Death and doubloons

>>Crew recover from the strange, and
perhaps last, voyage of the Farley Mowat

THE LAST TIME ABOARD:
Shannon Mann, retrieving her personal effects in Sydney, N.S.

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Sitting at a sidewalk café on Laurier East last week, the R/V Farley Mowat’s communications officer Shannon Mann, a 35-year-old Calgary resident and vegan, is in Montreal for a few days following a hurried trip west from Nova Scotia. She’s on her way to visit the human Farley Mowat at the novelist and conservationist’s home in Port Hope, Ontario, and is discussing the events that led up to the April 12 boarding of her ship by armed Mounties, and the sudden end to her latest adventure on the high seas.

Her story begins three weeks earlier, on March 24, when the Farley Mowat, the 52-year-old, 180-foot, steel-hulled, 1,400-horsepower, Dutch-registered flagship of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, set sail from Bermuda on course for the Cabot Straits in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the marine-mammal lovers intended to document—but not, says Mann, interfere with—the annual seal hunt. The SSCS has a long and colourful history, full of confrontation, danger, collisions and death threats, made richer by the group’s limelight-loving founder, Paul Watson, and is deeply loathed by East Coast fishermen and the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Loyola Hearn.

The voyage north went smoothly enough, and on March 28, the crew reported contact with a Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) aircraft. The plane circled the ship several times, eventually establishing radio contact and warning the crew not to enter the 12-mile territorial limit of Canadian waters. The next day, tragedy struck.

CAPTAIN AND COMMS: SSCS founder
Paul Watson and Mann

Mourning anger

The Acadien II, a stricken seal hunting ship out of the Magdalen Islands, was being towed by a Canadian Coast Guard rescue vessel when it capsized in the early hours of Saturday, March 29. Four of the six sailors aboard, aged between 20 and 57, were lost. The tragedy got lots of media coverage, and Watson, who didn’t accompany the Farley Mowat, joined the chorus of critics who blamed the Canadian government for the accident.

On March 30, the Farley Mowat reported they were being shadowed by the Coast Guard as they documented more hunting. “We got so much footage of these insane acts of cruelty,” says Mann. “Every single day we saw the Coast Guard.” The same day, the Coast Guard icebreaker and the Farley Mowat collided—Watson and Mann say they were rammed, DFO says they only grazed each other—after the SSCS ignored orders to back off from the hunt. No major damage was caused, but bad blood was boiling.

The hunt was suspended for a week, so the Farley Mowat berthed in St-Pierre, one of two small islands in the Gulf still belonging to France, to transfer the footage they shot and await the resumption of the hunt. “Everyone treated us really well until Paul made a comment about the death of the sealers,” says Mann.

Some comments: He described sealers as “cigarette-smoking apes” and “sadistic, vicious killers” who “are now pleading for sympathy because some of their own died while engaged in a viciously brutal activity.” He also said the four deaths was a tragedy, but the killing of 275,000 seal pups was even greater. “That aggravated a lot of people,” says Mann.

Run out, arrested and banished

Predictably furious, the St-Pierre fishermen swarmed the berthed Farley Mowat on April 4, with insults, threats and rocks thrown their way. The St-Pierre police suggested they leave immediately. Before they could, Mann says, the fishermen hacked away the Farley Mowat’s mooring lines, setting it adrift into the harbour.

“It was pretty dangerous,” says Mann. “If we ended up on the rocks, we could have punctured our hull.” The ship’s engineer managed to start the engines cold and they set sail back to the hunt. The next week they spent observing, still shadowed by the Coast Guard, until, on April 12, “I was on the bridge and I saw the Coast Guard launch small vessels,” says Mann. “I didn’t think they’d actually be stupid enough to board us. It was so obvious! They played right into Paul’s hands. We had all the footage we needed, and we probably would have left the next day.”

Mann was on the phone with Watson, who was in New York City, when the Mounties boarded and arrested everyone. Of the 17 crew members, 15 were soon released. Watson personally posted the $10,000 bail for the Farley Mowat’s captain Alex Cornelissen and First Officer Peter Hammarstedt, paying half with 2,500 toonies, calling them “doubloons,” saying it was a ransom and the arrest an act of piracy—Mowat himself donated the money. The media loved it, but Cornelissen and Hammarstedt were deported and told never to return.

Their legal status remains unclear—their deportation orders make it difficult for them to attend any trial in this country—and the Farley Mowat remains berthed in Sydney, where a court hearing will decide its fate on Friday, May 9.