Waves of Compassion

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Spong still had to prevail on the rest of Greenpeace. 'My role in Greenpeace was conspiratorial from the beginning,' he recalls. 'I had to convince them that whales were worth getting involved with. Then we had to create a sense of public outrage over what was happening to whales, and finally figure out how to make this plan of shielding the whales with our bodies work. It was pretty much all stealth and subterfuge, most of it in our heads lubricated by 25-cent beers at the Cecil.'

'What a brilliant idea it was,' recalls Dr. Myron Macdonald, who had been involved with Greenpeace from the beginning. 'I remember when it first came up at a meeting at Hamish's home. Hunter laid out the entire plan of placing humans between the whalers and the whales and capturing this on film in real time for the media. Many of us thought that since the French were still conducting atmospheric nuclear explosions and there was a global oil crisis, we had more important things to worry about. But Hunter insisted that this would make Greenpeace a truly ecological organization. He carried the day.'

John Cormack made the Phyllis Cormack available for the campaign. I took a leave of absence from my job at the North Shore News to be the photographer. Our plan was to use high-speed rubber Zodiacs to place ourselves between the whales and the whaling boats. Hunter got the idea to use Zodiacs from seeing pictures of French sailors boarding the Vega near Mururoa on McTaggart's second Voyage in 1973. McTaggart had been savagely beaten and partially blinded by the French, but the incident had been captured on film by Ann-Marie Horne. 'When I saw the photographs of the French Zodiacs,' Hunter remembers, 'I knew what we needed to confront the whalers.'

Paul Watson was the leftists radical of the group, known for his red headband and Maoist sympathies. He had been to Wounded Knee to help the Lakota Indians and had been at the Douglas Border closing in 1969. He was seditious and fearless. Watson helped bridge the gap between the hardcore political activists and ecologists when he joined the whale campaign. 'I met with Bob [Hunter] in the Alkazar Pub in November of '74,' recalls Watson. 'He told me the plan, and I agreed to pilot a Zodiac in front of the whaling ships.'

In his book Storming of the Mind, Hunter had introduced the concept of a 'mind bomb,' an electronic image sent around the world to 'explode in the collective consciousness.' Our Mind Bomb in this case was to reverse the Moby Dick image of brave little men in tiny boats hunting leviathan and replace it with the reality of modern whaling: huge mechanical factory ships and exploding harpoons hunting down the last remnants of the peaceful, intelligent whales. Our mission was to plant this image into the collective consciousness. We never doubted that we could do it, but the logistics were daunting. We had to figure out how to find the whaling fleets, not an island, but a moving target on a huge ocean. It was Spong who came up with a plan.

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