Sea Shepherd Society : Modern-Day Pirates Fight the Whalers

Paul Watson. Remember the name, for he is a man apparently determined to become a legend in his own time, or maybe die trying.

Watson was formerly a Greenpeace activist, almost since the environmental protection organization’s inception in 1971, but defected almost a decade ago.

According to him: “They forgot their original purpose and turned into a big, rich bureaucracy, more interested in fund-raising than in saving lives, so I got fed up and quit . . . they’re a bunch of wimps.”

According to them, Watson was an arrogant, aggressive pest from the start, never truly attuned to Greenpeace’s policy of nonviolence, and was finally nudged out of the organization after he snatched a club from the hand of a Newfoundland baby seal hunter during the 1977 campaign, and tossed it into the sea.

A More Suitable Niche

“Damned right I did. What was I supposed to do? Just stand there, two feet away, and watch him club its brains out before my eyes? That’s what I mean--a bunch of wimps,” Watson still hisses 10 years later.

In any case, he went on to find himself a far more suitable niche.

Today, at 37, he is founder, leader, guru and guiding light of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a small group of environmental guerrillas generally acknowledged, from here to Denmark, Spain, South Africa and Japan, as the closest thing on the world scene to a real, live band of modern-day pirates, lawless renegades of the high seas whose chief mission is preservation of marine life--and whose chief tactic is destruction of property.

Five Ships Sunk

Sea Shepherd has never thought twice, for instance, of sinking any whaling ship it could. Five so far. One in Portugal. Two in Spain. The most recent are a pair of Icelandic vessels, sunk to the bottom of Reykjavik harbor last winter. (Adding insult to serious industrial injury--Iceland had only four whalers to begin with--Sea Shepherd saboteurs even went to the trouble, in that case, of wrecking the national whaling station, too. Total losses were estimated at $5 million.)

During off-marine seasons, Sea Shepherd activists turn their attentions landward, busying themselves variously with attempted disruptions of the Canadian government’s annual wolf kills, driving spikes into the prime timber of trees about to be razed by lumberjacks, sometimes even liberating wild animals from city zoos.

As a result of their assorted activities, they have seen the inside of prisons from Lisbon to the Faroe Islands; half a dozen countries have issued warrants for their arrests; Canada once impounded their ship for nearly two years; and, not least, they’ve been routinely mauled the world over by outraged fishermen whose property and livelihoods they threaten. In one confrontation dramatic enough to make the nightly network news in 1983, they were chased out of Siberian waters by a Soviet destroyer.

And everyone still remembers, mostly with a grin, the day Watson bravely handcuffed himself to a Canadian whaling winch, only to have a captain drag him slowly into the freezing Arctic waters. Delighted whalers looked on, hooting with laughter, as Watson’s crew scrambled to the rescue.

Another obvious consequence of Sea Shepherd’s brazen ways is that it elicits few emotional in-betweens. To some, it is everything from a pack of common criminals and thugs to dangerous terrorists who will eventually kill someone in their wanton destruction of property, even if they haven’t yet. To others, they are men and women who virtually walk with the saints, heroes beyond moral reproach, willing to risk their own lives to protect the helpless when no one else will.

Adoring Disciples

Paul Watson, meanwhile, has become larger than life to his adoring disciples, many of them, like the two Iceland saboteurs, barely past 21. They follow his orders without question, pay anywhere from $500-$1,500 for the privilege of sailing with him, and respectfully address him as “Captain,” although he is no more a captain, in any official sense, than the skipper of a weekend fishing dinghy. This pleases Watson. He even has a smart black uniform laden with gold braid, which he bought in a surplus store years ago and wears often, especially when the TV cameras are around.

And the TV cameras are increasingly around. The pile of press clippings in Watson’s apartment steadily grows. Even Hollywood has been sniffing about, talking of doing his life story. The beauty of it, at least from a movie mogul’s point of view, is obvious: Not only is the saga of Captain Paul Watson the stuff of high drama and continuing suspense, it can be so simply scripted, in celluloid as in life--Watson as Rambo or Robin Hood, depending on your point of view.

Jon Voight as Watson

This also pleases Watson. If a movie deal should ever go through, he hopes Jon Voight will play his part. “I had dinner with him once and he said he was interested. I like him, he’s a real mellow, laid-back kind of guy.”

Voight is also only one among several stars who actively support Sea Shepherd, says Watson, quick to list others: Loretta Swit, Ed Asner, Jean Stapleton, Andy Williams, Ida Lupino, Mike Farrell (who, Watson says, once even posted $10,000 to bail him out of a Canadian jail) and, in his flashiest coup to date, he recently recruited Bo Derek’s support in behalf of his wolf campaign. “She even got me on the Merv Griffin show,” he grins.

