Pirates at the End of the World


Chapter 1

The Missing Trophy


November 28th to 30th, 2002


It was the middle of the night in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand. We had just arrived at the airport, after more than twenty hours flying from São Paulo over the seas of Antarctica. When we told the taxi driver that we wanted him to take us to the Captain Cook Docks, he looked at us with curiosity. After asking a co-worker for information, he said:

This truly isn’t a conventional trip. The photographer Ignácio Aronovich (aka Ig) and I came to Auckland with the intent of embarking on a ship belonging to an ultra-radical environmentalist organization, Sea Shepherd, and sail on her for six weeks. She would cross the deserted waters of Antarctica to combat a fleet of five Japanese ships that kills hundreds of whales there every year.

The taxi driver dropped us off at the gate to the docks. It was 5 in the morning and the Auckland skyscrapers were outlined against a gray sky, filled with clouds. It was drizzling. The guard showed us the way. I looked in the direction he indicated, but couldn’t manage to make out a boat through the rain and darkness. We walked slowly, sagging under the weight of the equipment we carried.

On our right there was a huge blue and white ship, all lit up, clean, spacious, attractive. I started to delude myself into thinking that she might be the one. Then, straight ahead of us, at about 1,000 feet, we began to make out towers, a chimney, taut steel cables, metal beams, antennas. All were in muted colors, camouflaged on the horizon by the darkness, lit poorly by a single yellow bulb. It was a ship. On the gangway which we had to cross to board, a sign warned that only authorized visitors were allowed and threatened us with a hand made drawing of a skull. I was certain that it was the Farley Mowat, Sea Shepherd’s aging ship, built in Norway in 1958 to fish in the Arctic. We drew closer and put down our bags. Then we saw them: the ten little flags painted on a wall of the deck symbolizing ten whaling ships sunk.

For five minutes or so we looked over the old steel ship in which we would spend the next month-and-a-half, chasing whaling ships and facing the world’s worst seas. I was the one who broke the silence.

We had arrived.


Like on World War One aircraft, the flags on the Farley Mowat are trophies. Each one recalls one of the ten Sea Shepherd victories against whaling ships. There are three pirate flags (with a skull and crossbones), two Spanish, two Icelandic and three Norwegian. The first of these trophies – one of the pirate flags – was earned 23 years ago.

In July 1979, an old steel fishing ship named Sea Shepherd set sail from Boston across the Atlantic to Europe. At the ship’s helm was its owner, Paul Watson, a young Canadian environmentalist who had just had a tumultuous departure from Greenpeace, an organization of which he had been the director and one of the founders. Soon after passing the Azores, the Sea Shepherd crew spotted a ship. It was the Sierra, a whaler that, according to the environmentalists’ count, had already killed 25,000 whales in a little more than a decade. The Sierra was a pirate ship. She had already resisted arrest off the coast of Nigeria, aiming a harpoon gun at the coast guard vessel and threatening to fire. She was banned from entry into any British port, had pending legal actions against it in the Bahamas and South Africa, and had violated the fishing regulations of at least a dozen countries. She had also disregarded all of the international whale conservation rules, killing any species, even those in extinction, without restrictions regarding pregnant females or calves.

Despite all of these irregularities, she continued operating. When the police of one country closed in, its owners simply registered the ship in another country. Its mast had already waved the flags of Holland, the Bahamas, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Cyprus. It makes no difference: the sea has no frontiers. There was always a country willing to accept its registry, and a place to hunt whales. To better hide herself, the Sierra almost never used the radio and never announced her destination when she left port. She was a phantom ship.

The Sea Shepherd followed the Sierra to the city of Oporto, in Portugal. On the following morning Watson announced his plans to the crew: to ram the whaler. There were the stirrings of mutiny aboard. Thirteen of the sixteen crew members left the ship, afraid of dying in the impact or rotting in a Portuguese prison.

Then Watson grabbed the microphone and told the Norwegian Arvid Nordengen, captain of the Sierra, that the whaler’s career was about to end. Nordengen didn’t have time to react. His ship was stopped, floating, it would take time to gain speed to flee. The Sea Shepherd drove her concrete reinforced bow into the side of the whaler, emitting a frightening groan of twisting metal. Watson then ordered the motor raised to its maximum, to gain speed, and rammed again. A two-by-three-meter hole opened in the hull of the pirate ship.

The Sea Shepherd tried to flee, but, shortly after entering Spanish waters, was convinced by the Portuguese Navy to stop (the strategy employed to convince them involved aiming canons and threatening to fire). The ship was seized, but the three crewmembers managed to flee the country (how they did it is a subject for chapter 3). The Sierra was taken to Lisbon for repairs. Her insurance didn’t cover sabotage. The damages were valued at one million dollars.

