Magda Konieczna

The failure that succeeded

appeared in Vancouver Courier September 8, 2004 (see the original)

When the crew of the Phyllis Cormack, temporarily renamed the Greenpeace, sailed home under the Lions Gate Bridge in October 1971, they considered themselves a failure. They had spent six weeks in an 80-foot fishing boat, risking their lives in a battle against the American military-industrial complex, and lost.

The crew had set out for the remote island of Amchitka, off the coast of Alaska, planning to put themselves into the fallout zone of a five-megaton bomb tested by the Americans-the largest underground nuclear weapons blast ever in the United States. Circumstances defeated them, however, and they found themselves back in Vancouver just days before the device detonated. Robert Hunter, now known as a Greenpeace founder, hammered out an angry, frustrated chronicle of the trip while aboard the Phyllis Cormack moored in Steveston that winter. The Greenpeace to Amchitka, his account of the voyage to be released this week by Arsenal Pulp Press, was written by a man who thought he had failed.

"At the time I wrote the thing, we thought we had blown the gig and that was pretty well it," Hunter said in a telephone interview from Toronto. "So I came back in an extreme state of despair, and I was writing in extreme state of despair."

But the expedition that failed to reach its destination could hardly have been a bigger success. The trip rallied public opinion against nuclear testing, leading to the cancellation of future testing at Amchitka and, later, the success of the environmental organization Greenpeace.

"They failed in their purpose-they actually didn't stop the test-but they were so remarkably successful that testing like that never happened again," said John-Henry Harter, a graduate student in environmental history at Simon Fraser University. "They created what would become one of the biggest environmental groups in the world. I don't think anyone could have really anticipated it. I'm sure that people gathering in basements figuring out this crazy trip never imagined how big it could really be."

"Ninety per cent of history is being there, and Vancouver was the only place in the world where a political entity such as Greenpeace could have been born," Hunter writes in The Greenpeace to Amchitka. "We had a critical mass of Americans who were really angry with their government. We had the right legal stuff, with sovereignty and anti-piracy rules on our side. We had the biggest concentration of tree-huggers, radicalized students, garbage-dump stoppers, shit-disturbing unionists, freeway fighters, pot smokers and growers, aging Trotskyites, condo killers, farmland savers, fish preservationists, animal rights activists, back-to-the-landers, vegetarians, nudists, Buddhists, and anti-spraying, anti-pollution marchers and picketers in the country, per capita, in the world."

The U.S. government conducted two nuclear tests in Amchitka, in 1965 and 1969. When it announced a third test in November of 1969, more than four times bigger than the last one, Hunter's anti-pollution marchers and farmland defenders at the Sierra Club of British Columbia got together to ponder what to do.

The idea was born suddenly, when Jim Bohlen, a member of the B.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, announced almost accidentally during a radio interview that the club would send a boat to Amchitka, in the style of a 1958 protest against nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. When Sierra Club headquarters in San Francisco said it wanted nothing to do with the trip, a quartet of Americans-Irving and Dorothy Stowe, and Jim and Marie Bohlen-who had fled to Vancouver to keep their sons out of military service, formed the Don't Make a Wave committee. The committee's name came from the potential tsunami that could result from the bomb's explosion.

The committee spent months preparing, raising funds and raising a crew. It discovered John Cormack, an off-season fisherman in need of cash who agreed to risk his 30-year-old boat and his life to take the crew into the test site.

Despite the danger, Hunter says, they didn't have an alternative. "I had two small kids and I thought well, I'll never have another chance like this to do something directly about nukes," he said. "If I didn't have kids, I wouldn't have gone."

The ship sailed on Sept. 15, 1971, travelling from Vancouver up the West Coast toward Alaska. Bohlen and the Sierra Club took care to recruit a crew with a variety of skills. Besides skipper John Cormack, Bohlen and three journalists-Hunter of the Vancouver Sun, Ben Metcalfe broadcasting on CBC and Bob Cummings of the Georgia Straight-were Lyle Thurston, the crew's medic; ecologist Pat Moore; engineer Dave Birmingham; photographer Robert Keziere; Bill Darnell and Terry Simmons, from the Sierra Club of B.C.; and Richard Fineberg. Vancouver activist Rod Marining joined the crew in Kodiak to replace Fineberg, who had left out of frustration. Except for Cormack, none of the crew members were experienced at sea.

Their tools were basic. In his book, Hunter observes "we were fighting with ancient weapons-pencils, notebooks, typewriters, black-and-white photos, and a marine side-band radio that worked mainly at night."

