Greenpeace Captain

Excerpt: Chapter One

Whatever the cause, the effect was clear. Davey and I locked eyes and I knew what had to be done. I said in my command voice: "Let's get everyone off the ship and onto the dock, and then we'll figure it out from there." Even as a relatively young captain, I knew that the priority was to get everyone off the ship. Davey and I both realized that if the engine room had flooded, the lower accommodations—which were on the same level—would be underwater too. I hoped like hell that no one was down there, but I had to walk back aft toward the lower accommodations to see for myself.

As I got to the stairs going down, I saw Martini Gotje at the bottom of the steps. He had gotten there first, and had immediately gone to the crew's sleeping quarters in the area that seemed to be in the most danger. Andy Biedermann had gone down right before him, and gotten our temporary cook, Margaret Mills, out of her bunk. I felt, rather than heard, the ship lift under my feet.

Whump!

Another shockwave—less than two minutes after the first. Was the New Zealand navy firing at us? At the dock? It was the onlyp thing I could think of, and that didn't seem very likely. Whatever was going on, it didn't make sense and it wasn't over. I looked down at Martini and told him to pass on the word to abandon ship. Abandon ship! At the dock! It seemed like a strange order to both of us, but he did not argue.

I went forward with the thought of trying to go down to the theater. With the water already this high, there was a good chance someone needed help. As I went past Grace O'Sullivan and Nathalie Mestre's cabin and took my first step down, I went up to my shin in water. Not good. Not good at all.

Somewhere along the way, my towel had slipped off. I hadn't noticed, and apparently no one else had. Still I did not want to hit the dock in my birthday suit. As I got back to my cabin, I felt the boat roll toward the nearby wharf as her bottom slipped down, and away from the dock into deeper water. She was definitely sinking, and there was no way of telling how far and how fast she was going down. Fuck the clothes, I'm out of here, I thought as the water poured over the doorsill. It was now flooding the upper deck. I headed aft to where there were more cabins, shouting "Abandon ship!" as I felt the boat under my feet leaning over even farther. It was just like The Poseidon Adventure, but sickeningly real.

We were berthed at the end of a large pier dominated by a sizable warehouse in a remote corner of the harbor. A few small sailboats had been tied up alongside us before the explosions—sailboats that were part of the Pacific Peace fleet that was planning to sail with us to the Moruroa Atoll to protest France's nuclear weapons testing. The Rainbow Warrior was going to accompany the fleet as a supply and support vessel. After the explosions, the sailboats had quickly moved a short distance away. There was nothing around us that could conceivably have caused our ship to explode and sink.

The ship had already sunk to the point where I had to climb up off the ship's deck to get onto the dock. As soon as my feet hit the pier, I began counting heads—taking a mental inventory of the crew. Several, I knew, had been onshore, taking some time off before we left for the three-thousand-mile sail to Moruroa. From what I could tell, only Hanne Sorensen and Fernando Pereira were missing. I wasn't worried about Fernando as he was normally a late-night person and loved to go ashore. Hanne was more of a concern.

There is a saying among captains: "In an emergency, no one rises to the occasion. You fall back to the level of your training." I was functioning, but still badly stunned. It all seemed surreal, but it was real all right. I was turning back to look at my ship when Davey grabbed me and told me, "Fernando's down there!"

Fernando was our snapper—the ship's photographer—who had joined the crew in Hawaii four months earlier. I hoped to hell Davey was wrong, and told him that I thought Fernando was still out on the town, but Davey was emphatic. Shit, I thought. If he's down there, he is way down under that mix of diesel fuel and cold, black water. Davey confirmed that Fernando had gone down with him to the mess (the crew's cafeteria) for a nightcap, and after the whatever-the-hell-it-was happened—like any good photographer in a crisis—Fernando had gone down to his cabin to get his camera gear. Fernando's cabin, starboard and forward, was now deep under the seawater that was quickly filling the ship. Air bubbles were still hissing and boiling as they escaped the hull and emerged through the slowly spreading slick around the boat.