8 The quote is credited to the British restaurant critic and author Adrian Anthony Gill and cited in the article “How Prince Charles’ letters (almost) helped save the Patagonian toothfish”, written by Geoffrey Lean and printed in The Telegraph, 15 May 2015.
9 The Banzare Bank was named after Douglas Mawson’s expedition in 1929: The British Australian New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition.
3 OPERATION ICEFISH
1 The notices are controversial and, ironically, it is in France, where Interpol has its headquarters, that Watson may reside in exile undisturbed. Furthermore, the American authorities choose to overlook the notices.
2 There are several versions of this quote, cited in interviews with Paul Watson. The two James Bond actors Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan are both members of Sea Shepherd’s advisory board. Richard Dean Anderson, better known as MacGyver, Christian Bale, who played Batman in a number of movies, and William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek, have all previously been members of the same advisory board.
3 Paul Watson made a number of appearances in the Norwegian media in conjunction with the operation in Lofoten. He appeared on the programme “Antennetimen” of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), and he wrote a long letter to the newspaper Nordlys, in which he called himself an ambassador for the nation of sea mammals. Portions of the letter were printed in translation in Nordlys on 11 January 1993.
4 Whale Wars was a weekly documentary series that premiered in the autumn of 2008 and followed Sea Shepherd’s campaigns against the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. By 2015, Animal Planet had broadcast seven seasons of the series comprising a total of 63 episodes.
5 HOT PURSUIT
1 The doctrine of “hot pursuit” (the right to continuous pursuit) on the high seas grants a coastal state the right to pursue a vessel in international waters if there is suspicion that the crew has committed a criminal act within the nation’s territorial waters. The right is set out in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In order for a pursuit to be defined as continuous in practical terms today the target cannot disappear from the pursuer’s radar screen.
6 OPERATION SPILLWAY
1 Project Scale is a part of Interpol’s division that combats environmental crime. The project was started 26 February 2013, and the first director was the lawyer Eve de Coning from Norway. Project Scale is funded by Norway, the USA and the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts.
2 The centre of operations, also called CCC, is manned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year as a contact for member nations in need of immediate information or facing a critical situation. The headquarters are located in Lyon, but Interpol also has operation centres in Buenos Aires and Singapore.
3 Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is often referred to as IUU fishing. Such fishing activity is illegal both if it violates laws established by a coastal state, and if it violates rules set out in the many international conventions regulating fishing in international waters. Fishing is considered unreported if there is a failure to report, if an incorrect report is made to the nation in which the vessel is registered, to the harbour where the fish is brought ashore or to a fisheries organization administrating fishing activities in international waters. Unregulated fishing is legal, but must take place in an unregulated area or for an unregulated species, or where there is no body of rules protecting the fish stock.
4 The descriptions of the work leading up to Interpol’s Project Scale are based on a large number of documents and reports, as well as interviews with people who participated in the work: Tor Glistrup, Gunnar Stølsvik and Eve de Coning from the Norwegian fisheries authorities, Stuart Cory from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA, Alistair McDonnell from Interpol’s Project Scale, Gary Orr from the Ministry from Primary Industries in New Zealand and Glen Salmon from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.
5 As a fisheries officer on isolated South Georgia in the 1990s, Alistair McDonnell had seen how overfishing in the British maritime zones in the South Atlantic was on the verge of obliterating the toothfish stock. At its peak, the annual catch amounted to 100,000 tons of toothfish. Three fishing vessels were put under arrest by the British authorities before the fleet of trawlers and longline fishing vessels gave up.
7 THE ICE
1 The bay was named after the general manager of the “Whalers Mutual Insurance Association” (Hvalfangernes Assuranceforening), Olaf Prydz. It was mapped for the first time in 1935 by the Norwegian whaler Klarius Mikkelsen on the ship Thorshavn. The following year the bay was explored extensively by a Norwegian expedition led by the whaling ship owner Lars Christensen, who outfitted nine scientific expeditions to the Antarctic. Christensen himself was on four of them.
2 Malaysia Airlines’ Flight 370 was on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members when it suddenly disappeared from radar screens above the Gulf of Thailand. At least 57 ships and 48 aircraft took part in the rescue operations, which were carried out in an enormous geographic region. A few days after the airplane disappeared, the authorities announced that the Boeing 777 aircraft had probably crashed some place in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. It wasn’t until 17 months later that the first piece of wreckage from the crashed plane was found, a part of the wing that
