Would you give your life for a whale? For a determined crewon a tiny ship at the bottom of the world, the answer is easy. By Peter Heller Photo by Paul Taggart
COMMITTED TO THE CORE: Joel Capolongo (far right) and other members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society prepare to confront the 8,000-ton Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru.
National Geographic Adventure by Peter Heller, May 2006
What woke me at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning was the bow of the ship
plunging off a steep wave and smashing into the trough. The hull shuddered like a living animal, and when the next roller
lifted the stern, I could hear the prop pitching out of the water, beating the air with a juddering moan that shivered the ribs of the 180-foot (55-meter) converted North Sea trawler. We were 200 miles
(322 kilometers)off the Adélie Coast, Antarctica, in a force 8 gale. The storm
had been building since the previous morning. I lay in the dark and breathed. Something was different. I listened to the deep throb of the diesel engine two decks below and the turbulent sloshing against my bolted porthole, and felt a quickening
in the ship.
Fifteen days before, we had left Melbourne, Australia, and headed due south on the Farley Mowat, the flagship of the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The mission of her captain, Paul Watson, and his 43-member, all-volunteer crew was to hunt down and stop the Japanese whaling fleet from engaging in what they considered illegal commercial whaling. Watson had said before the trip, "We will nonviolently intervene." But judging by the preparations conducted over the past week, it seemed he was readying for a full-scale attack.
I dressed quickly, grabbed a dry suit and a life jacket, and ran up three lurching flights of narrow stairs to the bridge. Dawn. Or what passed for it in the never night of Antarctic summer. A murky gloom of wind-tortured fog mingled with blowing snow and spray. White eruptions tore off the tops of the waves and streamed their shoulders in long streaks of foam. The sea was chaos. When I had gone to sleep four hours earlier, the swells were 20 feet (6 meters) high and building. Now monsters over 30 feet (9 meters) rolled under the stern and pitched the bow wildly into a featureless sky. The timberwork of the bridge groaned and creaked. The wind battered the thick windows and ripped past the superstructure with a buffeted keening.
Watson, 55, with thick, nearly white hair and beard, wide cheekbones, and packing some extra weight underneath his exposure suit, sat in the high captain's chair, on the starboard side of the bridge, looking alternately at a radar screen over his head and at the sea. He has a gentle, watchful demeanor. Like a polar bear. Alex Cornelissen, 38, his Dutch first officer, was in the center at the helm, trying to run with the waves. Cornelissen looks too thin to go anyplace cold, and his hair is buzzed to a near stubble.
"Good timing," Cornelissen said to me with the tightening of his mouth that is his smile. "Two ships on the radar. The closest is under two miles (three kilometers) off. If they're icebergs, they're doing six knots."
"Probably the Nisshin Maru and the Esperanza," Watson said. "They're just riding out the storm." He was talking about the 8,000-ton factory ship on which the Japanese butcher and pack the harpooned whales, and Greenpeace's flagship, which had sailed with its companion boat the Arctic Sunrise from Cape Town more than a month before and had been shadowing and harassing the whalers for weeks. Where the five other boats of the Japanese whaling fleet had scattered in the storm, no one could say.
I stared at the green blips on the main radar screen. Was it possible? Had Watson found, in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southern Ocean, his prey? It seemed against all odds, even with the recon helicopter he'd picked up in Hobart, Tasmania, on his way south. Even with the Antarctic storm that was now veiling his approach from the unwary whalers. Even with the informer onboard the Esperanza who had secretly relayed the fleet's general position to Watson just two nights before. Because in those two days the fleet could have sailed 500 miles (805 kilometers) away. I looked at Watson in his red exposure suit and began to pull on my own. Watson turned to Cornelissen. "Wake all hands," he said.
In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a group of 66 nations that makes regulations and recommendations on whaling around the world, enacted a moratorium on open-sea commercial whaling in response to the fast declining numbers of the Earth's largest mammals. The Japanese, who have been aggressive whalers since the food shortages following World War II, immediately exploited a loophole that
allows signatories to kill a certain number of whales annually for scientific research.
