As the Rainbow Warrior plied the waters of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) in the joint Greenpeace Foundation/GPINTL attempt to find actively-fishing tunaboats setting on dolphins, another crisis took shape which would cut the mission short.

Peru, which had long been a Japanese puppet on whaling issues, announced that it would not abide by the IWC-set quotas on whale kills (all Peruvian whale meat was graded on the spot by Japanese meat inspectors and shipped to Japan). At that time, the RW was cruising transect lines in the ETP to find tunaboats, and Don White was in Seattle at a meeting of then-existing Greenpeace organizations. When the word on Peru came through, White had to make a decision: the RW could spent the next three weeks transiting the ETP and perhaps confront a tunaboat – shifting the world focus on dolphin kills into high gear – or it could make directly for Peru and have the Greenpeace Foundation/GPINTL crew take direct action to dramatize Peru’s defiance of international whale treaty.

It was an extremely difficult decision, but it boiled down to a possibility on one hand versus a certainty on the other. Don called Campbell Plowden, then director of the GPINTL whaling campaign, into a side-meeting in Seattle and proposed an immediate diversion of the dolphin campaign to Peru to attempt to deal with the crisis. A few days later, White was to call the RW via raidiophone link and tell the surprised crew that they were heading for Peru to confront the whaling fleets, where they would be met by Plowden (who would coordinate the action). They agreed with guarded enthusiasm.

The Peru whaling campaign that ensued was a classic, and is attributable both to Plowden’s courageous leadership on behalf of GPINTL, and the Greenpeace Foundation crewmembers. Along with Plowden, Greenpeace Foundation staffmember Patti Hutchison chained herself to the harpoon of a Peruvian whaling ship; drawing national attention to what had been a dirty secret between Japanese and Peruvian officials. After their arrest, the entire remaining crew of the RW dolphin mission woke to machine-guns in their faces, all under arrest. Yet during the week this played itself out, the nation of Peru awoke to the ramifications of the issues, and to the ignoring of international treaty. Peru changed its stance from pro-whaling to anti-whaling, and the RW and crew were released. Thus ended the first sea-borne campaign to save dolphins from tuna fishermen; and thus was resolved a serious threat to the whales.

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