Greenpeace, Activism Memoir
Warrior of the Rainbow
Sunk by the French Secret Service— July 10 1985
Hear the author’s own voice in this reading:
She’s gone. I’ll never know the like of her again. So much we’d travelled together, good and bad, but never dull. I’d seen her as few ever had, lying at rest under the sinking sun. I’d been with her through storm torn skies, when lightning was so sharp it stitched clouds together. She was not mine of course, she belonged to the world, a symbol of man’s hope.
Now, whenever I sit on some windy hill, looking out above the ocean, it all comes back to me, the sense of smell reminding me long after the burning has gone, yet still lingers in my nostrils.
Lay still, Harry…lay absolutely still.
I remember seeing tears in the eyes of my friend.
Steve, I can’t feel my legs.
He was holding my head in his lap.
Harry, you’re okay, but you must lay still, do you understand?
I could hear sirens but above that I could hear the hissing of steam, like someone had placed a red-hot poker in water.
What happened, Steve?
The tears seen in his eyes were now streaming down his face and there, in the reflective glow of his eyes, I felt a sense I might be dying. I began to think of all the cowboy films I’d seen as a kid, where the wounded man bites the dust before getting out his last sentence.
Steve, tell my beautiful kids I loved them.
It was as though Steve heard that prayer and looked down at me.
Listen, you’re going to be all right. Don’t think about anything else…he didn’t want to tell me I had a jagged piece of metal in my back…so you lay still…and then there was no more to be heard.
I woke up in a hospital somewhere in Aukland, New Zealand. For three months I lay in hospital while surgeons played around with my spine.
The French had bombed and sunk the Rainbow Warrior, killing the ship’s photographer, Fernando Pereira. I don’t know why, when I look out to sea, it should all come back to me so vividly; not when there are so many other beautiful memories of the Warrior, so much achieved. We had our failures, of course, but she handed us friendships and adventures, and now she is gone.
There is no question in my mind that the world loved the Rainbow Warrior. She sailed into people’s dreams and hopes and tried to turn those dreams into the reality of a cared for world, and many times she did just that.
Thirty-eight years have passed since that terrible night in New Zealand. A new Rainbow Warrior now carries on the tradition. The original crew have grown older, grown beards and bellies, that was their time. But it was also the time of hope…and that time is never past.
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