A Portuguese judge decided that the Sea Shepherd would have to be handed over to the South African businessmen who were the owners of the Sierra, as compensation for the damages. Paul Watson raised suspicions that the judge had been bribed. He enlisted the help of two activists and flew to Portugal, with the intention of robbing his own ship from the docks, and this way avoid its being converted into a whaler. When they arrived there, they realized that the Sea Shepherd was not seaworthy. All of the fuel had been removed and the pumps and part of the navigation gear had disappeared. There was no way to steal it. Then they had an idea. In the machine room of any diesel ship is a valve that allows seawater to enter in order to supply a coil, which cools the motor. The three disconnected this valve. When they left the ship, the water was already up to their ankles. Hours later, the Sea Shepherd sunk.

On February 6, 1980 a bomb exploded aboard the Sierra, at the Lisbon docks, and it joined the Sea Shepherd at the bottom of the sea. Captain Paul Watson never assumed responsibility for this bomb, but the fact that he stamped a pirate flag with the name Sierra on his ship, and the smile in his face each time anyone asks him about the subject, at least make one wonder.


On April 28, 1980, bombs were again placed on all four ships of a whaling fleet belonging to a company in Vigo, Spain. Only two exploded, sinking the Ibsa I and the Ibsa II. Paul Watson did not officially claim the attack. However, he stamped two Spanish flags on his deck. Draw your own conclusions. The Spanish fleet operated with the permission of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which regulates worldwide hunting, but was accused of disobeying the rules, hunting beyond quotas.

The victory over the Sierra created a lot of publicity for Sea Shepherd in South Africa, and popular pressure grew for the government to put an end to illegal hunting. Paul Watson then sent a request to South African authorities for the two other whalers belonging to the company that owned the Sierra to be seized. The country’s navy confiscated and scuttled the Susan and the Theresa, also in 1980. Watson viewed this as another victory for Sea Shepherd and ordered two more pirate flags to be painted on the deck.

On October 15, 1986 two Sea Shepherd volunteers, Rod Coronado and David Howitt, traveled to Reykjavik, in Iceland. Rod got a job in a factory that processed whale meat. Thanks to this, he knew the place well when, twenty days later, the two invaded the factory and broke everything inside. They shattered computers, monitors, printers and everything else that looked expensive. They smashed the six diesel generators which kept the refrigerators running. They ripped out various small pieces and threw them into the sea from atop a fjord. It was snowing hard when the two saboteurs arrived at the docks, where three of the company’s whaling ships were moored. The nightwatchman was taking shelter from the cold in one of them. David and Rod entered the other two and disconnected the same valve that sunk the Sea Shepherd. In a few hours the Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 were at the bottom of the sea. Two more trophies for Paul Watson – this time the flags were Icelandic.

The Norwegian whaler Nybraena suffered the same fate in 1992. It was followed by its compatriots Senet, in 1994, and Morild, in 1998. The three fell victim to the same brand of sabotage: the salt-water inlet was opened, which has the advantage of presenting less risk to life than explosives.

It has been over 15 years since Paul Watson called Japan a “barbaric whale killer state”. A Japanese flag was lacking among those trophies painted on the deck. This is the reason we were going to Antarctica.


One day in 1977, in northern Canada, a woman came up to Paul Watson, enthralled, kissed him on the face, and said:

He waited until she left to ask:

It was Brigitte Bardot.

Actor Martin Sheen, who has even participated in Sea Shepherd campaigns, said that Paul Watson is the last real man on the planet.

Other Watson fans are Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan, the 007, and Richard Dean Anderson, better known as MacGyver.

It isn’t only in Hollywood that Paul is hailed as a hero. One of his great admirers is the Canadian writer and environmentalist Farley Mowat, to whom Watson paid homage by naming the ship we were on after him. Mowat, at 81, is a widely admired author in Canada.

Mowat thinks that Watson redeems before nature the atrocities that the rest of us, Homo sapiens, commit.

In 2000, Paul was chosen by Time magazine as one of the twenty-one environmental heroes of the century, alongside Theodore Roosevelt, Jacques Cousteau and Brazilian Chico Mendes. A man, a legend.


Our departure was marked for December 4th. We would sail west a week to ten days, crossing the turbulent Tasmanian Sea. Our heading was Hobart, capital of the Australian island of Tasmania, where we would stop to refuel. Hobart is a traditional jumping off spot for famous expeditions to Antarctica, like those of James Clark Ross and Roald Amundsen. From Hobart, we would begin our long and tenebrous voyage south. We were expecting a week of storms before arriving in the relatively calm waters of Antarctica. It was very unlikely that we would step foot on the continent, perhaps we would not even have the chance to lay eyes on it. However, encountering that iceberg-infested sea would already be adventure enough.

