Peter Heller - The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planets Largest Mammals

Lone-flier screams

Urges onto the whale-road

The unresisting heart across the waves of the sea.

The Seafarer

He makes flat warre with God, and doth defie With his poore clod of earth the spacious skie.

George Herbert, The Church Porch

A t three oclock on Christmas morning the bow of the Farley Mowat plunged off a steep wave and smashed into the trough. I woke with a jolt. The hull shuddered like a living animal and when the next roller lifted the stern I could hear the prop pitching out of water, beating air with a juddering moan that shivered the ribs of the 180-foot converted North Sea trawler.

We were 200 miles off the Adlie Coast, Antarctica in a force 8 gale. The storm had been building since the morning before. I lay in the dark and breathed. Something was different. I listened to the deep throb of the diesel engine two decks below and the turbulent sloshing against my bolted porthole and felt a quickening in the ship.

Fifteen days before, we had left Melbourne, Australia, and headed due south. The Farley Mowat was the flagship of the radical environmental group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The mission of her captain, Paul Watson, and his forty-three member all-volunteer crew was to hunt down and stop the Japanese whaling fleet, which was engaged in what he considered illegal commercial whaling. He had said before the trip, We will nonviolently intervene, but from what I could see of the preparations being conducted over the last week, he was readying for a full-scale attack.

I dressed quickly, grabbed a dry suit and a life jacket, and ran up three lurching flights of narrow stairs to the bridge. Dawn. Or what passed for it in the Never-Night of antarctic summer: a murky gloom of wind-tortured fog and blowing snow and spraywhite eruptions that tore off the tops of the waves and streamed their shoulders in long streaks of foam. When I had gone to sleep four hours earlier, the swells were twenty feet high and building. Now monsters over thirty feet rolled under the stern and pitched the bow wildly into a featureless sky. The timberwork of the bridge groaned and creaked. The wind battered the thick windows and ripped past the superstructure with a buffeted keening.

Watson, fifty-five, with thick, nearly white hair and beard, wide cheek bones, and packing extra weight under his exposure suit, sat in the high captains chair on the starboard side of the bridge, looking alternately at a radar screen over his head and at the sea. He has a gentle, watchful demeanor. Like a polar bear. Alex Cornelissen, thirty-seven, his Dutch first officer, was in the center at the helm, steering NNW and trying to run with the waves. Cornelissen looked too thin to go anyplace cold, and his hair was buzzed to a near stubble.

Good timing, he said to me with the tightening of his mouth that was his smile. Two ships on the radar. The closest is under two-mile range. If theyre icebergs theyre doing six knots.

Probably the Nisshin Maru and the Esperanza , Watson said. Theyre riding out the storm. He was talking about the 8,000-ton Japanese factory ship that butchered and packed the whales, and Greenpeaces flagship, which had sailed with its companion vessel the Arctic Sunrise from Cape Town over a month earlier, and had been shadowing and harassing the Japanese for days. Where the five other boats of the whaling fleet had scattered in the storm no one could say.

Watson had found, in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Southern Ocean, his prey. It was against all odds. Watson turned to Cornelissen. Wake all hands, he said.

In 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a group of seventy-seven nations that makes regulations and recommendations on whaling around the world, enacted a moratorium on open-sea commercial whaling in response to the fast-declining numbers of earths largest mammals. The Japanese, who have been aggressive whalers since the food shortages following World War II, immediately exploited a loophole that allows signatories to kill a certain number of whales annually for scientific research. In 2005, Japan, the only nation other than Norway and Iceland with an active whaling fleet, decided to double its research kill from the previous year and allot itself a quota of 935 minke whales and ten endangered fin whales. In the 2007/2008 season it planned to kill fifty fins and fifty endangered humpbacks. Its weapon is a relatively new and superefficient fleet comprising the 427-foot factory ship Nisshin Maru ; two spotter vessels; and three fast killer, or harpoon, boats, similar in size to the Farley Mowat .

Lethal research, the Japanese say, is the only way to accurately measure whale population, health, and its response to global warming and is essential for the sustainable management of the worlds cetacean stocks. The director general of Japans Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), Hiroshi Hatanaka, writes, The legal basis [for whaling] is very clear; the environmental basis is even clearer: The marine resources in the Southern Ocean must be utilized in a sustainable manner in order to protect and conserve them for future generations. Though the ICR is a registered nonprofit organization and claims no commercial benefit from its whaling, critics scoff, pointing out that the meat resulting from this heavily subsidized research ends up in Tokyos famous Tsukiji fish market, and on the tables at fancy restaurants. By some estimates, one fin whale can bring in $1 million.

Each year the IWCs Scientific Committee votes on whaling proposals, and at its annual meeting in 2005 it strongly urged Japanese whalers to obtain their scientific data using nonlethal means, and expressed strong concern over the taking of endangered fins, and humpbacks from vulnerable breeding stocks. The whalers response was silence, then business as usual.

Although this resolution is not legally binding, much of the public was outraged that the whalers would openly disregard it. The World Wildlife Fund contended that all the research could be conducted more efficiently with techniques that do not kill whales. New Zealands minister of conservation, Chris Carter, among others, described the Japanese research as blatant commercial whaling. Even dissenters within Japan protested: Mizuki Takana of Greenpeace Japan pointed to a report issued in 2002 by the influential newspaper Asahi in which only 4 percent of the Japanese surveyed said they regularly eat whale meat; 53 percent of the population had not consumed it since childhood. It is simply not true that whaling is important to the Japanese public, Takana said. The whaling fleet should not leave for the antarctic whale sanctuary.