The ''Phyllis Cormack'' is a 25-meter (82-foot) herring and halibut

seine fishing Seine fishing (or seine-haul fishing; ) is a method of fishing that employs a surrounding net, called a seine, that hangs vertically in the water with its bottom edge held down by weights and its top edge buoyed by floats. Seine nets can be de ...

boat, displacing 99 tons and crewed by up to 12 people. The wooden vessel was built in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, by Marine View Boat Works. The vessel was chartered in September 1971 by the Don't Make a Wave Committee to travel to Amchitka to protest against the planned nuclear tests there, and the passengers included Bob Hunter,

Ben Metcalfe Bennett Metcalfe (October 31, 1919 – October 14, 2003) was a Canadian journalist and first chairman of Greenpeace, which was founded in 1971. Ben Metcalfe was born in Winnipeg. Later he moved to the United Kingdom and at the age of 16 joined t ...

, John Cormack,

Jim Bohlen Jim Bohlen (July 4, 1926 – July 5, 2010) was an American engineer who worked on the Atlas ICBM missile program and later emigrated to Canada after becoming disillusioned with the US government's nuclear policy during the Cold War. He became one ...

, Patrick Moore and Terry A Simmons.

Greenpeace Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning network, founded in Canada in 1971 by Irving Stowe and Dorothy Stowe, immigrant environmental activists from the United States. Greenpeace states its goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth ...

calls this trip "our founding voyage."

Name

The boat's name derives from that of the wife of its skipper, John Cormack.

Greenpeace charters

1971

The vessel was renamed or nicknamed ''Greenpeace'' for the voyage, a name subsequently used by the organisation that sprang from the organising committee. Greenpeace International calls this expedition "the founding voyage". The nickname for the boat arose from "the dual ecological and antiwar nature of their mission". At the time, the boat was deemed to be "a bit jury-rigged." The boat's crew was Canadian, and included Bob Hunter, Ben Metcalfe, John Cormack, Jim Bohlen, Patrick Moore, and Terry A Simmons. The boat's departure and arrival point was

Vancouver, British Columbia Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

, though an unauthorised stop was made in Akutan, Alaska, resulting on a U.S. Coast Guard boarding and a charge of a U.S. customs violation. The crew's sight of a grisly, abandoned whaling station in Akutan was compared to the Communist Party of Kampuchea's Khmer Rouge Killing Fields and it was called a "pivotal" moment that turned Greenpeace on to the idea of saving the whales.

1975

In June 1975, the ''Phyllis Cormack'' was chartered by the Greenpeace Foundation, a Vancouver, B.C. ecological organization, to harass

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

and Japanese whaling; the crew included persons fluent in Japanese and in Russian. Greenpeace named the season's campaign "Project Ahab"; it ran about 50 miles offshore California, from Eureka in the north to past San Francisco in the south. ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' reported that for "the first time in the history of whaling, human beings had put their lives on the line for whales". The

Japanese Fisheries Agency Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

stated the harassers were fanatics for whom their movement "is like a religion".

Notes

References

Sources

* * Individual sailing vessels {{environment-stub