Peter Hammarstedt calls their course “fraudulent”, contacts Sea Shepherd’s office in France and instructs them to forward an email to the French government.
“As a member of CCAMLR, responsible for protecting the untouched marine ecosystem of Antarctica, we implore the French government to send a naval vessel to escort the Thunder back to a port where the ship can be inspected and the pirates held accountable,” Hammarstedt writes from the bridge of the Bob Barker.1
He also informs the French research station on the Kerguelen Islands of the ships’ position. His hope is that France will send out one of the naval vessels that the nation has stationed on the island of Réunion.
What Hammarstedt doesn’t know is that the French authorities have already been alerted. As the ships approached the French islands, a message was immediately sent from Interpol. “You have a bad guy in your waters soon. Get ready for it.”2
There are 500 nautical miles between the Crozet Islands and Kerguelen Islands, and the Thunder is sailing down the middle in between them. As long as the ships remain in international waters, the French naval vessels stay put.
The Kerguelen Islands lie 3,000 kilometres from the closest populated area, silently tortured by the winds from the west. The brutal storms constantly thrashing upon the landscape do not relent even during the night. The islands’ bald mountains loom out of the sea where the polar air meets the warmer water from the Indian Ocean – the Antarctic convergence. The confrontation can whisk the waves up to heights of 15 metres and produce winds blowing with a force of more than 100 kilometres an hour.
The French Baron Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen had led an expedition to the coast of Iceland and was accustomed to navigating ice-cold seas. Under orders from King Ludvig XV, in February 1772 his mission was to find the undiscovered continent that had to lie somewhere in the south.
Based on the accounts of the explorer Paulmier de Gonneville, the French believed that there was an enormous southern land mass that balanced the globe. Only a decade after Columbus’ return to Europe, Gonneville sailed from France to find a route to India. When he came home, he reported that for six months he had lived in a country far to the south that was flowing with milk and honey and which France should not hesitate to colonize. (Gonneville had probably been in Brazil.)3
Kerguelen’s commission was to find this unknown continent and establish friendly relations with its inhabitants. After 12 days of heavy sailing through hail, dense snowfall and a cold that Kerguelen described as the most bitter he had ever experienced, he glimpsed a lofty and vast tongue of land emerging out of the fog. They waited two days for the winds to calm before the expedition attempted to send a dinghy ashore, but it was seized by a current, beaten against the cliffs and thrown back to the companion vessel the Gros Ventre, the mast of which was broken in the collision.
When they finally came ashore, there was no sign of human life or land animals between the steep mountains, only colonies of penguins.
After 15 minutes the procession buried a bottle containing documents which, on behalf of the French crown, made a claim for the land they called “La France Australe”.
Kerguelen claimed to have discovered a fifth continent with soil that could be compared to that of southern France. All manner of vegetables and grains could be cultivated there, along with lumbering activity and the extraction of salt. Kerguelen described the temperate climate; he told of the forests and green valleys, which could only mean that the land was inhabited and cultivated by a primitive people.
He claimed that in the course of six years he would succeed in building a metropolis on the Antarctic continent he had discovered.
Although rumours were in circulation about how Kerguelen’s celebrated discovery was a flight of fancy, the French government bestowed the Order Chevalier de Saint Louis upon him and decided that he was to be quickly sent back to colonize the continent in the south. It was to be the proudest French scientific expedition in history, involving three ships and a total of 700 men. This time Kerguelen would continue east and sail around the whole continent. In the overloaded and damp holds below deck, worms and rot got into the supplies and on the voyage south he lost two of the topsails. When they reached the Southern Ocean, the crew was so devastated by scurvy and the meagre rations that several of them fainted on deck from the cold.
Kerguelen’s only pleasure was his 16-year-old mistress whom he had smuggled on board and who would probably be the first woman to sail into the Southern Ocean.
When Kerguelen once again reached the snow-covered island that was to bear his name, on 6 September 1773, he personally refused to go ashore, but instead sent one of his officers, who noted that there were some harbours there fit for use.
The great French expedition turned into a fiasco. Thirty-four of the crew had died, and they had not found anything but a godforsaken island which was mockingly referred to as the “Penguins Republic”. The humiliation led to the formation of a commission that concluded Kerguelen was a fraud. Initially he was condemned to 20 years in prison, a sentence that was later changed to six years.
When Captain James Cook laid anchor by the Kerguelen Islands in 1778, he elected to name it “Desolation Island”. But despite the dismal barrenness of the islands, its seal population was abundant. Then Norwegian, American and British sealers descended upon the islands and did their best to wipe out the population.
In 1996 the toothfish pirates sailed into the waters around the Kerguelen Islands. The ships were outfitted with advanced radar systems to ensure early warning of any patrol ships and during the night they loaded the illegal catch onto a cargo ship. When