In 2005, Japan, the only nation other than Norway and Iceland with an active whaling fleet, decided to double their "research" kill from the previous year and allot themselves a quota of 935 minke whales and ten endangered fin whales. In 2007 they plan to kill 50 fins and 50 endangered humpbacks. Their weapon is a relatively new and superefficient fleet comprising the 130-meter (427-foot) factory ship Nisshin Maru, two spotter vessels, and three fast killer, or harpoon, boats, similar in size to the Farley Mowat.
Lethal research, they say, is the only way to accurately measure whale population, health, and response to global warming and is essential for the sustainable management of the world's cetacean stocks. The director general of Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), Hiroshi Hatanaka, writes, "The legal basis [for whaling] is very clear; the environmental basis is even clearer: The marine resources in the Southern Ocean must be utilized in a sustainable manner in order to protect and conserve them for future generations." Though the ICR is a registered nonprofit and claims no commercial benefit from its whaling, critics scoff, pointing out that the meat resulting from this heavily subsidized research ends up in Tokyo's famed Tsukiji Fish Market and on the tables of fancy restaurants. By some estimates, one fin whale can bring in 1.5 million dollars.
Each year the IWC's scientific committee votes on whaling proposals, and at its annual meeting last June, it narrowly passed a resolution that "strongly urged" Japanese whalers to obtain their scientific data "using nonlethal means." The whalers' response was silence, then business as usual.
While this resolution is not legally binding, much of the public was outraged that the whalers would patently disregard it. The World Wildlife Fund contended that all the research could be conducted more efficiently with new techniques that do not kill whales. New Zealand's minister of conservation, Chris Carter, among others, called the Japanese research blatant commercial whaling. Even dissenters within Japan protested: Greenpeace Japan's Mizuki Takana pointed to a 2002 report by the influential Asahi newspaper in which only 4 percent of the Japanese surveyed said they regularly eat whale meat; 53 percent of the population had not consumed it since childhood. "It is simply not true that whaling is important to the Japanese public," Takana said in a statement. "The whaling fleet should not leave for the Antarctic whale sanctuary."
To Watson there is no debate: The Japanese whalers are acting commercially under the auspices of "bogus research" and therefore are in violation of the 1986 moratorium. Even more contentious, the whaling occurs in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an internationally ordained preserve that covers the waters surrounding Antarctica as far north as 40º S and protects 11 of the planet's 13 species of great whales. While research is permitted in the sanctuary, commercial whaling is explicitly forbidden. The whalers are also in clear conflict with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). And though the killing area lies entirely within the Australian Antarctic Territory, the Australians, while protesting, seem to lack the political will to face down a powerful trading partner. It irks Watson that Australian frigates will eagerly pursue Patagonian toothfish poachers from South America in these same waters, but will turn a blind eye to the Japanese whalers. "It sends a message that if you're rich and powerful, you can break the law. If the Australian Navy were doing its job," he says, "we wouldn't be down here."
Watson has no such diplomatic compunctions. He says: "Our intention is to stop the criminal whaling. We are not a protest organization. We are here to enforce international conservation law. We don't wave banners. We intervene."
Whaling fleets around the world know he means business. Watson has sunk eight whaling ships. To the bottom of the sea. By 1980 he'd single-handedly shut down pirate whaling in the North Atlantic by sinking the notorious pirate whaler Sierra in Portugal and two of the four ships in the Spanish whaling fleet, the Isba I and Isba II. He sank two of Iceland's whalers in Reykjavík harbor and three of Norway's whaling fleet at dockside. To his critics he says: "I don't give a damn what you think. My clients are the whales and the seals. If you can find me one whale that disagrees with what we're doing, we might reconsider."