(Among Sea Shepherd’s less celebrated but even more valuable benefactors are Cleveland Amory of the Animal Fund and the Royal British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose combined contributions largely financed Watson’s first ship.)

Watson learned the importance of celebrity endorsements during his Greenpeace days, when French actress Brigitte Bardot taught all fledgling environmentalists that more reporters will show up at a demonstration protesting the clubbing of baby seals if a glamorous movie star is present.

And the media, Watson doesn’t mind admitting, is never far from his mind. He spends hours scheming ways to win more press attention, not for even the slightest of ego reasons, he says, but because publicity can translate into money. Which Watson (who takes pride in the fact that Sea Shepherd has no paid executives, including himself) constantly needs more of. With a dues-paying membership of about 12,000, his annual budget in the best of years, he says, is only around $250,000; furthermore, he laments, it’s tough, trying to patrol the whole globe with only a single ship.

Laying eyes on Watson for the first time, it’s hard to believe that this is the daring, seafaring swashbuckler of modern lore, the bane of blubber buyers world-over, the belligerent boor who helped put the curse on all those lovely white seal coats down on Rodeo Drive.

Bedecked in his uniform or not, he still looks more like some over-aged, overweight, pie-faced kid, hoping to yet shed the soft plumpness of his baby fat. His hair is streaked with premature gray, a natural puffiness under his eyes lends him the consistent appearance of somebody who just got out of bed, and when he smiles, the boyish impression is complete, thanks to a narrow gap between his two front teeth.

His personality is just as improbable. No flash here, no animated, thundering theatrics, no trace of either bravado or defiance in his tone. Just a quiet, mild, pleasant personality standing before a bank of microphones at a Los Angeles press conference this spring, sounding as reasonably sincere, and bland, as some scientist announcing an obscure new technical breakthrough--not a man who was practically declaring war on two countries and thumbing his nose at a third.

More Ambitious Plans

Seizing the momentum afforded by the Iceland escapade, Watson had promptly embarked on a series of global press conferences, not only to applaud Sea Shepherd’s lastest “success” but to lay out his larger, even more ambitious plans for the rest of 1987.

He dispatched the entire topic of Iceland as fast as he could, in fact, as no more than past history, valuable only as a menacing, costly example to other nations.

“With this single action, we’ve not only permanently crippled Iceland’s whaling operation . . . we’ve accomplished what no other organization has been able to do within the past nine years,” Watson said, sounding more matter-of-fact than immodest. As for legal repercussions, he only sounded bored. “How can they charge us with illegal activities,” he shrugged, “when they were engaged in illegal activities themselves?”

Norway Next Target

More important, Watson wanted, first, to serve notice that Norway is next on his whaling “hit list” and can expect to lose a few ships of its own “at the first opportunity,” unless it shuts down operations instantly.

(To Watson, of course, this is a mere technicality--but in actuality, there is no such thing as “illegal” whaling. Although the 40-nation International Whaling Commission imposed a temporary moratorium on whaling of endangered species in 1985, effective until 1990, the organization is strictly an advisory body with no enforcement authority. “The whales appointed me,” Watson says of his role as the IWC’s volunteer cop.)

Then, in his grandest threat yet, Watson announced that, come summertime, he and his crew (of around 30 young zealots) plan to sail into the North Pacific to “haul up and shred” hundreds of miles of fishing nets laid out by some 2,000 fishermen, mostly Japanese, plus a few Koreans and Taiwanese. “We hope to create an international incident that will expose Japan’s massive plunder and pillage of the seas to the entire world.”

Nets 30 Miles Long

He has no quarrel with legitimate fishermen, but, Watson explained, the drift nets being used by the Japanese--some around 30 miles long, 30 feet deep--are needlessly destructive (other environmentalists agree), causing the deaths of literally thousands of seabirds, seals, dolphins and whales that become entangled in them.

” . . . And so they must be stopped now. The devastation is indescribable, and if we wait for all the legal channels to be exhausted, it’ll be a wasteland up there within 10 years.”

“Why are you announcing your plans in advance? Are you guys just spoiling for a fight?” one reporter asked as every camera in the room instantly swiveled toward two Japanese journalists in the audience. Besides being at the top of Watson’s hit list, Japan is also the world’s largest importer of whale meat and byproducts, among Iceland’s best customers. The pair remained disappointingly expressionless, not even taking notes.