Conditions on board were also basic-they made meals from what supplies they had, but occasionally feasted, once on two fresh coho salmon that came, along with a pledge of support, from the Kwakwaka'wakw people in Alert Bay, B.C. Alcohol was in short supply-Metcalfe kept a bottle of rum out of view, saved for a party when they reached the Bering Sea, 400 miles from Amchitka.

Showering was not permitted-besides cooking and drinking, each crew member had a daily water allotment for tooth-brushing. When the men arrived in Akutan, in the Aleutian Islands, they threw themselves into a stream. (In the book, Hunter calls the experience of floundering in five inches of icy water as "the finest goddamn experience in my life.")

When they returned to the boat, Metcalfe told them they had bathed in the local water supply. A local resident had declared she wouldn't take another drink until the filthy protesters left.

Decades later, Hunter discovered that despite the illusion of running the ship by consensus, Bohlen had called the shots. "I salute him now for his cunning and maturity and prudence," he wrote in the conclusion to the book. "We probably would have died if he hadn't assumed control."

Only eight days out of the Vancouver, when the Greenpeace was one day's sailing from the Aleutians, and 400 miles from Amchitka, the test was delayed. The feeling, Hunter wrote, was like what an astronaut might experience when on his way to the moon, its surface suddenly leaps 50 billion miles away. The crew had no way of telling whether the test had been delayed, or whether it was a ploy by the Americans to fool them into turning back.

In retrospect, Hunter believes the delay was caused by their presence in those waters. "The boat gave [the test] a profile," he said from Toronto. "They knew we only represented a limited kind of threat in terms of getting there-we had a small fish boat. By delaying, they did exactly the right thing."

The men had been on board only eight days, but they were long ones. Supplies were an issue-staying until the new test date would put them two weeks' sailing from Vancouver, without food, water and possibly fuel. Turning back did not seem like an option since it was unlikely the new test date would be announced with enough time for them to return. The boat stayed on course for the Aleutian Islands and Amchitka, until an unfortunate run-in with the U.S. Coast Guard halted its progress-permanently. The Coast Guard members presented the crew with an unexpected letter of solidarity with Greenpeace, declaring that "what you're doing is for the good of mankind," but their captain informed Cormack that he had broken the law by failing to report to U.S. customs in Akutan.

The Greenpeace ended up at Sand Point on Oct. 2, while customs problems were sorted out. The crew had to post a $500 bond, and the customs officer informed them that each of the nine Canadians on board might be charged an additional $1,000. The situation in Sand Point quickly turned hopeless. With the test date constantly moving, Amchitka seemed in sight, but the test did not. The boat charter was set to run out, and several of the men were likely to lose their jobs if they didn't return.

On Oct. 13, they held one last crew meeting. Some crew members argued that, given the popular sentiment against the test that resulted directly from the trip's media profile-10,000 students reportedly showed up at the American consulate in Vancouver in protest-they had succeeded and it was time to go home.

But the Sierra Club's Simmons reminded them they were on a protest voyage, not a propaganda trip. "If we were really protesters, we would have no question in our minds which direction to go," he said, according to Hunter's account in the book. The question of splitting the crew came up-the Greenpeace could continue with willing crew members while the rest flew back to Vancouver. But when it became evident that consensus was not going to work, the crew voted to stay together, united in their retreat from Sand Point.

Although he wanted to go on, Hunter now says turning back was the right decision. "The weather up there was killer weather," he said. "We'd have probably drowned. The wind off Amchitka was 100-something miles per hour off the Bering Sea the day the bomb went off. If we'd have been there, we would've been wiped out on the rocks. The reality was it saved our lives, but in the heat of battle, it didn't look that way."

They returned home before the bomb went off. Four of the crew members later transferred to the Greenpeace Too, also chartered by the Don't Make a Wave Committee, when that boat intercepted the retreating Greenpeace in Comox. The second boat, however, failed to reach the test site on time.

The test went ahead Nov. 6, one week after the Greenpeace limped back into Vancouver. The five-megaton device exploded in a geographically unstable area and caused the death of much of the wildlife in the area.

"I still don't know what would've happened had we been there when the damn bomb went off. We probably would have been killed; the hope was that they weren't going to do it," said photographer Keziere, whose photos from the voyage illustrate The Greenpeace to Amchitka. "Or maybe we would get dragged out of there, but we didn't get that far. The shock wave would have been really enormous and I don't know if the boat would've just shattered or come apart or what."

Although the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission reported the blast went off successfully, Keziere said that's not the whole story. "The hitch is of course that there is a considerable radioactive site there. There will be indeed for the next 5,000 years, so it ain't over yet," he said.

Five months after they returned, the U.S. closed the Amchitka test site, and the area was declared a wildlife refuge in 1976. Riding on the wings of that success, Greenpeace crew member Ben Metcalfe recruited a crew to sail into the Mururoa Atoll the following year, where the French were performing nuclear tests.

