Waves of Compassion

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These twelve souls headed off across the Gulf of Alaska for Amchitka Island, making landfall on Akutan Island on September 26. The Greenpeace was immediately seized by the U.S. Coast Guard for landing without permission and escorted back to Sand Point, Alaska, where they paid a fine and were released. The bomb test was then postponed until November, but the boat charter with Captain Cormack ran out at the end of October.

'We found out in Sand Point,' recalls Metcalfe, 'that the voyage was getting media attention in Canada and the U.S. Demonstrations had occurred in every major Canadian city.' Twenty members of the Coast Guard vessel Confidence, which seized the Greenpeace boat, signed a letter saying '? what you are doing is for the good of all mankind.' The protestors sensed that they were having an impact, but there was a fierce battle among the crew. Hunter wanted to continue on to Amchitka, while Bohlen and Metcalfe felt they had done their job and should head home. Bohlen took charge and instructed Cormack to head for Vancouver. At Kodiak Fineberg left the boat and Rod Marining joined. In the meantime, the Don't Make A Wave Committee chartered a larger, faster Canadian minesweeper, renamed Greenpeace Too. The two boats met in Union Bay, B.C. where, Simmons, Cummings, Marining, and Birmingham joined the second boat, headed for Amchitka.

'During the voyage,' Hunter remembers, 'Metcalfe, Bohlen, and I discussed replacing Irving Stowe as the leader. But Stowe had control of Don't Make a Wave, so I suggested we start a new organization called Greenpeace.' When they returned, Hunter, Moore, and Bruce founded The Whole Earth Church, using the Greenpeace emblem and Moore's now famous line from the voyage, 'A flower is your brother.' The Whole Earth Church espoused that 'all forms of life are inter-related. Any form of life which goes against the natural laws of interdependency has fallen from the State of Grace known as ecological harmony.' Members of the Church were asked to 'assume their rightful role as Custodians of the Earth.'

It was during this voyage that Hunter read Warriors of the Rainbow by William Willoya and Vinson Brown, which recounts the Cree Indian prophecy that one day, when the earth was poisoned by humans, a group of people from all nations would band together to defend nature. 'Well, this is us, I thought right away,' Hunter remembers. 'We're the Warriors of the Rainbow.'

Bohlen convinced Cote to vote with him to remove Irving Stowe as chairman of Don't Make a Wave. The organization officially became the 'Greenpeace Foundation' on May 4, 1972. 'Foundation' was suggested by Hunter in reference to Issac Assimov's futuristic Foundation Trilogy, in which a 'Foundation' takes responsibility for ushering the galaxy through the dark ages into an enlightened age. Greenpeace installed Metcalfe as the first chairman.

Metcalfe recalls, 'In the spring of 1972 the group scattered. I was battling with Canadian Minister for External Affairs Mitchell Sharp to get the bomb on the UN agenda in Stockholm when France announced a nuclear test for Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific. I woke up at 3am and couldn't stop thinking about it. I turned to my wife Dorothy, and said, 'We're going.' Rather than release the news in Vancouver, where it would have died, I used a simple media trick. I released the story in Australia and New Zealand where the French tests were big news. I sent a telegram that Greenpeace was coming down to protest the French nuclear-bomb test. By that afternoon all the Vancouver media had picked it up off the wire services. The gauntlet was down, but we still had to find a boat.'

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