Captain Paul Watson
The Good Pirate
(a story for children
aged 5 to 105)
© Dave Keenan, Brisbane Australia, October
2003.
Images and source material are from the website
of
the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and Paul
Watson’s 1994 book Ocean Warrior.
Two of the images are from the website of the
Greenpeace Foundation.
This is a
true story.
Paul
Watson was born in Canada on the second of December, 1950. Even as a child he
hated any kind of cruelty, and at the age of nine he would go out into the
forest to find and destroy the leg traps that trappers had set to catch
animals.
When Paul
was a young man of twenty one years, the United Nations asked everyone to stop
killing whales, but most countries still allowed it. Sailors who kill whales
are called whalers. Whalers use ships with a gun on the front that fires a big
steel arrow at the whales to kill them. The steel arrow is called a harpoon.
Three years later Paul Watson and some other people decided to work
together to try to stop people killing whales. Their group was called
Greenpeace. They went out in a small blow-up rubber boat with an outboard
motor. They bravely drove their boat in front of the whales so the whalers
couldn’t shoot the whales.
The
Greenpeace people weren’t always able to protect the whales. One time, after a
long chase, a pod of sperm whales was so exhausted they couldn’t swim away from
the whaling ship any more. The whalers waited until a wave made the whales go
up while Paul Watson’s rubber boat went down and they fired an explosive
harpoon right over Paul Watson’s head and killed one of the whales.
Then the
biggest male whale, who was the leader of the pod, dived under the water. Paul
Watson knew it would come up fast and try to attack the whaling ship to protect
its family. But the whaling ship was bigger than the whale, and it was made of
steel, so the whale didn’t have a chance.
Paul
Watson had been told that this whale might attack his boat too, since his boat
was right between the whales and the whaling ship. But the whale narrowly
missed the rubber boat and launched itself straight at the harpooner.
The
harpooner had another harpoon ready and he shot the whale.
Paul
Watson was so close he got some of the whale’s blood on him. When the dying
whale came up out of the water again, its huge head was above the rubber boat.
Paul Watson looked into one of its big eyes and he felt that the whale
understood what they were trying to do. He felt that it knew they had been
trying to save it from the whalers. It could have fallen onto their little boat
and crushed it, but instead it moved slowly backwards into the water before it
died.
This made
Paul Watson feel so sad for the whale, and so angry at the whalers, that he
vowed to dedicate his life to saving these magnificent and intelligent
creatures.
Two years
later, Greenpeace had lots of people, but Paul Watson wanted to do things that
Greenpeace wouldn’t let him do. So he left Greenpeace and bought his own ship.
He called his ship the Sea Shepherd and made his own pirate flag. The flag has
Neptune’s trident and a shepherd’s crook instead of crossed bones.
He made
sure his ship was as fast as the whaler’s ships and he had the bow (that’s the
front) of his ship filled with concrete to make it very strong. When he finds a
whaling ship, Captain Watson drives his ship fast into the side of the whaling
ship to try to sink it. This is called ramming. But first he calls the captain
of the whaling ship on the radio and tells them he is going to ram. This is so
the whalers can be ready to get into their life-boats if their ship does sink.
Captain Watson doesn’t want any people to get hurt; he only wants to make sure
they can’t use their ships to kill whales any more.
By 1986
many species of whale were nearly extinct and most countries at last made it
illegal to kill them. But three countries still keep killing whales: Japan,
Iceland and Norway. So Captain Watson is still trying to stop them.
He also
tries to stop hunters killing seals, and he tries to stop fishing boats
catching too many fish in places where they aren’t supposed to. If they take
too many fish there won’t be enough left to make sure we have enough fish to
eat in the future.
The
countries that own these fishing places are supposed to protect them, but often
they don’t. Captain Watson doesn’t usually try to sink these illegal fishing
boats, but if they won’t leave when he tells them, he hoses them with sea-water
and sometimes throws stink-bombs onto their deck. Or he rams them to damage a
part of their boat so they can’t pull in their nets. Then he destroys the nets.
One time
his crew fought off men with guns who were trying to take over his ship, by
hosing them with pie-filling! Hundreds of litres of
it - banana cream and cherry flavours – pumped at
high speed out of water cannons.
One of the
most terrible whaling ships of all time was the Sierra. It had been used
to kill thousands and thousands of whales (around 25,000). After many months of
searching the Atlantic Ocean, Captain Watson and his crew finally found the
Sierra near Portugal in 1979. They managed to ram it twice but didn’t quite
sink it. Then a navy ship from Portugal arrived and threatened to shoot the Sea
Shepherd. So Captain Watson agreed to sail his ship back to Portugal.
A judge in
Portugal said that because Captain Watson had damaged the whaling ship so much,
the judge would give Captain Watson’s ship to the whalers. But Captain Watson
and some of his crew managed to sneak back on board the Sea Shepherd at night,
and they sank their own ship rather than let it be used to kill whales.
The
whalers spent lots of money and many months fixing the Sierra. But before it
was finished, someone swam under it and put a magnetic limpet mine on it. They
made sure no one was on board. A few minutes later, the mine exploded and blew
a hole in the whaling ship. It sank in ten minutes.
Captain
Watson and his friends have so far sent ten illegal whaling ships to the bottom
of the ocean, and no one has been hurt.
Captain
Watson has had other ships since the Sea Shepherd. He called his newest ship
the Ocean Warrior. He later changed its name to the Farley Mowat,
naming it after a famous writer and environmentalist. Captain Watson has
mounted an old brass cannon on his ship, like the ones
on the old pirate ships, but with no cannon-balls. He sometimes fires it just
with gunpowder, to scare the whalers.
The good
pirate Captain Watson doesn’t use plunder (that’s stealing) to buy his ships
and supplies, as a bad pirate would. Instead, people from all over the world
send him money because they believe he is doing such a good thing. Most of his
crew are volunteers. That means they don’t even want
to be paid for the work they do. It’s likely that some of these men and women
come from your country. Captain Watson has received awards from all over the
world for his good work in protecting sea creatures, and sometimes when he’s
back on land, people pay to go and listen to him tell of his adventures. A
movie is being made about his life.
If you are
ever lucky enough go on a whale-watch tour to see whale families playing
happily together, think of Captain Watson who helped to make that possible.
He’s still out there sailing the seas trying to make the world safe for all
whales.
Note for grownups: If you found this story
inspiring please consider making a donation to the Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society.