20,000 Leagues Under the Sea : Fathom This: Environmentalist Paul Watson wants a submarine to police anyone who’s ever hunted a whale, a harp seal or a dolphin.

So we sailed up to the sun, Till we found the sea of green. And we lived beneath the waves , In our yellow submarine. --The Beatles

*

Paul Watson, savior of seals and sinker of whalers, wants to add a sneakier dimension to his salvation navy.

So now he’s in England, poking among surplus rust buckets in Portsmouth Docks, with $300,000 to spend on the best of a batch of 30-year-old Oberon Class attack submarines retired by the Royal Navy.

Later, the founder and head brigand of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society may detour east to Odessa and browse among half a dozen leftovers from the former Soviet Union’s undersea fleet.

“Russian subs are a bargain at $60,000,” says Watson, admiral of Sea Shepherd’s four-ship squadron and scourge of anyone who ever pointed a harpoon at a whale, hefted a club at a harp seal or netted a dolphin. “Unfortunately, none of the dials or instructions are in English.”

Whatever the purchase, his submarine will certainly be painted yellow to play off the childlike enchantment, friendship and phantasm of the Beatles’ classic. Watson might even invite Paul, George and Ringo to reprise their anthem for the boat’s return to active duty.

When refitted, shaken down and fully jaundiced, the sub will become Nautilus, as a memorial to Jules Verne. Watson, waving an antique copy of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” says the vessel also will honor the author’s early visions for “protecting wildlife and the ocean.”

Watson, 43, sees himself as neither a literary hero nor as Capt. Nemo, an anti-social submariner presumed to have perished at sea. “But we have started calling the operation ‘Nemo’s Revenge,’ ” he says.

Revenge, it must be emphasized, will not include torpedoing Norwegian whalers, Canadian sealers, Japanese drift netters and others the Santa Monica-based Sea Shepherd blames for creating a marine holocaust.

Decommissioned submarines, explains a British Embassy spokesman in Washington, are not sold with torpedoes. Oberon Class vessels--although veterans of Persian Gulf patrols during Desert Storm--were never equipped with sea-to-anything missiles. And deck guns went out with U-boats.

So there’s a good chance Watson could end up being offered a one-owner, high-mileage boat stripped by disposal regulations of such little underwater luxuries as propellers, periscope and sonar dome.

“But there are ways around such things if we move fast,” says used submarine dealer Vin Sootarsingh of Portsmouth, who also sells tanks and airplanes. “There are conservationists in the Royal Navy, too.”

Watson is optimistic, betting that he’ll get everything but the torpedoes. He’s especially interested in the tactical advantage of sonar.

“With sonar, you can actually deflect (whales), herd them away from a whaling ship,” he says. “And we’ll be able to ‘see’ whales by sonar, turning them long before the whaler can see them.”

And loitering at periscope depth, but unseen on sandy Caribbean bottoms, Watson hopes to bushwhack speedy, elusive turtle poachers.

“A torpedo tube is just an air lock,” he says. “So we can go down less than 100 feet and if poachers show, we put divers out of the tubes to arrest them and turn them over to local authorities.”

Installing an observation hatch in the submarine’s deck will allow underwater spying on illegal drift netting.

“We should be able to film the nets underwater, get footage of dragging operations destroying the habitat, and use that as evidence,” Watson says. “Or we can hook the net and sink it.”

When in port, the Nautilus will break out the photographs and exhibits, become a museum and open its hull to tourists and school groups.

Watson says Sea Shepherd has a London office, so he may seek British registry for the submarine. Or turn to a port of convenience, such as Liberia.

Whatever the home port, says a State Department spokesman, the Nautilus should face no problems in U. S. waters--not as long as it has been demilitarized.

Watson, of course, is as adept at massaging the media as he is at whacking whalers. Such has been the coverage of both he and Sea Shepherd that major studios keep optioning his life story--with total payments of about $500,000, or almost enough to pay for a year of Sea Shepherd operations.

So he knows there’s a sly benefit to owning an underwater warship that goes beyond military cunning.