The shortest route to Antarctica is from Chile. The tip of South America almost touches the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. However, the Japanese whalers wouldn’t be fishing on this side of the world – whale populations are concentrated to the south of Australia and New Zealand, in the isolated environs of the Ross Sea. This region is much further south and much more deserted and isolated than the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Brazilian research base is situated. Very few people go there. We had enough fuel to spend around three weeks patrolling the waters of Antarctica, before beginning the long journey back.


The International Whaling Comission was founded in 1946 to prevent the animal’s extinction. Not that it was an environmentalist organization – such things didn’t even exist at that time. In truth, it was just the opposite. The IWC was created by the whaling countries, which realized that their “stock” was rapidly running out. That is, the whales were disappearing. And if the whales came to an end, the whaling industry would come to an end too.

The IWC set down rules to avoid this economic disaster and the member countries committed themselves to follow them – quotas for each species that might be exhausted, hunting seasons to avoid deaths during mating season, and size limits. Great intentions, but it didn’t work – firstly, because the rules were not very rigorous (the old story of the fox guarding the henhouse), and secondly, because they continued to be disregarded by whaling companies. The general atmosphere was the following: the whales are going to run out anyway, so I might as well get my slice before someone else does. At the same time, the number of whaling ships was growing. New technologies made the operation more efficient, and pirate ships, like the Sierra, took to the seven seas without any controls whatsoever. The whales became progressively rarer.

In 1960, the world celebrated the dubious record of the greatest number of whales killed in a single year: 66,097. From then on this number began to plummet. The reason for this drop was not any ecological awareness on the part of the hunters. The world was killing fewer whales because it was becoming difficult to find whales to kill. It isn’t by chance that environmental organizations began to emerge during that decade, and that a growing number of people showed concern about the destiny of the largest animals on Earth. The IWC was changing its complexion. As countries decided to prohibit the increasingly less lucrative hunting of whales, more and more IWC members defended rigorous hunting restrictions, or even its suspension.

In 1972, during the first great UN conference dealing with environmental questions, held in Stockholm, the United States proposed a moratorium on the hunting of whales, until the populations could recuperate. The question was a polemic one, but it was gaining force as more and more countries stopped hunting. In 1982 the moratorium was established, but it wasn’t put into effect by the IWC until 1987. Since then it has been prohibited to kill any whale anywhere for an undetermined period of time.

But there is an exception. An obscure clause of the treaty continues to allow the killing of whales for scientific purposes. It also states that those who killed for scientific ends should make maximum usage of the carcass, which, after all, was already dead. It isn’t a coincidence that the Soviet Union, Iceland, Norway and Japan – all traditional whaling countries – that very same year, 1987, created their “research programs”.

Of these countries, the only one which continues clinging firmly to the scientific research clause is Japan. The largest of the Japanese “research programs” is Jarpa (Japanese Antarctic Whale Research Program). In short, the program consists of killing of 400 minke whales (440 more accurately, because they allow a margin of error of 10% more or less, which always ends up on the more side), studying their ears, stomachs and intestines, packaging up the meat, and selling it in chic fish stores for more than 100 dollars per kilo.

Paul Watson says that the Japanese disobey international rules and carry out commercial hunting. The Japanese deny it. They say that they are in complete accord with the law and that their hunting has scientific goals – they only sell the leftovers from the research to avoid waste. Paul Watson said that he is going to make them adhere to the moratorium, since no country will do so out of fear of straining commercial relations with Japan. The Japanese say that Paul Watson is an ecoterrorist. Paul Watson says that an ecoterrorist is someone who commits terrorism against the environment, in other words, the whalers. The Japanese say that Paul Watson is a criminal. Paul Watson said that he’d meet the Japanese in Antarctica...and I was going with him.


But to do exactly what there? Collide with a Japanese whaler, as Watson did with the Sierra? It didn’t seem like an option to me. An impact in the Southern Ocean, even more so in the area we were going to, one of the more isolated in the world, isn’t the same thing as one off coast of Portugal. Such an action would put someone’s life at risk – more likely ours than theirs, because the whaling fleet consists of five ships and we were alone. In that frozen water, ten minutes overboard would mean death. Paul Watson takes pride in the fact that a Sea Shepherd action has never caused a serious injury.

Sabotaging the ships seemed even less viable to me. Entering a ship, finding the way to the engine room, and spending half-an-hour disconnecting a valve is a job for the cloak of night, on an empty ship, anchored at port. It wouldn’t work in Antarctica, even more so during summer, under the midnight sun. In other words, I traveled from Brazil to New Zealand and embarked on a ship without having any idea of what awaited me. What I knew was Paul Watson’s history – and, therefore, I knew that the guy was capable of acts of daring.

