In the evening, the crew members of the Bob Barker are granted a five minute conversation with their families. For a brief moment, Captain Hammarstedt thinks of the famous football match between German and British soldiers who laid down their arms for a few hours on Christmas in 1914.2 He considers calling the Thunder and wishing them a Happy Christmas, but he does not act on the thought. Instead, he has a short conversation over the phone with his family. They are gathered in the small Swedish town of Sigtuna. They are also eating a vegetarian Christmas dinner, his mother tells him.
The first clear memory he has of his mother is in front of a window in Beijing. He was four years old and he watched in amazement as the tanks rolled down towards Tiananmen Square.3 Then his mother came and lifted him away. She subsequently packed all the family possessions into four suitcases and hurried to the airport.
Hammarstedt’s father worked for the Swedish industrial group ABB, living an increasingly nomadic existence at the company’s foreign offices. When Peter Hammarstedt was seven years old, the family moved to the sleepy town of New Hope in Pennsylvania. It would turn out to be years of personal hardship. He was short, frail and wore eyeglasses that covered half his face. He bought the right clothes at the wrong time, and his boyish voice whined and slid all over the place. He also became a vegetarian after a classmate told him about how hens and chickens were bred in narrow cages. He was friendless and was tormented by his classmates. At home he tried to hide the bruises from his mother. He soon developed a compulsion to stand up for the defenceless. Once a month his parents took him to a bookstore in New Jersey, where he found his way to the Afro-American section and started reading in depth about the Black Panther movement. He travelled to California to find John Carlos, one of the two track and field athletes who had done the Black Power salute during the medal ceremony at the summer Olympics in 1968. Hammarstedt wanted to know why Carlos had chosen to utilize the moment in a way that would change his life and make him a traitor in the eyes of many Americans.4
When the young Christian boy Hammarstedt as a 14 year old received 200 dollars from his father, he decided to donate it to a charitable cause. Through an Internet search he found the civil rights movements the American Civil Liberties Union and Free Tibet, and the special interest lobby group the National Rifle Association. While he was searching online for worthy recipients of his dollars, he came across a film showing a group of Greenpeace activists in a rubber dinghy. They were trying to stop the Japanese factory ship the Nisshin Maru from hauling a whale on board.
That was when he made up his mind. He wanted to be one of them, like the activists in the dinghy who risked their lives in the fight for what they believed in.
At the age of 17 Hammarstedt moved back to Stockholm. The first thing he did was to seek out the team that carried out direct actions in Greenpeace. In 2003, immediately after Iceland had resumed whaling operations, the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise was in Stockholm. While Hammarstedt was on night duty on the ship, he overheard everyone on board discussing what the competing organization Sea Shepherd would do with the Icelanders. Sea Shepherd was a small and scruffy organization: unpredictable, controversial and militant. This was where Hammarstedt wanted to be. He sent in an application, but never received any reply. For a month he called Sea Shepherd every day. Then Hammarstedt suddenly received word that he should come to Seattle to report for duty on the campaign ship the Farley Mowat as a seaman. He is now celebrating his tenth Christmas in a row in the Antarctic.
In the messroom on the Thunder, Christmas dinner is served at noon. The crew and the officers who are not on duty eat their meal together. On the menu is split cod, prepared in a stew with cabbage and potatoes. A roast turkey is also put out and a few bottles of red wine. But what could appear to be a low-key holiday mood, is in reality an uneasy uncertainty about what will take place in the upcoming days or weeks. Some are discussing how the evening will unfold for those who are at home. Nobody sings, nobody exchanges gifts and nobody says out loud what most of them are thinking: What is going to happen now?
Now there is only one man who can decide the fate of the 40 men who on this Christmas Eve are sitting and daydreaming about a life far away from the dark wood panelling of the messroom on the Thunder. The ship owner. El Armador. Not everyone on the Thunder knows who he is, not by a long shot; some members of the crew had caught a glimpse of him and his business partners when they unloaded their illegal catch in a disreputable harbour in Malaysia or Indonesia.
Those of the crew on the Thunder who are closest to him know that he is firm in his faith and that it is very likely that on this particular evening he will light the traditional oil lamps in his home and prepare a holiday meal of shellfish
