The last pirate: Paul Watson splits with Sea Shepherd

He has been shot by angry whalers, played maritime chicken in the frigid Southern Ocean, been declared a pirate by a United States court, forced to live in “exile” as an international fugitive, and remains the subject of an Interpol red notice, issued at the request of Japan.

But it was a palace coup within the organisation he founded, Sea Shepherd, that finally stopped Captain Paul Watson pursuing his radical brand of direct-action environmentalism and cast him out of the body he shaped.

This last break was announced on September 3 by Watson himself, in a series of Facebook posts. Now he is setting up a new organisation, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, to carry on what he calls the “confrontational” activity that once made Sea Shepherd the world’s most infamous environmental group.

Already, a billionaire supporter has promised to pay for a new ship. Watson expects to be back in business by early next year, with one or possibly two vessels. Supporters are in the early stages of setting up an Australian chapter of the foundation.

In the wake of Watson’s departure, Sea Shepherd is globally riven, between those members who gloried in the outlaw aura of the old Sea Shepherd and its founder, and those determined to follow a new course, still committed to direct action but with less confrontation and more co-operation with governments and legal authorities, as well as a greater emphasis on research.

Although the split was announced by Watson, it was not initiated by him, at least not directly. His September social media post quoted from an email he had received that same morning from Sea Shepherd Global chief executive Alex Cornelissen.

“I am sorry to inform you that based on the conversations that we’ve had, and the legal issues between you and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, we asked you to step down from the board.

“Since you have not complied with that request, the majority of the Global Board has decided that it is a conflict of interest for you to remain as a director on the board of Sea Shepherd Global; and has therefore reached the decision that you are no longer a director of Sea Shepherd Global.”

In fact, Watson’s prominence within the organisation had been in decline for a long time. As described on the Sea Shepherd website: “… our founder took a substantial step back from SSCS management in 2014, and in 2019 reduced his role to primarily archiving the organization’s history”.

About the same time, Sea Shepherd began shifting away from Watson’s particular focus – harassing whaling operations in international waters – towards overfishing and collaboration with foreign governments to help them monitor illegal activity in their territorial waters.

Speaking with The Saturday Paper from his home in Vermont, Watson is cheerful and discursive. He portrays the changes at Sea Shepherd as follows.

“About 2019 they began to marginalise me because they said that my reputation was preventing them from getting directors’ insurance. And so I was asked to step off the board [of the US arm, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society] but I would still be involved in part in the decision-making,” he says.

“After I was removed from the board, Pritam Singh, who is now the president of that board, he dismissed the directors who supported me and then replaced them with people that he trusted. Basically. He runs it and … they rubber stamp everything he does.”

Singh is a very different character to Watson. He is both a capitalist and a man given to quiet contemplation. He runs a hotel, development and management company in Key West and the Florida Keys, and also helped found the first Mindfulness Training Institute in the US, as well as a couple of Buddhist monasteries. Under him, Sea Shepherd has become less radical and more interested in co-operation.

“In June,” Watson says, “they made the decision they were going to change the direction of the organisation to be less controversial, less confrontational, you know, to concentrate on research, to become mediocre…”

And that, in his view, was antithetical to what Sea Shepherd was meant to be. So he quit.

“You know, we fill a particular niche within the marine conservation movement,” he says. “We’re there to rock the boat. We’re there to be controversial and confrontational. That’s what we do.

“We used to describe ourselves as the ‘ladies of the night’ of the movement, because people, a lot of people, agreed with us – they just didn’t want to be seen with us in the daytime.”

Now, Watson says, the organisation is becoming “an Uber service for government bureaucrats”.

He continues: “That means that any release, any information, has to be approved by the government partner. They’re dictating what we can and cannot say. And although there is, of course, a lot of benefit, and a lot of good in the campaigns that they’re doing, it really makes Sea Shepherd submissive to these government partners. And I have a problem with that.”

Submission is not what he set up the organisation for 45 years ago.

Long before Sea Shepherd, in 1971, he was deeply involved in the establishment of another environment group, initially made up of a couple of dozen people frustrated with the lack of action by mainstream environment organisations, particularly the venerable Sierra Club, established in 1892, in opposition to US nuclear testing on Amchitka Island in the Bering Sea off Alaska. They called it Greenpeace. Watson is often credited – and credits himself – with being a co-founder. Greenpeace credits him only as an “influential early member”.

Almost immediately, there were tensions over tactics. Greenpeace, some of whose founders were Quakers, was pacifist and law-abiding. Watson argued for aggressive tactics. It was while he was with Greenpeace that he pioneered the harassment of whaling ships. In 1977, when leading a protest against the annual slaughter of seal pups in Canada’s north-east, an enraged Watson confronted a hunter, seized his club and pelts and threw them into the sea.

