Editor’s Note: The following is an edited extract from Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars by Sam Vincent, published by Black Inc.
Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars
For Australians, media coverage of Antarctic whaling evokes summer as much as leftover turkey sandwiches and Christmas cake. It’s a familiar story of the struggle between good and evil: NGO “eco-warriors” pitted against the might of the Japanese state; “majestic giants of the deep” pursued by industrial weaponry; the pristine Southern Ocean running red with blood.
With four ships, five inflatable boats, one helicopter, two drones and 120 crew – representing twenty-four nationalities – Operation Zero Tolerance is to be the biggest campaign of Sea Shepherd’s thirty-five-year history.
Fellow newcomers to the campaign embarking in Auckland are Tod, a nerdy Asian-American computer programmer from New York; Olav, a German father of three who wears a whale-fluke pendant around his neck; Bruce, the Seniors Card–carrying third mate of Sea Shepherd’s flagship, the Steve Irwin; and Giacomo, a Berlin based Italian photographer on assignment for a PR agency.
With his short-back-and sides haircut and grey nomad uniform of jeans, polo shirt and gleaming white sneakers, Bruce doesn’t fit my vegan vigilante stereotype for Sea Shepherd converts.
“I’ve always been interested in conservation, so given my skill set [10,000 nautical miles of racing yacht navigation], this was a natural progression,” he says. “Paul [Watson, Sea Shepherd’s founder] needed a new third mate; I’m retired and the kids have left home, so I thought: ‘Bugger it, why not?'”
Over 500 people applied to crew on Sea Shepherd campaigns each year. Some are chosen for particular skills (welders, carpenters, navigators or doctors), but most bring nothing more than a demonstrated passion for the cause. “In some ways,’ says ‘Grug’, an Australian deckhand, “I think the only thing we all have in common is the desire to save whales. Everyone on this boat thinks it’s shocking what the whalers are doing down there.”
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When a snowy-haired kid with freckles and Mickey Mouse gumboots pulled a carving knife from his pocket, passed it to his dad and casually watched him butcher a pilot whale, I think that’s the only time I’ve had culture shock. That was shocking.
The Faroe Islands rise from the North Atlantic like giant upturned billiard tables, their jagged felt-green mountains punctuated by thundering waterfalls, stone shepherd’s huts and the occasional hamlet of colourful cottages with roofs often topped with turf. This spectacular archipelago, a semi-autonomous Danish possession perched between Iceland, Scotland and Norway, is celebrated for plump sheep and cute puffins. But the 50,000 Faroe Islanders are also widely condemned for the grindadráp, a semi-regular summertime pilot-whale hunt that has come to define their national identity.
The first record of the grindadráp is from 1298: a pod of whales (grind) is spotted, the alarm is raised with a bellow and every man within earshot drops what he is doing, arms himself, and rushes to the water’s edge. Within minutes the sea runs red with blood and entire communities are provisioned with meat.
On my second-last day in the Faroes, on assignment for a newspaper, I am woken by a knock on my door and the same call that has galvanized Faroese men into action for centuries: “Grind!”
We arrive in the town of Vestmanna hours after the slaughter, but the sea still has a pink tinge. Fifty-nine long-finned pilot whales have been arranged in rows on the town’s wharf; neat offal escape hatches have been carved out of each carcass, while blood is being washed away with a hose.
With four whaling foremen supervising, men are butchering each carcass while their children hang about. I am profoundly shocked as I wander among the carcasses, but it takes me a few minutes to realize why. It isn’t the sight of the whales, nor the rich, wet smell of death. It’s the children all around me: they’re bored. A brother and sister are sitting on one carcass as if they’re waiting for the school bus; a nearby girl seems oblivious to the carnage as she slowly rides her bicycle straight through it, her pink helmet matching the intestines spilling out of the whales’ stomachs. Other kids sit with chins resting on hands. After Mickey Mouse Gumboots gives his dad the knife as if it were a TV remote, our eyes meet. His is the universal expression of the spoiled brat: I would rather be playing Xbox.
In time, my initial shock gives way to comprehension: of course those kids were bored–I was bored too when I was dragged to the supermarket with my mum, or, perhaps more applicably, when my dad, a farmer, made me help out at the cattle yards.
Journalistic assignments to the Arctic expose me to another side of this debate: those who want to save the whales–for supper. In Greenland my Inuit friends Kjeld, Naja and Aqqalu nearly break my jaw the day they feed me a strip of mattaq, the rock-hard raw skin of the narwhal. Júlí, a ghostly-white Icelandic fisherman I know who holds vegetables and vegetarians in equal contempt, mesmerizes me with tales of his father’s involvement in Iceland’s own “scientific” whaling program. In the early 2000s, Paul Watson even sent Júlí’s dad a threatening letter demanding that he stop hunting whales. When I ask how his dad reacted, Júlí breaks into a smile. “He framed it.”
I don’t, of course, tell anyone on the Steve about my whale-eating friends. While I don’t share Júlí’s zeal for killing whales (in Iceland he offered to take me shooting dolphins with a shotgun for fun), nor do I still view whales as species deserving of special treatment. Setting aside the legality of Japan’s Antarctic whaling program and the veracity of its claims to “scientific” research, I am not sure anymore why I should be opposed to the sustainable hunting of whales.
But it took only five days for the hostages of a 1973 Swedish bank robbery to start empathizing with their captors–Stockholm Syndrome, a local criminologist called it. I’m spending a whole three months at sea with Sea Shepherd’s crew, and nowhere to go but south.
