Iceland Dives In for Chance to Free ‘Willy’

Elias Jonsson has never seen “Free Willy,” the children’s movie--”I must have been working then or something,” he says politely--but he still has some well-informed views on plans now afoot to bring its 10,000-pound star home to native waters.

Jonsson, a diver by trade, was hired back in the late 1970s--around the time “Willy” was caught and shipped south--to care for killer whales that Icelandic herring fishermen sometimes net by accident. It was standard practice back then to sell such unwanted catches to foreign marine parks, and that’s what happened to Keiko, as the star of “Free Willy” is known off the silver screen.

“There’s nobody in Iceland who’s been around killer whales more than I have,” Jonsson says, flipping the pages of scrapbooks to reveal photo after photo of himself two decades ago, clad in a wetsuit and treading the frigid waters off the Icelandic coast next to jutting dorsal fins. Based on that experience, he says, “It’s possible this could work.”

“This” is the unprecedented scheme to bring Keiko back to the North Atlantic, reintroduce him to the wild after 20 years in captivity and--here’s the really long shot--reacquaint him with his original pod. Iceland, Ireland and to a lesser extent Scotland are all vying for the honors.

Iceland is the first choice of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, the Newport, Ore., organization that is spearheading the plan, because Iceland has the most killer whales swimming offshore. The government in Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, is expected to announce its decision in a few weeks, and if it approves, Keiko could be flown “home” by September.

Icelanders have joined the countless whale-loving moviegoers who believe that the real-life “Willy” deserves to be free, like the character he played in the 1993 movie--a remarkable phenomenon, because Iceland was until recently an active whaling nation.

It hasn’t been forgotten here that North American activists did much to shut down the whaling industry, even going so far as to sink two whaling boats in Reykjavik harbor. Many Icelanders believe that Americans are sentimental busybodies for identifying so emotionally with the big marine mammals and for forcing their views on other societies.

“When Keiko was moved to Newport, it’s estimated that some 750 million people watched it on television,” recalls Hallur Hallsson, a former journalist from Iceland who is now leading the campaign here to free Keiko. “It’s unbelievable. People in Iceland just laughed, ‘Oh, those Americans, they’re crazy.’

“But since then,” he adds, “it’s really started to get going.”

Iceland’s growing interest in bringing Keiko here isn’t driven so much by a newfound love of whales as by an appreciation of the tourist money the mammals can attract. The first year Keiko was living in Newport, he attracted 1.3 million visitors to the town, which has a population of 8,000.

“He created $75 million in revenues,” Hallsson says. “He created 3,300 jobs. You’d like to get a slice of that, wouldn’t you? Who wouldn’t?”

The attempt to reintroduce Keiko to the North Atlantic results from a wave of popular outrage over the way he was treated after appearing in “Free Willy.”

The high point of the film comes, after all, when a young boy helps the whale escape his cruel aquarium-keepers; with a little help from the special-effects folks, the mighty mammal is shown leaping a jetty to the open seas as the boy waves goodbye.

That moving scene fired the imaginations of countless young viewers--and was followed by shocked indignation when “Life” magazine tracked down the real-life killer whale, post-film, in his tank in Mexico City. Keiko, who was captured as a calf, had by this time far outgrown his tank.

Nor could Keiko’s real-life keepers afford to run water-coolers, so his cramped tank was a sultry 80 degrees, 30 degrees warmer than the maximum for a healthy killer whale. Keiko was underweight and his skin covered with warty lesions.

“It was very clear to his Mexican owners that if he didn’t get out of that pool, he would probably die there,” says Diane Hammond, spokeswoman for the Free Willy Keiko Foundation.

Warner Bros., which had put a toll-free whale information number at the end of “Free Willy,” was swamped by calls from angry moviegoers, who accused the studio of making millions off Keiko and then abandoning him.

