Something about whales brings out the mystic in otherwise admirable people, and very embarrassing it can be. Deep in the Southern Ocean a Japanese whaling flotilla is at work, tracked and harassed by the anti-whaling forces of Greenpeace (the Esperanza) and Sea Shepherd (the Steve Irwin). If there’s one thing the latter two organizations hate more than whaling, it’s each other, and co-operation in the cause of the whales has not been very evident down there: each has been going its own way in the hunt for the Japanese.
But, the Melbourne Age reports, it turns out that the radicals of Sea Shepherd have a great advantage over their establishment rivals at Greenpeace. The whales are on their side.
Greenpeace declined to comment on Esperanza’s position, but the western location confirmed Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson’s belief that the whalers were likely to be working north of Prydz Bay, in the Co-operation Sea, where he was headed. He also said a whale showed him the way. ‘Yesterday a large humpback whale surfaced beside the Steve Irwin and seven times raised his long flipper into the air, and seven times brought it down pointing in a direction due west, as if to say “go this way”.’
Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, is a formidable figure, a man Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey would have called ‘a capital seaman’,* but it’s hard to respect someone who really believes that a whale popped up out of the water for him, knew who he was and what he was doing, and gave him a helping flipper. Yet Watson is typical of a paradoxical but strongly-rooted tendency in the conservation movement to put humanity at the centre of everything: he cannot see the whales in their own terms, he has to humanize them and believe that there is some kind of relationship there that sanctifies his anthropocentric view of the natural world.
The ‘they went that-a-way’ whale is not an aberration for Watson. If you visit Sea Shepherd’s web site you’ll find that the whole enterprise was inspired by a similar Disneyesque fantasy:
In June 1975, Robert Hunter and Paul Watson were the first people to put their lives on the line to protect whales when Paul placed his inflatable Zodiac between a Russian harpoon vessel and a pod of defenseless Sperm whales. During this confrontation with the Russian whaler, a harpooned and dying sperm whale loomed over Paul’s small boat. Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying whale’s eye. He felt that the whale knew what they were trying to do. He watched as the magnificent leviathan heaved its body away from his boat, slipped beneath the waves and died. A few seconds of looking into this dying whale’s eye changed his life forever. He vowed to become a lifelong defender of the whales and all creatures of the seas.
Presumably defending ‘all creatures of the seas’ would mean protecting giant squid from the sperm whales who prey upon them (’Paul recognized a flicker of understanding in the dying squid’s eye …’) but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Despite his claim to care not only for ‘the whales, dolphins, seals’ but for ‘all the other creatures on this earth’ the truth is that only some species are of interest: the ones that are beautiful, that make people feel bad about humanity but good about themselves, and that can have human characteristics - the nice ones, at least - projected onto them. Watson even claims that he has been ‘rewarded by friendship with many members of different species’: friends with dolphins and killer whales? It must put a strain on things when one of your friends hunts down, tears apart and starts to eat another. But such conflicts are absent from Watson’s world because he sees nature only from his own point of view, and interprets it in accordance with his own moral, aesthetic, and even spiritual, standards. Nature is harmonious and peaceful, filled with gentle, intelligent, beautiful creatures. It’s just human beings who screw it all up and stop it being what human beings like to think it should be.
By the way, the Jolly Roger flown by Sea Shepherd’s Steve Irwin (formerly Farley Mowat) is not just for show. The ship is unregistered and is, genuinely and legally, a pirate. Watson is quite proud of this, holding forth about what he imagines is the noble history of pirates:
‘It was not the British Navy that ended piracy in the Caribbean, it was Captain Henry Morgan who did that, and he was a pirate,’ said Captain Watson. ‘I am proud to add my name to the long list of honourable and noble pirates like Sir Francis Drake, John Paul Jones, and Jean LaFitte.’
Henry Morgan certainly did not end piracy in the Caribbean, which continued for thirty years after his death in 1688 and was eventually brought to an end by the actions of the British and Spanish navies. Nor were Morgan, Drake or LaFitte pirates; they were privateers, licensed by letter of marque to prey upon the commerce of their country’s enemies during time of war (and LaFitte was a slave-trader, among many other disreputable things: ‘honourable and noble’ he was not). As for John Paul Jones, that great man was an American naval officer, and to suggest that he had anything of the pirate about him is insulting as well as profoundly ignorant.
* Another quote from Jack Aubrey: ‘I have always liked whalers’ (Patrick O’Brian, Blue at the Mizzen (1999), p. 183).