Quotes Mahatma Gandhi

In reply, Watson gave the same speech he always does, at least to the media. Contrary to popular perception, Sea Shepherd activists see themselves as pacifists in the finest tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, “who said it was OK to destroy property it it was done with good will, not ill will.” (Watson refers to Gandhi a lot.) Moreover, members carry neither explosives nor weapons for self-protection, never resist arrest and, Watson always stresses, have never once in their history caused a single human injury.

But they do honor life more than property. Matter of fact, he always concludes, he doesn’t see any difference between Sea Shepherd’s activities and the Boston Tea Party. “Was that terrorism?” he loves to ask, American audiences especially.

(Around less cynical audiences, such a schoolchildren, Watson is usually somewhat more dramatic. “We are heralding a revolution,” he likes to say. “We are the Davids, challenging the Goliaths of doom.”

(And, for the hard-core cases of serious adult outrage, the law-loving antagonists who frequently rise up at some civic event to reject Watson’s whole bit, he simply slides softly, almost sadly into the role of sacrificial lamb: “Well, if we’re perceived as radicals, environmental shock troops,” he says, “then at least more moderate groups such as Greenpeace are better able to open discourse . . . so we’re glad to serve this role.”)

But nobody in this crowd was going to carp at him about property rights. The Japanese had already left.

Only the one final, obvious question: And, no, Watson replied to it, he has no fear of serious retribution from those whose livelihood he threatens, whose property he intends to destroy, no concern that one of these days some outraged skipper might just decide to blow a hole in his boat. Or him.

“But, if anyone ever does,” he added, “it will be a shot heard around the world.”

Back home in Vancouver, Watson, a vegetarian, sat in a local restaurant specializing in Western Indian cuisine, apparently enjoying a fairly gruesome looking meal of corn, roe and boiled ferns, as he mused aloud about the curious route life had taken to make him what he is today.

He owes it all, he says, to the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973.

Watson, who had enough to say about himself to write his autobiography at age 34, remembers the details vividly. But the story really begins with his childhood, he says. Like most people, Watson enjoys talking about himself, right down to the most trivial details.

In short form, his is basically the tale of an animal-loving kid who grew up in a small New Brunswick fishing village (and was, by age 8, shooting his own BB gun at other kids shooting at birds and squirrels with theirs) but always “dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, an Indiana Jones type” when he grew up. Until he discovered the novels of Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville and Jack London, which led him, at l7, to join the Norwegian Merchant Marine, then later the Canadian Coast Guard, where he learned his seamanship.

Tired of Regimen

But tiring of the regimen, he went to college, majoring in communications. He didn’t like that either. Meantime, along the way, he discovered Greenpeace, just forming to protest atmospheric nuclear testing in the Amchitka Islands. Still, Watson had no real focus, he says. Until, one day, when he was 23, motivated partly by an interest in seeing some of the United States, he found himself sneaking behind federal lines on the Pine Ridge, S.D., Oglala Sioux Reservation to volunteer as “medic” for the Indians holed up at Wounded Knee.

In appreciation of his services, the Indians made him an honorary Sioux in special initiation ceremonies inside a sweat lodge.

True Destiny Revealed

And it was there, in that sweat lodge, says Watson (a.k.a. Gray Wolf Clear Water, to the Sioux) that his true destiny was at last revealed.

As he wrote in his autobiography:

“What happened to me was that I saw a huge buffalo, the great animal that is to the Great Plains of North Amrica what the elephant is to Africa and the whale is to the world’s oceans. The buffalo seemed to talk to me as I lay sweating and gasping for air inside the incredibly hot lodge. It seemed to say that I should look to the whales, that I should not dissipate my energies on the full range of animal life, but that I should concentrate on the mammals of the sea, especially whales. . . . It brought my whole life into focus, in the sense that I knew exactly what I meant to do with myself from then on.”

Watson, recently divorced from a Sea Shepherd crew member and father of a 6-year-old girl, was accompanied at dinner by his live-in girlfriend, Joanna Forman, 26. A modish blond who wears slashingly vivid makeup and skin-tight designer jeans with spike-heeled shoes, Forman helps Watson run Sea Shepherd’s headquarters out of their comfortable, waterfront condominium, a place filled with marine artifacts and paintings, an expensive computer setup and a kitchen full of health foods.

Especially Good Spirits

Forman also leaves most of the talking to Watson--who seemed to be in especially good spirits at the end of an especially good day.

