In the summer of 2014 Watson lived on a farm in Woodstock, Vermont – an unreal place, a rolling, green landscape surrounded by maple trees, and classical farmhouses with colonnades and big windows in a resplendent New England style. In the midst of all this there was a Japanese Zen garden, a teahouse and a Buddhist meditation temple that was a meeting place for a group of resident monks. On an open field a cluster of standing stones had been arranged in a circle – a copy of Stonehenge. From the property Watson could see all the way to the majestic White Mountains in New Hampshire. There was also a small lake on the property, in which nobody was allowed to swim since the guests’ suntan lotion could harm the frogs that lived there.
This surprising corner of the American dream was owned by the billionaire Pritam Singh – born Paul Arthur Labombard in an impoverished industrial town in Massachusetts. After having run away from a neighbourhood fraught with alcoholism and poverty, he reappeared as a radical student activist and later as a spokesperson for Sikh rebels in northern India. Back in the USA, on borrowed money and with a powerful desire to accomplish something, he fought his way up the ladder of the construction industry. Before long, the left-wing radical with clear blue eyes, a bristly beard and turban was one of the largest property developers in Key West on Florida’s southern tip.
There, by chance, he met Paul Watson. Pritam Singh was quickly incorporated into the movement’s entourage of high-profile celebrities. He part-financed Sea Shepherd’s flagship the Steve Irwin, named after the Australian environmentalist and crocodile hunter who was killed by a stingray, and took the position of vice president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Paul Watson understood the value of connections with celebrities from the business and entertainment worlds. They had the power of seduction mixed with wealth. Or as Watson expressed it: “With two James Bonds, Batman, Captain Kirk and MacGyver on the board we are invincible.”2
In Vermont on this warm midsummer evening, Watson was the host of Sea Shepherd’s first global conference. The 250 guests, the majority dressed in black, were blessed by local Mohawk Indians. Seminars were held on the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, sharks in China, meditation and veganism – and demonstrations of drones. Captain Peter Hammarstedt gave a lecture on the whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean.
The whale defence movement constituted Sea Shepherd’s history and was its signature cause. After having left Greenpeace because he felt the organization was not sufficiently militant, Paul Watson purchased a 20-year-old trawler, christened it the Sea Shepherd and set out to hunt for the whaling vessel the Sierra. The Sierra was an uncannily effective hunter, said to be behind the slaughter of as many as 25,000 whales. When Watson found the ship in the waters between Spain and Morocco, he gouged a three-metre large hole in the hull of the whaling ship with his own bow.
It was a foretaste of what was to come.
In 1992 Watson and his fiancée, the former Playboy model Lisa Distefano, tried to sink the whaling ship Nybræna while it was docked alongside the quay in Lofoten. The sabotage earned Watson a sentence of 120 days in jail, but he was released when the Dutch authorities refused to extradite him to Norway.
In an open letter to the Norwegian people Paul Watson claimed that he had sunk eight ships and damaged eight more. In the letter he also gave an account of the movement’s ideology: Sea Shepherd did not submit to anything but what Watson called the laws of nature.
“The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is a law-abiding organization. We rigidly adhere to and respect the laws of nature or lex natura. We hold the position that the laws of ecology take precedence over the laws designed by nation states to protect corporate interests … The smell of guilt is already a stench in the nostrils of God,” he wrote.3
For Watson there was no point in sinking a ship unless you could show the world what you had done. In response to the reality series Whale Wars, which depicted Sea Shepherd’s fight against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, the influx of funds and volunteers to the organization increased dramatically. Due to the success of the Animal Planet series, the whaling campaign overshadowed everything else Sea Shepherd did.4
Now Peter Hammarstedt wanted to do things differently. During the former expeditions to Antarctica, he often saw gillnet floats that fleets of toothfish poachers had left behind, before disappearing into obscure ports in Southeast Asia. Hammarstedt wanted Sea Shepherd to change its profile, abandon the whaling campaigns and become known as a protector of the untouched Antarctic.
In Vermont, in the combined meditation room and library with the high ceiling, Peter Hammarstedt took Paul Watson by the arm and requested a chat. The UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague had ordered Japan to stop its whaling activities in the Southern Ocean and a portion of the Sea Shepherd fleet was standing idle.
“What do you think about our taking on the hunt for illegal fishermen in Antarctica?” Hammarstedt asked.
“Do you think it’s possible to find them?” Watson replied.
“I’m sure of it,” Hammarstedt said.
“OK,” Watson replied.
Four months later, the captains Peter Hammarstedt and Siddharth “Sid” Chakravarty were sitting in a hotel room in Wellington. Operation Icefish had been publicly announced. Down in the harbour the campaign vessel the Sam Simon was ready to set sail for the Southern Ocean. For weeks Captain Chakravarty had been travelling around visiting ship graveyards in Mumbai in search of parts for the powerful winch he must build on the Sam Simon to haul up the kilometre-long gillnets he expected to find. The Bob Barker, with its large fuel capacity, more powerful engine and a hull reinforced to withstand the ice, would
