Eyes of Fire: Greenpeace at 35 Years (Rex Weyler)

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

by Rex Weyler

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0915-31.htm

<snip>

Hunter admired the tough captain. He studied his moods and steered around them carefully. He studied his desires and tried to please him. Cormack, for his part, appreciated the effort and more or less adopted Hunter. The young writer dubbed the Captain, “Lord of the Piston Rings,” and although the elder skipper didn’t recognize the reference to Tolkien, he took it as a compliment.

Cormack, however, could turn ferocious when the crew made minor errors. Darnell opened a can of evaporated milk upside down in the galley, and when Cormack saw it, he shrieked. “Bloody idiots!” He hurled the can overboard and stomped back into the galley. “You damned perfessors don’t know shit!” The Captain grabbed his coffee and disappeared into the wheelhouse. The crew learned from Birmingham that opening cans upside down was considered bad luck and obviously the Captain took it seriously. There were more rules. Hanging cups open end out was also bad luck. Standing in a doorway could prove perilous as the Captain might run you over as if you were invisible. When the skipper entered the galley, anyone sitting at the end of the table would be well advised to slide over and make room. Ignorance of these rules was no defense.

On the third day, the Phyllis Cormack passed through Johnstone Strait and approached the Kwakiutl Indian village at Alert Bay. Cormack informed the crew that they had been invited ashore for a blessing and a gift of salmon. Lucy and Daisy Sewid, the chief’s daughters, met the crew at the dock and escorted them to a formal ceremony in the longhouse. Kwakiutl families came aboard and blessed the ship, and fisherman brought Coho salmon. Daisy Sewid told Hunter that although the Kwakiutl supported Greenpeace, the ceremony was made possible because the fishing families from the village were devoted friends of John Cormack.

The following morning, Hunter filed a column with The Vancouver Sun, by radiophone. He saw something disquieting in the closed canneries and abandoned fish boats along the coast. The Kwakiutl had lived from the bounty of the inland sea for thousands of years before the factory trawlers arrived in the 1960s with their massive drift nets. Catch levels in the North Pacific had reached all-time highs and then crashed. As the Pacific perch, herring, and yellowfin sole disappeared, Japanese and Soviet trawlers moved north after the Bering Sea pollock. By the fall of 1971, the pollock harvest had increased from 175,000 tons per year to almost two million tons per year, and then declined like the other commercial species. Crab and shrimp populations went into decline. Hunter saw in the depressed fishing economies a warning from the environment, a sign that humankind had reached some dangerous Rubicon...




About Rex Weyler:

http://www.rexweyler.com/about/index.html