The studio sought the help of the Earth Island Institute and some wealthy donors and had Keiko moved to roomy new digs in Oregon, with ample fresh seawater and fish. The foundation was set up to “rehabilitate” him.

After two years in Newport, Keiko has bounced back to good health, eating so heartily that he has gained 2,000 pounds. His skin lesions have disappeared, and he can stay underwater for 18 minutes, compared with just three in Mexico City.

He is also developing a feisty new personality, Hammond says.

“He can be a real handful, testing everybody,” she says. “But it’s really good to see this independent decision-making.

“Whether he develops all the skills necessary to become a wild killer whale again is anybody’s guess,” Hammond says. “There’s never been a killer whale that anybody’s tried this with. We’re breaking new ground every day.”

Although the killer whale is not an endangered species, Hammond says she hopes that Keiko’s return will offer lessons useful to the wildlife biologists who are working with endangered animals in captive-breeding programs.

Plans for returning Keiko to the North Atlantic call for building a big, dumbbell-shaped floating pen in a bay similar to the fish pens used in salmon hatcheries but on a scale never before attempted. Keiko would swim in the deep octagonal ends of the dumbbell shape, and his caretakers would work in shallow waters in the middle.

From the pen, it is hoped, Keiko will be able to make acoustic contact with the killer-whale pods passing nearby and eventually be “adopted” by one. Hammond says it will take at least two years to know whether Keiko can responsibly be set free; at this point, no one even knows whether he will be able to communicate with his own species.

“Keiko’s been in a concrete pool where he’s heard nothing but himself and human-made noises, pumps and show tunes and so on,” Hammond says.

While waiting for a yes or no from Iceland, the foundation has been training Keiko to dive and to catch live fish, in hopes of weaning him off the rations of dead fish that he is used to having dumped into his open mouth by attendants each day.

“It’s been slow, and it’s frustrating some days,” Hammond says. “He’s by no means adept as a hunter, but he’s got the basics down.”

At the same time, veterinarians have been trying to make sure Keiko has no diseases that might be transmitted to fish once he reenters the wild. A clean bill of health is a make-or-break requirement for Iceland, which gets 70% of its foreign revenue from fisheries and is vigilant about protecting the stocks.

While the American and Icelandic veterinarians do their probing in Newport, Jonsson, here in Hafnarfjoerdur, has decided to root for Keiko’s return.

Not because he or his fishermen friends are sentimental about killer whales, mind you.

“I’m one of the few who have seen killer whales hunt, and I didn’t like it very much,” Jonsson says, describing a day when, from a fishing boat, he grimly watched a pod of six killer whales run down a much bigger whale and eat it alive. “They’re ruthless,” he says.

But through his work closer in to shore, Jonsson says he learned to admire the intellect and memory of the killer whales he tended while they were awaiting shipment to marine parks. One whale, he remembers, was seasick when it was brought to him: The herring fishermen who had accidentally netted it had loaded it onto the deck of their boat, then sailed home for six hours through choppy seas.

When Jonsson got his hands on the animal, it was so dizzy it couldn’t stay right-side up in the water, and he had to spend hours by its side, holding it upright so it could breathe.

“After that, we got along so well that I never was afraid,” he says.

That whale was eventually shipped off to an aquarium in Antibes, France, Jonsson says, and two years later he got the job of flying in a female companion for it. The seasick whale hadn’t seen him in two years, he recalls, but when he entered the aquarium, it finished its performance and rushed over to where he was standing, wagging its head and obviously showing that it recognized its former caretaker.

“I was very impressed,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it off and on since then.” If that killer whale could remember him after two years, Jonsson figures, why shouldn’t Keiko remember how to hunt, or to recognize his fellows, after 20 years?

“They know lots of things, in my opinion,” he says. “Of course, [releasing Keiko] has a lot to do with propaganda and human feelings, and it’s hard for me to get mixed up in that. I think there are a lot of problems in the world that are more important. But a lot of people feel he ought to be free, and that’s their business.”