Chapter One
Storm
At three o’clock on Christmas morning the bow of the Farley Mowat plunged
off a steep wave and smashed into the trough. I woke with a jolt. The hull
shuddered like a living animal and when the next roller lifted the stern I
could hear the prop pitching out of water, beating air with a juddering
moan that shivered the ribs of the 180-foot converted North Sea trawler.
We were 200 miles off the Adélie Coast, Antarctica in a force 8 gale. The
storm had been building since the morning before. 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. The Farley Mowat was the flagship of the radical environmental
group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The mission of her captain,
Paul Watson, and his forty-three member all-volunteer crew was to hunt
down and stop the Japanese whaling fleet, which was engaged in what he
considered illegal commercial whaling. He had said before the trip, “We
will nonviolently intervene,” but from what I could see of the
preparations being conducted over the last week, 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 and blowing snow and spray – white eruptions that tore off the tops
of the waves and streamed their shoulders in long streaks of foam. When I
had gone to sleep four hours earlier, the swells were twenty feet high and
building. Now monsters over thirty feet 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, fifty-five, with thick, nearly white hair and beard, wide cheek
bones, and packing extra weight under 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, thirty-seven, his Dutch
first officer, was in the center at the helm, steering NNW and trying to
run with the waves. Cornelissen looked too thin to go anyplace cold, and
his hair was buzzed to a near stubble.
“Good timing,” he said to me with the tightening of his mouth that was his
smile. “Two ships on the radar. The closest is under two-mile range. If
they’re icebergs they’re doing six knots.”
“Probably the Nisshin Maru and the Esperanza,” Watson said. “They’re
riding out the storm.” He was talking about the 8,000-ton Japanese factory
ship that butchered and packed the whales, and Greenpeace’s flagship,
which had sailed with its companion vessel the Arctic Sunrise from Cape
Town over a month earlier, and had been shadowing and harassing the
Japanese for days. Where the five other boats of the whaling fleet had
scattered in the storm no one could say.
Watson had found, in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southern
Ocean, his prey. It was against all odds. Watson turned to Cornelissen.
“Wake all hands,” he said.
In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a group of
seventy-seven 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 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 its “research”
kill from the previous year and allot itself a quota of 935 minke whales
and ten endangered fin whales. In the 2007/2008 season it planned to kill
fifty fins and fifty endangered humpbacks. Its weapon is a relatively new
and superefficient fleet comprising the 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, the Japanese say, is the only way to accurately measure
whale population, health, and its 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 organization 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 famous Tsukiji fish market,
and on the tables at fancy restaurants. By some estimates, one fin whale
can bring in $1 million.
Each year the IWC’s Scientific Committee votes on whaling proposals, and
at its annual meeting in 2005 it “strongly urged” Japanese whalers to
obtain their scientific data “using nonlethal means,” and expressed strong
concern over the taking of endangered fins, and humpbacks from vulnerable
breeding stocks. The whalers’ response was silence, then business as
usual.
Although this resolution is not legally binding, much of the public was
outraged that the whalers would openly disregard it. The World Wildlife
Fund contended that all the research could be conducted more efficiently
with techniques that do not kill whales. New Zealand’s minister of
conservation, Chris Carter, among others, described the Japanese research
as blatant commercial whaling. Even dissenters within Japan protested:
Mizuki Takana of Greenpeace Japan pointed to a report issued in 2002 by
the influential newspaper Asahi 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. “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 controversially, the whaling occurs in the
Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, an internationally ordained preserve that
covers the waters surrounding Antarctica as far north as 40ºS and protects
eleven of the planet’s thirteen species of great whales. Although research
is permitted in the sanctuary, commercial whaling is explicitly forbidden.
The whalers are also in clear conflict with the Convention on the
International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES). And although the
killing area in 2006 lay almost entirely within the Australian Antarctic
Territory, the Australians, while protesting, seemed 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 said,
“we wouldn’t be down here.”
Watson has no such diplomatic compunctions. He said, “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. He has rammed numerous illegal fishing vessels on the
high seas. By 1980 he had single-handedly shut down pirate whaling in the
North Atlantic by sinking the notorious pirate whaler Sierra in Portugal
and three of Norway’s whaling fleet at dockside. He shut down the Astrid
in the Canary Islands. He sank two of Iceland’s whalers in Reykjavik
harbor, and half the ships of the Spanish whaling fleet – the Isba I and
Isba II. His operatives blew open their hulls with limpet mines. To his
critics he points out that he has never hurt anyone, and that he has never
been convicted of a felony in any country.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Whale Warriors
by Peter Heller
Copyright © 2007 by Peter Heller.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Free Press
Copyright © 2007
Peter Heller
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3246-0