And so he was ousted from the Greenpeace board, reportedly by an 11-1 vote, with the one being him. Cut free from the group, he promptly founded Sea Shepherd. It was his vision right down to the design – although not the actual artwork – of the organisation’s logo. Most environment groups have logos intended to evoke warm and fuzzy emotions – a panda, a bilby, a whale, a koala. Watson’s design was a variation on the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger, but with a shepherd’s crook and Neptune’s trident beneath the human skull.

For most of its history Sea Shepherd’s story was very much Watson’s story, and his story was carefully curated – through his extensive autobiographical writings, interviews and documentaries – as a tale of righteous, if not always strictly legal, smiting of nature’s despoilers.

This was the young boy from a small fishing town in New Brunswick, Canada, whose environmental activism began about the age of 12 when he set about destroying hunters’ beaver traps after his “best friend”, a beaver named Bucky, was killed in one.

Elsewhere, Watson describes being horrified when his uncle took him to witness a seal hunt. He remembers shooting another boy with a BB gun because that boy was about to kill a bird. He joined the Canadian coastguard and then became a merchant mariner, then put together a small private navy crewed by vegan vigilantes and sailed the world, hounding whalers, sealers and illegal fishers.

Sea Shepherd’s efforts to prevent Japanese whaling around Antarctica drew particular attention. Japan killed tens of thousands of whales, mostly minkes, allegedly in the interests of scientific research but in reality to harvest whale meat for food.

It became a war. Sea Shepherd’s tactic of steering its vessels between harpooners and their targets resulted in several collisions. One vessel, the Ady Gil, was sliced in half in 2010 – a deliberate act according to Sea Shepherd, an accident according to Japan. The parties accused each other of dangerous, even life-threatening, practices in close-quarters combat.

The Japanese used water cannons, flashbang explosive devices, hurled metal objects and chunks of whale meat and blubber, and fired guns at the environmentalists who, for their part, threw smoke bombs and jars of acid made from rancid butter to contaminate the whale meat, and dragged cables to try to foul the propellers of the whalers. In some cases, they scuttled unmanned vessels.

Sea Shepherd was accused of being an organisation of eco-terrorists but Watson never resiled from its tactics, insisting they were legitimised by the illegal behaviour of the whalers.

An interview he gave the ABC in March 2008 underlines the point. He claimed he had been shot in the chest but was saved from serious injury by a bulletproof vest and a metal badge.

“We were doing what we usually do, which is putting stink bombs on deck,” he said.

“We go out of our way to make sure we don’t throw them near anybody, but they were throwing the flash grenades directly at us.

“These people are criminals, they’re down here killing whales illegally in a place they’re not supposed to be.”

Speaking to The Saturday Paper, he claims Australia refused to investigate, so as not to antagonise Japan. The Japanese admitted to firing “warning shots” into the air.

“When I got back to Melbourne that year, I had the bullet that was removed from my bulletproof vest. And I tried to give it to the federal police and they said, ‘Nope, not our jurisdiction. We’re not interested in looking at it.’ ”

Regardless of the specifics of that incident, it illustrates a couple of broader points.

The first is that Sea Shepherd garnered immense coverage through conflict, and public opinion swung firmly against whaling. The Japanese, says a former Australian activist, “began to try to hide from us in the Southern Ocean” to prevent Sea Shepherd’s very sophisticated media operation from capturing images of their bloody business and pumping them out to hungry media. The second point is that Watson and Sea Shepherd became a problem not just for the whalers and other targets of their actions, but also for governments and justice systems around the world. They had an impact on international relations, particularly, in Australia’s case, with Japan.

Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, for example, breached diplomatic protocol at a function with Shinzo Abe 10 years ago “to deliver a handwritten message from Paul Watson to cease and desist whaling”.

Sea Shepherd’s activities have led to legal actions in numerous countries, including the US, Canada, Norway, Costa Rica and, of course, Japan. But the structure of Sea Shepherd, says the source, makes prosecutions difficult.

“Sea Shepherd is structurally complicated, divided up and incorporated in different countries. One of the reasons Sea Shepherd Global was set up was because Sea Shepherd US got sued by Japanese whalers. They ended up settling. So now they want to keep a legal distance between them.”

In 2012, Watson was detained in Germany at the request of Costa Rica but he skipped bail. A month later Interpol issued a red notice for his arrest at the request of both Costa Rica and Japan. (Costa Rica subsequently withdrew.)

Soon after, a US court declared Sea Shepherd a pirate organisation and ordered the group to keep its distance from Japanese whalers. “You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch,” chief judge Alex Kozinski, of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Washington, noted in his florid decision. “When you ram ships; hurl glass containers of acid; drag metal-reinforced ropes in the water to damage propellers and rudders; launch smoke bombs and flares with hooks; and point high-powered lasers at other ships, you are, without a doubt, a pirate, no matter how high-minded you believe your purpose to be.”