For one thing, he thought he was on the verge of raising $650,000 for a second ship, he said happily. He was so confident, in fact, he had already named it (Sea Wolf) and was making plans to send it back to the Faroe Islands (a Danish protectorate in the whaling business, north of the British Isles), while the Sea Shepherd did its work on the other side of the world this summer.

Secondly, Watson had started the day with a speech at a local high school, where he had kept around 200 students enthralled for more than an hour with a blow-by-blow account of his adventures, starting with the first ship Sea Shepherd ever sunk, the South African-owned Sierra, in 1979. (He dressed for the occasion in tennis shoes, baggy blue jeans and sweatshirts, his standard uniform when no TV cameras are about, the net effect being that he didn’t look much older than his audience.)

Chased It 200 Miles

“We had to chase it about 200 miles across the sea. Finally, we rammed (a hole in) it . . . right in Lisbon harbor.” Then, in a gripping, unvarnished version of his own bravado at age 29, Watson told how 14 of his crew had turned skittish and jumped ship, “which I could understand, I was scared myself,” leaving only himself and two loyal mates to try to make a sea escape. They failed, were arrested, briefly jailed and their ship impounded--”so we later went back and sunk our own ship, rather than let them turn it into a whaler.”

Watson goes to more trouble than usual, with young audiences, to justify his assorted violations of the law, starting as always with Gandhi. “Sometimes you have to follow your conscience, sometimes it’s necessary to break laws to save lives.” Watson is also less modest in these young forums. “Actually, the Japanese respect us for our samurai style, our kamikaze tactics, because we’re acting in their own tradition,” he said. “And even Newfoundland seal hunters told us they admired our seamanship.”

Earlier, the principal had greeted Watson at the door, fretting a little, “because some parents will probably complain that we’ve invited such a controversial figure.” But what the hell, he shrugged, wandering off to find a seat. (Watson speaks at schools for free, he says, although he can now sometimes command up to $2,000 in lecture fees.)

But, afterward, he and several teachers flocked to tell Watson how much they admired what he was doing. One even shamelessly jostled a colleague in her rush to get a seat at Watson’s table during lunch.

All in all, a flattering stopover. But, although he was somewhat chattier in the car going home afterward, it is maybe the most fascinating aspect of Watson’s personality that, in private as in public, he seems almost devoid of any real mood swings. He rarely laughs, seldom frowns, never raises his voice or cusses. He says he is never depressed, tense or flustered and has rarely experienced real anger, even at baby seal killers. With Watson, almost everything is strictly in the monotonal content of his words.

Something Eerie

Even he agrees there’s something eerie about his emotional make-up, that he’s probably “a little abnormal . . . but it’s the way I’ve always been. Even when my mother died--at age 13, I was the only one in the family who didn’t cry. Everybody thought I was heartless, that I didn’t care. . . . I did. But I just couldn’t cry.”

Even his commitment to marine mammals, Watson says, is strictly intellectual, not emotional. “When we’re at sea and a bunch of whale surface, the whole crew goes bananas at the sight,” he shrugs. “But I just think, ‘There goes a bunch of whales.’ I don’t get a thrill at the sight, I just want to save them from extinction.”

There are at least two topics, however, that hit nerve endings Watson can’t hide. Domestic pets and Greenpeace.

At a casual mention of household cats and dogs, it was positively startling, how suddenly he became a man utterly transformed, flushed, his voice harsh with bitter disgust, even hate.

‘Dogs Damned Servile’

“Dogs are so damned servile. It’s ‘Kick me and I’ll love you.’ I don’t understand that.” And cats don’t rate much better. “People have ruined domestic animals, bred all the life out of them. And I’ll never understand how people can love dogs but not raise a fuss over the extermination of wolves.”

Watson’s solution is enough to curdle the blood of cat and dog lovers. “The answer is phase out pets. Neuter them all. There are too many dogs and cats in North America. It’s way out of the natural order of things.”

When it comes to Greenpeace, Watson becomes, not angry but variously bitter, snide, peevish and self-righteous. And he could rave on all day.

To mention just a few of Watson’s more extravagant insults, he says Greenpeace activists (whom he sarcastically calls “the Fuller brush salesmen of the environmental movement”) “make a big splash but have accomplished nothing,” steal credit for Sea Shepherd accomplishments and even cash checks made out to Sea Shepherd by people who mistakenly think the two organizations are related.

‘They Copy Us’

“They’re a bunch of frauds, and they constantly copy us,” he snarls. “I can determine what Greenpeace’s agenda will be tomorrow by announcing today what we plan to do next.” He cites his upcoming campaign against the Japanese drift nets as the latest example of Greenpeace’s jumping on his bandwagon.