In 1981, for example, in the middle of the Cold War, the captain had the audacity to invade the Soviet Union. Commanding the Sea Shepherd II, a troller almost identical to the defunct Sea Shepherd – and bought with money paid by Warner Bros for the rights to make a film out of the story of the sinking of the Sierra (a project that never got off the drawing board) – Watson penetrated Soviet waters and got off in Siberia. He took a photographer with him onto the beach, who took photos of the whale meat-processing industry to prove that the Russians broke international treaties. Then two soldiers appeared. The activists started to return to the ship, smiling and waving to convince the guards that everything was okay. The only reason the Russians, armed with rifles, didn’t fire is that they didn’t understand what was going on. Watson and the photos managed to return to the Sea Shepherd II, but two Soviet warships and two helicopters chased the boat. Everyone aimed machineguns. The Russians then ordered, by radio:

Watson hesitated for a second, and then, according to him, responded:

Well, the story ends with the environmental ship miraculously crossing over the limits of Soviet territorial waters, leaving behind the armed, and much faster, pursuers. Watson swears that he escaped because a whale emerged between him and the Soviets. Believe what you want. “If there weren’t so many witnesses, I wouldn’t have the guts to tell this story,” wrote the captain, in the autobiography Ocean Warrior. “We, who were there to save the whales, ended up being saved by one”.


Inside, the Farley Mowat wasn’t as small as it looked from outside. However, it was old, very old, and dirty. There was grease everywhere I leaned. The cabin, which I shared with Ig, had 6 by 9 feet. Then there were a bunk, a small table, a bookshelf, two dressers, two large drawers, a sink, and a porthole. Not bad. It’s true that the beds were very narrow – something like 1 foot and a half – and that the mattress was extremely thin, but I’d slept in worse places.

On the day we arrived, we were told that we did not have much fresh water aboard. Since the voyage was long and the crew large, we would have to ration. Showers were to be taken just once every three days, and with great economy. Luckily, the toilets in the two bathrooms used seawater – fed by the same valve that Sea Shepherd normally disconnected when they wanted to sink a ship. It was hard getting off a twenty-hour plane flight, in the height of summer, and having to wait three days to take a shower.


On November 29th, after dinner, we were told the rules aboard. We, the media, could not under any circumstances enter the area where the crew’s cabins were located. Also, we were forbidden to step foot in the machine room. They didn’t know us, we could be saboteurs in the service of the whalers or from some rival NGO. The bridge, from where the ship was steered – a room higher than the others and surrounded by windows – could only be visited with the express authorization of the captain. In order to converse with the members of the crew, we had to make it clear that it was an interview. In addition, we could never ask anyone about Sea Shepherd. The captain alone responded for Sea Shepherd.

The person who told us all this was Dinah. Dinah Elissat, a 39-year-old Canadian, brave, intense, very thin. She lives on the ship – she had been there for three-and-a-half years. We nicknamed her Ripley, because of her similarity to the Sigourney Weaver role in the film Alien, the hard-nosed official great for killing ETs but awkward in her personal relations. Our first contact with her was on the 28th. Ig was taking some photos of people working and suddenly received a dressing-down. What’s this about photographing others without even introducing himself, who was he, how did he get in here? Wow.

Dinah made it very clear how we needed to behave ourselves aboard. If there was panic – and this wasn’t all that remote a possibility – our responsibility was to stay out of the way, and in the day-to-day we needed to be alert.

I listened in silence. Something told me that a long six weeks awaited us.


On our third night on the ship, still in port in Auckland, ten or so people sat on the deck, drinking beer and watching the ships pass. The sky was beautiful, everyone was in a good mood, the captain told jokes and stories. The jokes were invariably bad and I knew most of the stories – almost all of them were in one of his autobiographical books. However, there was no way to deny the magnetism of the man. He monopolized everyone’s attention, recounting incidents, like the time he made a Japanese whaler give him his extremely expensive tie as a gift (“I complemented him on the tie and gave him a Sea Shepherd shirt. I know Japanese culture. I knew that he would have to give me the tie, as a matter of honor. I still wear it whenever I have a meeting with whalers”). Watson even managed to get the whaler to pose for a photo with the Sea Shepherd T-shirt.

The captain also spoke of his new passion, religion. He is writing a book in which he condemns all “anthropocentric religions” (mainly Christianity), exposing their inconsistencies and showing how they are the true culprits for the destruction of the planet, by separating man from nature.

Interesting, but I’d like to know about more pressing questions.

There was an awkward silence in the circle. I think everyone was curious about the response, but no one had risked asking the question. Those who have read Paul Watson’s books know that, on his ships, it is the captain who decides what to do, and this is no one else’s business. Watson does not believe in democracy aboard. He stopped smiling and looked straight at me.