“While saving a whale in 1986 was a media event, in 1993 it isn’t such a big story,” he says. “Putting Zodiacs in front of whaling vessels doesn’t do it anymore. Done that, been there, seen that.

“So you come up with something new.”

And he believes that coming up with a yellow submarine, all myth and symbols, crewed by unpaid idealists out to save ocean mammals, is irresistible.

*

The life of Paul Watson--baby-faced ocean raider, nerveless tackler of any nation threatening marine wildlife--is the stuff of many movies.

A native of New Brunswick, he taught himself the sea with the merchant navies of Norway and Sweden and with the Canadian Coast Guard. He doesn’t have a mate or master’s ticket but is philosophical about the shortage: “They’d just take it away from me if I had one.”

In the ‘70s, Watson was a free spirit who enlisted in Earth Day demonstrations. He sailed to Alaska to protest Atomic Energy Commission H-bomb tests at Amchitka and, in 1973, wangled press credentials to smuggle himself into Wounded Knee.

The American Indian Movement got a medic, and Watson became Gray Wolf Clear Water, an honorary Oglala Sioux.

Then he joined Greenpeace. A few months later, he left Greenpeace. Watson became a nemesis protesting the group’s pacifism, railing against its rich bureaucracy, calling Greenpeace a collection of wimps. And you can quote him. Please.

Greenpeace generally chooses to ignore Watson and his criticism. But Jim Bohland, a Greenpeace founder, said in a 1987 interview that he considered Watson “absolutely insane . . . out of his mind . . . an egomaniac, pure and simple.”

Watson formed Sea Shepherd in 1978 around a few friends and a creaky trawler. Serious shenanigans began.

His penalties have been jail, fines, threatened life sentences, a dragging across an ice floe into freezing waters, outlaw status in several countries, ships impounded and, more recently, a $25,000 price on his head by Taiwanese fishermen.

But the prizes have been half a dozen whalers sunk from Norway to Iceland; rammings that brought at least a temporary end to dolphin slaughter in Asia; protests, publicized trials, demonstrations and the creation of international maritime incidents that helped pile pressure on the International Whaling Commission and a suspension of whale hunts; million-dollar drift nets cut from Japanese trawlers and sent to the bottom; and global respect among environmentalists for his 23,000-member organization now in several countries.

There is no in-between with Paul Watson.

He is adored by disciples who hang on his quotations from Gandhi and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” Watson has the ear and support--and often the financial help--of movie stars. Plus the benediction of Cleveland Amory’s Fund for Animals and Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Watson is a vegetarian who draws no salary and only personal living expenses from Sea Shepherd funds. The cost of volunteering for one of his voyages can run as high as $1,500.

Yet opponents have called him an terrorist with a death wish, a media whore and a “genuine Chicken of the Sea.” Also a paranoiac who feeds from public appearances in a brass-buttoned uniform to buttress the vain image of self-appointed “Capt.” Paul Watson.

But Watson’s proud claim--one acknowledged by his enemies--is that no one has died or been injured in a Sea Shepherd assault. Watson says he is no more than a private policeman making citizen arrests of fisherman breaking laws beyond the reach of international authorities.

Overriding all opinions is his mission that few outside the animal products industries will argue: saving helpless wildlife from money-grubbers and being prepared to die doing it.

Or as Watson frequently puts it: “The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive--money--to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it. So one person’s terrorist becomes another person’s freedom fighter.”

While speaking such slogans--this time on a British television show--Watson casually mentioned his yearning for a submarine.

The remark brought a call from Sootarsingh, who said he had ex-Royal Navy submarines fresh from decommissioning. Watson then received a surge of membership requests from former submariners hot to get back beneath the waves.

Commissioned in 1962, Oberon Class attack submarines have served with the navies of Great Britain, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Chile, Canada and Egypt.

They are 300-feet long, displace 2,030 tons and can dive to 950 feet with a range of 9,000 miles at 12 knots while surfaced.

Oberons are powered by diesel and electric engines.

Naturally, a good used nuclear submarine would be much faster.

“But,” Watson notes, “nuclear power wouldn’t go down too well in the environmental movement.”