And the “real reason” Greenpeace criticizes him, he finishes sarcastically, isn’t because the organization seriously opposes Sea Shepherd’s destruction of property, but because “they’re into megabucks, they’re big business, so we’re a serious threat because we’re in business to put ourselves out of business.”

This is, obviously, Watson at his worst, Watson damaging his own credibility since, as anyone familiar with Greenpeace knows it has accomplished a great deal in its 15-year history, not simply through its campaigns to save marine life but in its efforts to improve the quality of life for human beings through its work to halt nuclear testing, toxic waste dumps and countless other enterprises. And Greenpeacers have not only been jailed, arrested, beaten and otherwise demonstrated just as much bravery as Sea Shepherd’s crew--they even lost a life two years ago when the French deliberately destroyed their ship, the Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand.

Own Lieutenants Appalled

Watson’s own lieutenants are appalled at his attacks on Greenpeace. “We’ve tried to get him to stop,” sighs Ben Cramer, who heads Sea Shepherd’s office outside Washington, “but he simply won’t.”

For its own part, Greenpeace--which dwarfs Sea Shepherd and most other environmental groups with a membership of around 2 million and a budget of $20 million annually--would officially prefer to take the high road, ignoring Watson altogether. But he makes some spokesmen so angry, they can’t keep quiet. Jim Bohland, for instance, one of the founders of Greenpeace, still living in Vancouver where the group originated in 1971, disputed Watson’s claim that Greenpeace had accomplished nothing, beyond continually stealing the thunder for Sea Shepherd successes.

“Christ, where do I even begin?” said Bohland, mustering a disgusted chuckle. “I’ve known the guy for 15 years, and he’s absolutely insane, out of his mind. Those are the remarks of a paranoid person. As everyone knows, for example, Greenpeace has had a full-fledged, five-year drift net campaign in the works for some time, working along with other environmentalist groups. We’ve been up there (in the North Pacific) since ’84. On this one, far from our trying to steal his thunder, Watson’s really horning in on us. It’s unfortunate that he has separated himself so deliberately from other groups working for the same goals. But,” Bohland finished, “Watson’s an egomaniac, pure and simple.”

ADDENDUM: It takes patience, to say the least, being a daring, seafaring pirate in modern times. There are so many variables to contend with. One day you sink a couple of ships, maybe even get mentioned in Time magazine, the next thing you know you’ve got so many problems you’re searching for the Excedrin.

Consider, for instance, what happened within just a matter of months to Watson, whose year began with such promise, so many grand plans. By March, it looked as if 1987 might turn into one unmitigated disaster for Sea Shepherd instead.

First, Watson’s deal to buy a second ship fell through, which means there will not only be no Faroe Islands campaign this summer, but also that an even more important part of Watson’s master plan for the future had also evaporated. As he had originally explained his scheme, he would pick up the ship in Canada cheaply, use it in the Faroes this season, then take it to Argentina or some other South American country hunting for heavy-duty vessels, sell it for maybe $3 million, return home and buy himself a couple of more boats with the profits. In the end, he envisioned a virtual Sea Shepherd armada.

Ship Owner No Dummy

Unfortunately, however, the ship’s owner turned out to be no dummy and decided to do the same thing himself. At last report, Watson’s second ship was already en route south.

Even worse, Watson next learned that the Sea Shepherd itself, in England for repairs, is apparently beyond fixing, too worn to undertake another long voyage anywhere. So, by April, it appeared there would be no sensational summertime showdown with the Japanese either.

That left Watson with only a couple of lesser confrontations on Sea Shepherd’s immediate action agenda. One was a planned disruption of the Canadian government’s spring wolf hunt. But damned if the authorities didn’t cancel that, too. By last month, Sea Shepherd activists were reduced to ordinary, orderly demonstrations in the streets, protesting Canada’s alleged resumption of baby seal hunts--until even that mission turned to dust when the government politely offered to fly Watson up to see for himself that it wasn’t true.

A Test of Mettle

All enough to test the mettle of any activist, to be sure. Watson included.

To tell the truth, it really didn’t take much for Watson to say what the hell. He was already fed up, mousing around with bureaucrats in his native land--and when they decided last month, atop all else, to audit his tax returns, such was his restless frustation that, guess what?

He decided to abandon his home base in Vancouver and move to the land of opportunity and glamour.

According to Sea Shepherd’s Redondo Beach office, Watson had barely been here a month before he was able to raise $100,000 to buy a 180-foot tuna boat worthy of a showdown with the Japanese. Sailing date is tentatively scheduled for this month. Press invited.