Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (20 page)

Now the authorities really didn’t know what to do with us. Peter Ballem pulled out all the stops, contacting the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, stating that we had a constitutional right to go out to the ice and that the permits should be issued. We were shocked when we learned that the PMO had issued instructions to the Fisheries officers give us the permits. We had to make a verbal statement that we wouldn’t interfere with the seal hunt, but we crossed our fingers behind our backs. Why did they think we wanted to go out there?

Eileen kissed me goodbye for the cameras as we boarded the helicopters and made our way to Cartwright, Labrador, on March 17. The ice and the seals had drifted northward, so we could not reach the seal hunt in a single flight. Fortunately our pilots had access to a fuel cache up the coast of Labrador (Newfoundlanders call it “down the Labrador” even though it is north). The weather forecast called for blizzard conditions the next morning as the crew settled in for the evening in Cartwright. A small miracle brought a bright blue sky the next morning and we took off in the subzero cold of a north Canadian winter. The seal herd was about 50 miles offshore and we landed before noon on the ice floes in the midst of the hunt. We had not told our lawyer, Peter Ballem, what we intended to do, but our mission that day had a single purpose: I had decided to make a statement by sitting on a baby seal and demanding this one seal be spared the hunter’s club.

When we landed, we spent some time getting footage and photos of the seal killing and the environment in which this was taking place. Then I spotted a baby seal that lay off to the side of the action and went over to it, sat on its back, and grabbed hold of its flippers in order to prevent it from escaping. I had no idea how strong these little creatures were, and this one wasn’t so little either. It was all I could do to hang on to this “tough little bugger, ” as I later described the pup. It wasn’t long before the Fisheries officers and their RCMP buddies noticed I was astride the pup. They made their way over and gathered around me, along with our film and photo crew, Peter Ballem, Bob Taunt, and a couple of sealers, who were leaning on their hakapiks.

I clung to the seal pup for dear life and announced to the assembled group that I wanted the sealers to spare this one pup, just this one. The sealers could go and find any number of other seals to club, but I was protecting this pup. Surely it was reasonable to spare one pup’s life. Of course, the authorities didn’t see things that way and, in fact, realized their jobs would be on the line if they allowed me to save even one seal’s life, so they told me I must get off the seal or be arrested. The Fisheries officer asked the sealers if they wanted to kill this seal. “Aye bye,” one replied. We went back and forth a few times with the camera rolling and Rex snapping shots until the ultimatum was given. Now I am not one to go limp and be forcibly dragged away upon being arrested for civil disobedience. I believe the moment the long arm of the law tells you that you are under arrest you should go peaceably and not resist. That’s what the civil in civil disobedience means.

So I was arrested and taken off the seal and had to watch while the two sealers who had been pressed into service by the authorities bashed its head in and skinned it. It’s not as if I hadn’t witnessed this procedure before. When I arrived in the Cartwright jail, they took my belt and shoelaces so I couldn’t hang myself in the prison cell. I guess this was standard procedure, but it did seem a bit funny at the time. Thankfully Peter was able to get me out of there before nightfall, and we were all back together in St. Anthony that evening. We had succeeded in getting our confrontation and it was once again broadcast around the world.

In some ways this “seal-sitting” episode was both the most disappointing and the most rewarding campaign action I was ever involved in. It was disappointing because the color film footage, with sound, shot by Steve Bowerman while I was arrested on the seal while pleading for its life, never saw the light of day. We will never know if Steve made a technical error or if sabotage was involved. All we know is that when the film footage arrived at the CBC’s Montreal studio for processing it was exposed and useless. Steve had either exposed it by mistake (perhaps he had not closed the camera magazine properly) or someone had purposely exposed the film so that it would never be seen. To this day I suspect the latter, as we all did at the time.

The best news was that Rex’s black and white still photos had survived. When he sent them over the wire service, the photo of me sitting on the seal was published the next morning in more than 3000 newspapers around the world. This was the widest distribution of any Greenpeace still image in the history of the organization until then. So the seal-sit was a great success, even though we didn’t get the ultimate media hit on TV. You win some, you lose some.

In an extraordinarily petty move the Canadian attorney general filed a charge against our lawyer, Peter Ballem, for “aiding and abetting” my seal-sitting crime. This was probably because Peter had managed to get us our permit and here we had embarrassed the government once more. This meant that Peter could not defend me in court, so we needed yet another lawyer to defend both of us. Longtime Greenpeace supporter David Gibbons, who was one of the most prominent criminal lawyers in Canada, stepped up to the plate. (Gibbons died in 2004.)

As if we hadn’t garnered enough attention from the media during the seal hunt itself, we were now faced with a trial in Newfoundland for loitering in a temporary Fisheries office and for sitting on a baby seal without permission from the minister of Fisheries and Oceans. We arrived in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in early June 1978 to face the charges. Anyone could see this was a trumped-up situation, but the government was serious, so we had to respond in a similar fashion even if it was laughable. With lay Judge Gordon Seabright presiding the proceedings began with the charges against Rex and me for loitering in the temporary Fisheries office. The highlight of the trial came during David Gibbons’s closing remarks, when he opined in high court fashion, “Your Honor, Judge Seabright, I must inform you that if my clients are convicted in this matter, it will no doubt go down in the annals of jurisprudence as the shortest loiter in history.” We calculated that the loiter had lasted for about seven minutes. “Not guilty,” came the verdict. Now we were to move on to the more serious charge: sitting on a baby seal without permission from the minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Oh yes, and the charge that my lawyer had aided and abetted me in this heinous crime, all under the so-called Seal Protection Regulations.