"It took a long time to stop nuclear testing but it was eventually done and I think that's pretty much a straight line from Amchitka and the Mururoa Atoll protests," said Dr. Graeme Wynn, a professor of environmental history at UBC.

But how did so much success come from a failed trip?

The crew of the Greenpeace learned a valuable lesson from two separate groups of Quaker protestors who went before them.

The Quakers took two ships, the Golden Rule and the Phoenix, into nuclear test sites in the Marshall Islands in 1958. Both crews were arrested and neither reached the site on time.

"The Golden Rule and the Phoenix just went out there; they may have had a press conference at the dock but that's about all they did," said Simmons.

Those on board the Greenpeace in 1971, though, for perhaps the first time in an environmental protest, figured out how to stir media interest. With three journalists on board, these men were determined to be heard.

Those reporters weren't there simply to chronicle the story; they were living the story. That was a revolutionary step for the environmental movement, Harter said. "The environmental movement [before Greenpeace] was very laid back, really about lobbying, about writing letters to the government. Those three journalists, they didn't go to cover the story; they went as members and they created the story," he said.

Harter said most people now don't realize the boat turned back.

"It shows that the mythology of that trip is bigger than what it actually was. Anyone who kind of knows the history thinks about that trip as being successful. Maybe they even think that they stopped the test. Because it's the mythology that was created that's more important than the actual facts and details of it. I really see that as a turning point in the modern-day environmental movement," he said.

Peace and the environment struck an authentic chord with the public at the time. Vancouver of the late 1960s and early 1970s was flooded with American draft dodgers-the largest group of them anywhere in the world. Activists were coming out of years of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The Georgia Straight, started only years before, screamed twice a week about the horror of Vietnam, liberating Quebec, abortions and unionizing vegetable pickers.

That climate of rebellion, coupled with a growing pacifist reaction to what many saw as American imperialist action in Vietnam and increasing interest in the environment, created the perfect mix for Greenpeace's debut, and not just among traditional activists.

"The fact that America was testing nuclear weapons just off the coast of Canada really stirred the public imagination in Canada in the mainstream," Harter said. "It was against that idea that Americans could do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted.

"They [Greenpeace] were being really radical. They were going to pilot a ship right into a blast site of a nuclear weapon which is really, simply put, pretty crazy. But they tapped into a consciousness at the time that mainstream Canadians actually agreed with. It wasn't just radicals. It wasn't just this tiny group that supported them. They got letters from all over saying that they supported this effort."

Marches brought out thousands of people in every major Canadian city. Protestors succeeded in closing the U.S. border near Vancouver, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau endorsed their efforts.

"Greenpeace doing those things alone wouldn't have stopped nuclear testing unless there had been resonance among the public," UBC's Wynn said. "People got attracted to this bunch of warriors that put themselves between exploiters and nature and stood there on the ice flows or in Amchitka or wherever it was, standing between the natural world and the forces that were trying to destroy it."

Key to making anti-war and environmental issues resonate with the public was combining the two in one cause, Simmons said. That combination was captured in the group's name. When someone flashed a "V" sign, the movement's international symbol for peace, Greenpeace crew member Bill Darnell replied, "Make it a green peace," and the name stuck.

When he first wrote The Greenpeace to Amchitka in Steveston harbour years ago, Hunter had no idea what would follow from the trip. Digging those memories out now, Hunter said, is like discovering a forgotten relic, or a "Dead Sea scroll."

The original manuscript was published, in a severely edited version, as a photo book in 1972. Hunter's copy of the manuscript got torn up. Keziere, however, kept a photocopied version of the original and recently turned it over to Arsenal Pulp Press.

Seeing the book years later highlights their initial perceived failure. "We were very intense in that period, I can tell," Hunter said. "In fact I was quite angry. Of course all these years later I don't wear my anger on my sleeve quite as much. I think the big shock is just how emotional it all was."

More than 30 years later, Hunter and Keziere agree they're past their prime as environmental warriors. "I wouldn't be wanted anymore," Keziere said.

But they say the environmental struggle is far from over.

"The ecological system is collapsing at an unbelievably swift rate," Hunter said. "By 2030 if we haven't turned around, we're f____."

And Greenpeace's role? "Hopefully to save the world; that's its function," he said. "It's still out there contending. It's the third or fourth generation of Greenpeacers that are out there, and they're just as keen and passionate and sincere as anybody ever was."

Hunter does keep his hand in. He was aboard Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise in 2000 as it protested the offshore oil industry in California. But he also feels that many of his battles have been fought.

"I've got grandchildren now and it's a different story. The measure of how things have changed is that my kids think that nuking something means putting it in the microwave."