Waves of Compassion

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The Soviet whalers seemed completely confused by this colorful boatload of hippies flying a flag with the earth on it, playing rock music, and zipping around them in little Zodiacs. The workers waved and smiled from decks and the officers glared from the bridge. The first time we got close enough to the whalers to talk to them, a deckhand leaned over the railing and shouted in English, 'Do you have LSD?'

We picked out a departing harpoon boat, the Vlastny, and followed it. It was soon pursuing a pod of sperm whales. Hunter leapt into a Zodiac with Watson, Korotva took Fred Easton, and I went with Patrick Moore. Hunter and Watson tried to position themselves between the harpoon boat and the frantic whales, but Watson's outboard sputtered to a stop and they were thrown aside by the bow of the killer boat. Korotva pulled up, traded passengers with Watson, and sped off with Hunter. They positioned themselves directly in front of the massive cannon, shielding the whales. When they dropped into a trough, however, the cannon fired and the harpoon flew over their heads and exploded in the side of a whale. 'The harpoon cable slashed down beside us,' recalls Hunter, 'nearly ripping us in two.' Easton turned to me with thumbs up. He had captured the entire episode on film.

The story was carried in every London newspaper on the final day of the IWC. Reporters swarmed the Soviet and Japanese delegates, who were completely caught off guard. 'The fight to save the whales changed on that day,' remembers Spong. 'They could no longer ignore us.'

'It was the ultimate Mind Bomb,' says Hunter now. 'The mythology about Moby Dick had dominated the public perception of whales. That perception changed forever.'

'Old Greenpeacers still argue,' says Marining, 'about whether the Mystics or the Mechanics found the whalers. Was it Mel following the rainbow, Hewitt's RDF, or Spong's spy work? It was everything, the Mystics and the Mechanics, divine intervention, good planning, good seamanship, and good karma all rolled into one.'

We followed the Soviet ships for two days, but they stopped hunting whales and ran south faster than we could follow. We turned northeast for the coast. In San Francisco, I was picked up from the boat by two AP photographers and we had the photographs on the wire services within an hour. The film footage was shown on Walter Cronkite's evening news broadcast. The local bars gave us free drinks. Environmentalists, school children, rock stars, and movie agents came to the boat. 'Ben Metcalfe had warned me: 'Fear success,'' recalls Hunter. 'Now I knew what he meant. We had planned to make a global media hit for the whales, and we had succeeded, but we had not planned what to do afterwards.'

The Eco Navy

With McTaggart in France, Spong in London, and the media frenzy in San Francisco, Greenpeace had emerged onto the world stage. Back in Vancouver, the two phones in the little office rang incessantly. Upon our returned, we were $40,000 in debt and half the calls were from local suppliers, camera stores and marine supply shops, wondering when they were going to get paid.

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