But before we could move on the lawyer acting for the Crown interjected with a complaint. Apparently David Gibbons was not called before the bar in Newfoundland. Without an invitation from the provincial law society, Gibbons could not defend me in a Newfoundland court and we would have to retain another lawyer who was called to the bar. Now my first lawyer had been charged with helping me commit my crime, my second lawyer was disallowed from representing me, so to appear before the judge on our behalf we hired a third lawyer who new nothing of the case.

In the end Peter Ballem was acquitted and I was found guilty of contravening the Seal Protection Regulations and fined $200. It was clear that lay Judge Seabright saw the irony in the case, but there was no doubt that I had broken the law, so he had no choice but to find me guilty. News of the trial and the conviction was widely broadcast, once again bringing attention to the fact that Canada continued a practice that should have been abolished long ago.

[1]
. Robert Hunter,
Warriors of the Rainbow
(New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 387.

Chapter 8 -
Growing Pains

The trial in Corner Brook had been a brief interlude in our preparations for the 1978 voyage to save the whales. We were all disappointed that the
James Bay
was not available, as she had been sold to a group of treasure hunters for service in the Caribbean. We subsequently learned that they had been successful and that the investors in the venture had made a fortune. For a brief moment this made me wonder about the choices one makes in life, but we had our own mission to complete. It might not be a financially rewarding one, but the prospect of saving the whales was such a powerful motivator that I didn’t dwell on it.

After a long search, we found the M.V.
Peacock
, another converted minesweeper, in Los Angeles, where she was berthed in San Pedro Harbor. The
Peacock
was not as fast as the
James Bay
, but she could do the job after a major refit and a paint job. Eileen and I moved in with Phil Caston in Sherman Oaks and spent a month commuting to the docks to make the
Peacock
seaworthy. We both felt exhausted from the effort so Eileen and I decided that we would stay ashore for the first leg of the voyage, as there were plenty of seasoned crew on board. Bob Taunt was chosen as the leader of the expedition as he had been on the two previous missions and was a director of the San Francisco organization. It did not bode well for the mission when Bob broke his foot kicking an oil drum on deck in a fit of rage just before the ship was to cast off. We got him bandaged up, and in early July the
Peacock
set sail. The media provided extensive coverage of the launch of our fourth voyage into the Pacific to confront the Soviet factory fleet. ABC’s
Good Morning America
featured helicopter footage of the Peacock with flags flying and an enthusiastic crew ready for action on the high seas.

Eileen and I were in Winter Harbour when our old friend, Jim Taylor, who had joined the expedition, phoned to tell us that the
Peacock
had arrived in Honolulu without having met either of the two Soviet whaling fleets. It seemed for the first time that the Soviets were avoiding the whaling grounds off California and were staying west of Hawaii. Perhaps they had received enough bad press already. But that didn’t mean they weren’t killing whales out there. Unfortunately the mood aboard the
Peacock
had turned sour. Bob Taunt had left the boat and was holed up in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel due to the mutinous nature of the crew. I never really determined whose fault this was, but they obviously needed help. I left Winter Harbour and flew to Honolulu to replace Bob as leader of the expedition. We got the mutiny sorted out and with fresh coordinates for the whaling fleet we headed back out into the north Pacific.

The Soviet whaling fleet was operating about 500 miles north of Hawaii, so we steamed for two days. On the morning of the third day, we arrived among the whalers in rough weather. They found a pod of sperm whales, took up the chase, and we lowered our Zodiacs for the standard confrontation. It was a bit like sleepwalking as we had done this so many times before. Once again we put ourselves in front of the harpoons, filmed and photographed the action, and stymied the odd shot. At the end of the day, though, we really could not prevent them from killing the whales. But we were getting the footage and making the news. We knew what we really needed was a vote against whaling from the International Whaling Commission. To date our efforts had failed there, despite support from many countries, because the majority still sided with the whalers. It was becoming just a little disheartening.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world a new Greenpeace universe was unfolding. Having won a partial victory against the French government for beating him and ramming his boat at Mururoa, David McTaggart had turned his mind to building his own campaign to save the whales in Europe. He had noticed the great success we had in our Pacific campaign and invited Bob Hunter to come to Europe to help raise funds in order to launch a similar effort there. Iceland, Norway, and Spain were all still operating shore-based whaling stations in 1978. Iceland, in particular, was killing the large fin whales in the North Atlantic. Bob appeared with representatives of the World Wildlife Fund on Dutch television, showing footage from our confrontations with the Soviet whaling fleet in the Pacific, and the donations came pouring in.

With the funds raised from Bob’s TV appearance, the fledgling European group bought a mothballed British research ship designed for service in the North Atlantic. The 150-foot
Sir William Hardy
was renamed the
Rainbow Warrior
, the brainwave of Susi Newborn, a Londoner who had joined McTaggart’s growing band of ecofreaks. Volunteers descended on the new ship. It was soon fit for a voyage against Icelandic whalers, complete with the Kwakiutl Sisiutl crest painted on the funnel.

During the summer of 1978, the
Rainbow Warrior
established herself as the new flagship for Greenpeace, confronting the Icelandic whalers in terribly rough seas. The British media and public were particularly attracted to the campaign as it reminded them of the Cod Wars between British and Icelandic fishing fleets that had taken place a few years earlier. Naval ships from Iceland had systematically cut the lines behind British trawlers to protest the fact that they were fishing within 200 miles of their island. The Brits cheered Greenpeace on as they got in a little payback for the home team.