Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

TWENTY-THREE

To understand Pete Willcox, you have to go back to his grandparents.[84]

In 1952 Henry Willcox chaired the US delegation to a peace conference in China. One of the speakers was the communist premier Mao Tse-tung. When they returned to America, Henry and his wife had their passports confiscated[85] at New York harbour. He sued the United States government, eventually securing a five-to-four Supreme Court decision on the ‘right of freedom to travel’. But the case cost him his building company. He was voted out by the employees he’d given shares to.

The Korean War was raging, the Cold War was at its height, Senator Joe McCarthy was warning of ‘reds under the bed’ and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was holding hearings that resulted in the famous ‘Hollywood blacklist’. Three hundred writers and performers were boycotted by the movie studios based on their alleged communist sympathies. Even Charlie Chaplin.

On 6 March 1953, the day after Joseph Stalin died, Pete was born. His birth mother gave him up for adoption, but Henry’s son Roger Willcox and his daughter-in-law Elsie gave the boy a safe, loving home. Two years later Elsie was herself summoned to appear before the HUAC to account for her suspected involvement with an anti-war group. Elsie was in the process of adopting another boy, Mike, but the papers weren’t yet finalised. Fearing the summons could put the adoption in jeopardy, she took Pete and Mike and went underground for three months, hiding in a New England farmhouse. When the papers were eventually finalised, she surfaced and was issued with a subpoena to testify.[86]

Elsie was pulled before the Committee. One of the congressmen said she’d betrayed her country. Elsie invoked her right to silence. Pete Willcox grew up believing that if you hadn’t been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee then you hadn’t done much with your life.[87]

He was five years old when he went on his first protest, against a new coal-burning power plant in Norwalk Harbor. Two years after that he was protesting outside Woolworth’s in solidarity with the young African-Americans staging sit-ins at racially segregated stores in the Deep South.

In 1965 Pete witnessed the culmination of the famous march from Selma to Montgomery. Selma was the county seat of Dallas County, Alabama. In the early 1960s the population was 57 per cent African-American, but only 1 per cent were registered to vote[88] (for whites, voter registration sometimes surpassed 100 per cent[89]). A campaign began to turn that around, but it was met with organised violent resistance by sections of the white minority, and by the mid-sixties Selma had become a focus for the national civil rights movement.

A march was organised from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to petition the avowedly racist governor George Wallace. The peaceful marchers were met by state troopers who beat them and rained canisters of tear gas onto the heads of the crowd.[90] Two weeks later eight thousand people assembled at Brown Chapel in Selma and, led by Martin Luther King Jr., they set out again for Montgomery. By the time they arrived on the steps of the State Capitol building four days later,[91] the crowd had swelled to twenty-five thousand.[92] Among their number were Roger Willcox and his twelve-year-old son, Pete.

Dr King addressed the crowd:

Pete later told the journalist Josh Eells that the march instilled in him ‘the notion that if you dedicate yourself to something outside your immediate sphere, it’s going to be a more fulfilling life’.[94]

Most American schoolchildren are sent to summer camp. When he was fourteen years old the parents of Pete Willcox sent him to the Soviet Union. It was 1967, the year before Pavel Litvinov sat down in Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Roger and Elsie the USSR didn’t hold the same demonic connotations that it did for most Americans. Pete spent several weeks touring the country, visiting a Russian school and eating austere Russian meals. He took a train from Moscow to Crimea, where he spent six weeks at Camp Artek, the famous retreat for the children of party members and international delegations (Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was at the camp that summer[95]). Again and again Pete met Russians who yearned for peace, for better relations with America.

When he was nineteen years old he was drafted to fight in Vietnam. Soon afterwards he took a call from the wife of the folk singer Pete Seeger, a family friend. The Seegers had an offer to make. They owned a boat and used it to teach local children about pollution in the Hudson river. The first mate had recently been tried for draft evasion but had somehow persuaded the judge that the crew of the boat should be exempted from the military. If Pete wanted, he could join the crew and avoid Vietnam.[96]

Pete Willcox eventually became captain of Seeger’s boat. He dated the cook Maggy, it was love but it didn’t last. She married another guy, but they stayed in touch.

After six years of educating kids about one dirty river in one state, Pete was getting itchy feet. In 1981, at the age of twenty-eight, he answered an advert in a magazine for a job as a deckhand for Greenpeace. On day one, because he was a good painter, he was made the new first mate. Three months later he was captain. Six months after that he was sued for piracy for the first time after taking part in a direct action protest against toxic waste dumping off the New Jersey coast. Two years later came a second piracy charge, this time for boarding a Japanese whaling ship.[97]

Then in 1985, the French secret service bombed his ship, the Rainbow Warrior, and killed his friend, the photographer Fernando Pereira.

Two of the bombers – Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart – were arrested by local police.[98] Three other French agents were arrested by the Australian authorities but were released and picked up by a French submarine.[99] Four months later Prieur and Mafart were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for manslaughter,[100] but the French government threatened economic sanctions against New Zealand unless the agents were freed.[101] A political deal was struck that saw the bombers held on a French Polynesian island, but after just two years they were released and returned to France, where Mafart was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.[102] It later transpired that President François Mitterrand knew about the plan to bomb the Rainbow Warrior before it was executed.[103] The leader of the team that planted the bombs was reported to be Louis-Pierre Dillais. He later moved to the United States and settled in Virginia, where he still lives, running the American arm of a Belgian weapons manufacturer.[104]

Pete was devastated by Fernando’s death. He took a year out, sailed a bit, took time to reflect. Eventually he was ready to get back to campaigning. Soon he was being arrested in Denmark, then the Philippines. A movie came out, The Rainbow Warrior, in which Pete was played by Oscar-winner Jon Voight. Years passed. Greenpeace grew in size and scope. The job of captain changed.

‘When I started out, there was one campaigner on the boat, and half the time his job was to bring the recreational pharmaceuticals,’ Pete told Josh Eells from the magazine Men’s Journal. ‘Now there’s a campaigner, an assistant campaigner, a comms person, a second comms person, a webbie, photographer… I remember saying in the early eighties that we had to get as disciplined and organised as IBM or Exxon, or we weren’t going to matter. And in a lot of ways we did, and it sucks. I’m still glad we did it. But now you’re kind of just a cog in a wheel.’[105]

Pete met an Argentine doctor at sea, married her and had two kids, but the marriage didn’t last. Later he connected with his birth mother, then in 2010 he was visiting Maine to pick up a classic yacht for delivery when he met up with Maggy, the cook back on Pete Seeger’s boat forty years earlier. She was single now, so was he, and that thing between them was still there. Three years later they married. Seven months after that he sailed for the Arctic.