harem to come to his rescue as he thrashed about bleeding to death. Then the whalers would circle around and systematically kill the entire pod.

There is no way to kill a whale in a humane manner. The tip of the harpoon is a grenade that explodes, preferably in the spine, severing it and rendering the whale immobile. Among the tens of whales we witnessed being harpooned over the years, most died slowly, spouting blood and gasping desperately.

The whalers had no idea who we were. Being off the coast of California with cameras, they may have assumed we were filmmakers from Hollywood. We approached slowly, as we wanted to make sure they realized that we were peaceful, even if we didn’t agree with what they were doing. They called off the hunt and waved to us from the decks of the factory ship and the harpoon boats. We launched our three Zodiacs and went alongside one of the harpoon boats. At the advice of people who had been to Russia we had taken along ballpoint pens, some blue jeans, and a copy of
Playboy
magazine. We came alongside one of the harpoon boats and held out our peace offering. The first English words that were spoken to us by a Russian whaler were, “Hey, you guys got’it any acid?” We hadn’t thought of that.

But things quickly turned sour as we made our intentions clear. Our Russian-speaking crew member hollered across to them that we were here to save the whales and we intended to directly interfere with the hunt. The harpoon boats coolly turned to go about their deadly business.

Thankfully there was only a two-foot chop, so we could move along at a reasonable speed. Miraculously we quickly managed to get in front of a harpoon boat as it was chasing a pod of sperm whales. Even more miraculously, Fred Easton had his camera pointed at the harpoon when it was fired, following it and the attached cable as it flew over the heads of Bob Hunter and George Korotva and plunged into the back of a female sperm whale. All this was captured on about three seconds of footage. We didn’t save that whale, but eight whales in the pod escaped as the whalers retreated to the factory ship with only two whales. Maybe they realized that in their zeal they had nearly killed two people.

“We have saved eight whales today” stated the media release we broadcast over shortwave radio to our shore station in Vancouver. The story of the encounter was quickly broadcast around the world. The International Whaling Commission was meeting in England and news of our success buoyed the anti-whaling protestors who had gathered there.

When we arrived in San Francisco the next day we were swarmed by the media. We handed our film footage to an independent studio so it could be “pooled,” that is, made available to all the networks. That evening we watched from a nearby tavern as our story ran near the top of all three networks’ national news programs. Our film footage of the harpoon shot was carried on television stations around the world, including in our home country, Canada. This was before the advent of cable networks like CNN and Fox, when only CBS, NBC, and ABC ruled the tube. As counterculture personality Hank Harrison (father of actress/musician Courtney Love) wrote later, it was the “Greenpeacing of America.” We were welcomed into the city of San Francisco as conquering heroes. There was an explosion of support from around the world. Greenpeace would never look back.

Below: The
Phyllis Cormack
in full battle colors, on maneuvers in preparation for the first encounter with the Russian factory whaling fleet. Photo: Patrick Moore

[1]
. Paul Winter,
Songs of the Humpback Whale
, http://www.amazon.com/Songs-Humpback-Whale-Paul-Winter/dp/B00000AFPR

Chapter 6 -
Baby Seals and Movie Stars

While on the whale voyage we read the cover story in a recent edition of
National Geographic
about the annual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of harp seal pups in their breeding grounds off the east coast of Canada. Letter writing campaigns and petitions had failed to stop the killing. It looked like a job for Greenpeace. Plans began for an expedition to the ice floes to save the seals.

Our little committee in a church basement had turned into a full-time job for an office full of people with rent and salaries to pay. To be fair, the salary was between $200 and $300 a month, but in the 1970s it was a subsistence living.

In the fall of 1975 we set about organizing our U.S. branch office, based in San Francisco. While on a talk show with Dr. Bill Wattenburg on KGO in San Francisco, Bob Hunter and I appealed for a volunteer lawyer to help us set up operations in the United States. We knew the key to raising the amount of money we needed to stop the factory whaling fleets was a fundraising arm in the U.S. We joked among ourselves that with American money and Canadian know-how we would save the earth.

A young lawyer named David Tussman came forward. He seemed sharp, his dad was a famous philosophy professor at Berkeley, and he was plugged into the San Francisco scene. David incorporated Greenpeace USA, got us our tax-deductible status, and helped build a board of directors. He would later betray us.