Watson's ship radiates both nobility and menace. The ship is black, stem to stern, and it flies under a Jolly Roger. The only color is a nod to public relations—the yellow letters on the side of the ship that spell seashepherd.org. Forward of the bridge, the Farley is low-slung, and the main deck holds three fast Zodiacs, or inflatable outboard motorboats, and two Jet Skis in their cradles. In the old fish hold beneath the deck, under a steel door, is a flying inflatable boat, or FIB, a kind of Zodiac with ultralight wings and a motor, which Watson hoped to use for reconnaissance. From the main deck, the bow sweeps up to a gracefully rounded bludgeon of black steel. The hull is ice reinforced, meaning strong enough to push through moderately thick ice, and ideal for ramming. Water cannons bristle off the bow and the aft helicopter deck. They are there to prevent unwanted boarding.
Four days out of Melbourne, the Farley's two welders got busy and began to build something that looked to me like a giant blade. It was. It was called the "can opener," and it was constructed with steel I beams and welded to the starboard bow; a seven-foot (2-meter), razor-sharp cutter designed to gut the hull of an enemy ship.
I think it was then that I realized my assignment was not a game. Watson
takes great pride in having never injured anyone, neither his crew members nor anyone else. The ships he has sunk have all been in port. He insists, "We are nonviolent. We disable property used in criminal activities." But his critics include prominent members of the mega-environmental organization Greenpeace, which Watson co-founded in 1972 and whose board he left five years later because, he says, "they wanted to 'bear witness' and protest. I didn't want to protest anymore. There were international laws, regulations, and treaties I wanted to enforce." Watson's dark eyes flash. "I once called them the 'Avon ladies of the environmental movement' and they never forgot it. It was a reference to their armies of door-to-door fund-raisers."
Watson didn't want to lead a large bureaucracy that spent much of its energy raising money and waving banners. He wanted to get in a ship and physically intervene. He said of the Antarctic campaign, "Greenpeace has a fast ship that could stop the whalers cold. I can't see watching whales being tortured and dying in abject agony while I 'bear witness.'"
In 1977 Watson started the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and for the past 25 years has been running almost continuous campaigns at sea to stop illegal whaling, drift netting, long-lining, dolphin slaughters, and sealing. The Washington State-based organization spends no money on fund-raising but gets donations through media attention and word of mouth. Pierce Brosnan, Martin Sheen, and Christian Bale are generous supporters, as are John Paul DeJoria, CEO of the Paul Mitchell hair products company; Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia; and Steve Wynn, Las Vegas hotel and casino operator. Watson quipped, "With James Bond, the President, and Batman on my side, how can I lose?"
We sailed out of Melbourne on the morning of December 10, and it didn't take long for me to realize that the campaign was quixotic, even anachronistic. The 50-year-old Farley was ready for retirement and could average only a paltry ten knots. She crawled and rolled into the roaring forties. The ship's first engineer, Canadian Trevor VanDerGulik, ran a test of the water cannons and one dribbled, while the standpipe of another burst, gushing water over the bridge. I looked more closely at the crew. Three of the deckhands, Justin, Jeff, and Joel—"We're the J Crew," they'd told me—would be among the frontline soldiers in any battle. Though they were brave and dedicated animal rights activists, they'd never been to sea and were prostrate with motion sickness on the two-day run to Tasmania.
Not to say that some of the crew weren't skilled and experienced. Chris Aultman, the helicopter pilot from Orange County, California, was a tried and excellent pilot when taking off from solid ground—he'd just never flown off a moving deck. VanDerGulik, Watson's nephew, was a master ship's engineer used to supervising large dry-dock repairs with 500 mechanics under him. Marc Oosterwal, another Dutchman, was a top-notch welder. And Dave DeGraaff was a master electrician from Melbourne and a shop steward for his union, responsible for dozens of electricians. He and other workers had seen the Farley docked from a high-rise construction site nearby and got curious. DeGraaff took a tour of the ship and promptly signed on. Soon more construction unions in Melbourne were lining up behind Sea Shepherd, and thousands of dollars' worth of steel, welding rods, and expensive rubber for the heli-deck was showing up daily.