Yet when Watson returned to the US, after two years lived partly at sea and partly in France, which granted him asylum, he was not arrested. The activist credits former US secretary of state John Kerry for allowing him back into the country. But he still can’t travel internationally, including to Australia, for fear of arrest and deportation to Japan.

“I can go to France and I can come back into the US,” he says. “I’m a Canadian citizen, but they made it quite clear I’ll be extradited to Japan. Canadians don’t like me for a lot of reasons – my opposition to sealing, overfishing and salmon farms. But, I’ve got a lot of support in France, in the government.”

And among Sea Shepherd members. The same structural separation that makes Sea Shepherd hard to prosecute also makes it hard to control.

Although Watson has parted company with Sea Shepherd US and Global, he says others are still backing him and his new foundation. “Sea Shepherd is a movement. These people on the global board can’t really control a movement. Nobody can control a movement.”

In June, before he was removed as a director, Watson says that when he told the board he could not support Sea Shepherd’s new direction, they responded by saying, essentially: “You work for us, you get paid by us. So you do what you’re told.”

Watson describes it like this: “They wanted to pay me a lot of money – about $300,000 a year – just to just shut up and be like an impotent figurehead for the organisation. I said, ‘No, not really, I’ll just resign.’ ”

From there things got ugly and legalistic. Watson was still on the board of Sea Shepherd Global at that time, which he believed was still on his side.

What he says he didn’t know was that the US board owned about 70 trademarks. “They have the trademark for Australia and New Zealand and everywhere. So they went to global and said, ‘Look, we own you, we own the logo, we own the name. And basically you do what you’re told.’ ”

Watson says four of the six members of the board of Sea Shepherd Global “decided on the orders of the US to dismiss me. There was no meeting, no discussion, no vote.

“Lamya Essemlali, the president of Sea Shepherd France, and I weren’t even aware of this. I get an email saying ‘You’re dismissed from the global board.’

“So I’ve set up my own foundation, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. I know it sounds really egotistical, but I think at least they can’t take that away from me.

“Since then, I’ve got the support of Sea Shepherd France, Germany, UK, New Zealand and Brazil. So we’re going to reorganise, basically.”

Sea Shepherd Australia has not, however, offered its support. Watson believes that the director of Sea Shepherd Australia, Jeff Hansen, was one of those who voted to dismiss him. He further accuses the Australian organisation of “basically demonising me and making all sorts of insinuations and accusations and basically saying, we had to do this”. Watson responded in a video on the Sea Shepherd Facebook page, “with the result that I am now banned from the Australian Facebook page”.

And yet, he says, he remains on the Australian board of directors. Watson believes they are now too scared to remove him, lest it precipitate an exodus of members.

That, at least, is his version of events. Despite numerous attempts by The Saturday Paper to contact Hansen and other senior people within the organisation to get their side of the story, there was no response.

Watson says he still has “tremendous” support among the grassroots membership, here and around the world.

He cites an example, relating to a decision by the US board to scrap several of its vessels, including MV John Paul DeJoria, named for the billionaire philanthropist behind Paul Mitchell hair products and the Patrón Spirits Company.

According to Watson, they didn’t tell DeJoria, and when DeJoria contacted them he was told the vessel had been offered to Watson but he didn’t want it.

“Which was a lie,” Watson says. “So John Paul got upset and said to me, ‘Find a ship and I’ll pay for it.’ ”

Sea Shepherd is now deeply, perhaps irrevocably, split. Those who know Watson, his history of falling out with people, his sometimes abrasive ways and his large ego, are not surprised.

“I used to joke that I had a headache named Paul Watson,” says one former activist, who was once very senior in the Australian group.

“And I’m sure I’m not the only one. His view was that it was his organisation and he can do with it what he wants, can say what he wants. Never mind what others were doing, the hard work behind the scenes. It was always his way, his news to break. Everyone else be damned.”

This activist came to doubt the efficacy of his methods, and believes the new approach of working with authorities in the interests of protecting vulnerable sea life is more productive.

That said, she concedes Watson inspired a lot of people. “He made environmentalism bad-ass and he made it punk. So, there are a whole bunch of people that are really deeply engaged in environmental issues that would have otherwise not engaged. How effective it is, I don’t know.”

Paul Watson, though, has no doubts. The “bureaucrats”, as he calls the people who now run Sea Shepherd, can do things their way. He will continue to do it his way, even though, at 71 and fearing arrest, he will probably direct operations from shore.

“I haven’t changed,” he says. “They have.”