さあ！諸君！捕鯨問題だ！

＝＝＝’HARPOON’ 　 by Andrew DARBY、121−122頁

　 Carter tracked Sierra through government and financial records,
and looked under the rocks of the maritime world. He took a chance on
placing a small advertisement in an engineers' journal, seeking a leak.
Wonderfully, a response came from a marine engineer working on Sierra.
'The engineer bravely videotaped the piracy, including an endangered
humpback whale being dragged up the slipway, butchered, and boxed for
the Japanese market.' This whistleblower's indelible evidence survives in
Carter's small history of pirate whaling. A Humpback already protected by
the IWC for twelve years was pictured on Sierra's stern in 1975, skewered
on cables, an unmistakeable pectoral wing flat on the deck.

　 The IWC made noises of official disapproval of the Sierra in a resolution
against pirate whaling in 1977. The same interests thumbed their nose at
the regulators. They acquired other ships: the Tonna, poetically capsized
and sunk by the weight of a dead Fin in July 1978; the last South African
legal chasers, renamed Susan and Theresa like Behr's daughters; and a
refitted Japanese trawler, Astrid. The South African government legislated
against the pirates, and their business links were brought to light in US
Congressional hearings before the Packwood-Magnuson Amendment
clanked into gear. It threatened Japanese fishing interests with expulsion
from US fisheries. Tokyo responded by passing its own law against receiving
meat from non-IWC countries.

　 Still the Sierra whaled on until Watson came riding over the horizon in
Sea Shepherd, thinking of the extinction of the Great Plains bison, and
how he had once fantasised about having a Sherman tank to take on the
buffalo hunters.

　 'Sierra, Sierra,' Watson called over a marine radio on 15 July 1979.
'Goddamn you, you whale-killing son of a bitch, your career is going to end
today.'

　 Having tracked the ship to the harbour at Leixoes in northern Portugal,
Watson powered Sea Shepherd up to ram it. With a few minutes of fury he
changed the face of anti-whaling direct action. The 779-tonne former
North Sea trawler, its stem filled with concrete, first hit the Sierra's bow and
then starboard side, staving it in. Sierra reached dock heavily damaged but
afloat. The only person injured was a former Sea Shepherd crewman who
was beaten when he later went to apologise to Sierra's crew. Watson was
briefly arrested. Rather than have Sea Shepherd confiscated, he scuttled it.
Sierra was repaired, but when it seemed it might go whaling again, three
unidentified saboteurs with military skills sank it with a limpet mine.

　 'We traded a ship for a ship, but it was a great trade because we also
traded our ship for the lives of hundreds of whales that would be spared
from the Sierra,' Watson said. Within a few months other pirate vessels
in this fleet were out of business, two seized by South Africa, and Astrid
fleeing to the less hazardous tuna business, encouraged by a Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society reward posted around Canary Island docks offering a
bounty for its sinking. Within months, more unexplained limpet mines
sank two Spanish whalers.

（つづく、かもしれない）