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Maite Mompo has been arrested more times than she can remember. She has stood trial in Israel, was nearly deported from Brazil and is due to be tried later this year in Spain, her home country, for an action at a nuclear power plant in Valencia. Being in police custody is par for the course when you have spent a decade aboard Greenpeace ships (not literally: the pattern is usually three months on, three months off). It is a career that has seen Mompo stand between harpoons and whales, document the environmental impact of the war between Israel and Lebanon and listen in horror to live radio updates from the captain of a nearby ship being captured by Somali pirates.
She has stayed on dry land of late, writing an exhaustive history of the ships. It begins in 1971 with the maiden voyage from Vancouver of a fishing boat that had been renamed Greenpeace to protest about US nuclear testing. Seven years later came the launch of Rainbow Warrior, which was audaciously blown up by French agents in the port of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1985, to stop it interfering with nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The ship sank with photographer Fernando Pereira still on board.
The legend of Rainbow Warrior lives on, with the ship now in her third incarnation, but it was on the second Rainbow Warrior (decommissioned in 2011) that Mompo worked the most. She decided she wanted to sail with Greenpeace when she was 11, “after watching the first Rainbow Warrior on TV, protecting the whales”. After school, she got a law degree, set up her local Amnesty International group, volunteered for various local pacifist and environmental groups and worked for a wind farm company. It wasn’t until she was 30 that she began volunteering for Greenpeace, and another seven years before she started working on the international ships.
Nautical experience isn’t a prerequisite for the job, but Mompo, now 47 and based in southern Spain, had a passion for sailing. Soon she was saving whales herself in what was supposed to be the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. She went out every day for a month, in a rigid inflatable boat (RIB), to hamper the work of vast Japanese whaling vessels. For safety reasons there always had to be a minimum of two boats in these actions, but Mompo remembers one occasion, over an hour into protecting a large adult minke whale, when the second RIB was forced to retreat with engine trouble. Mompo and the two other crew on her boat, she writes, “were incapable of abandoning it”.
Mompo’s role was to signal the positions of both the whale and the whaler to her colleague at the wheel of their RIB, holding on for dear life as they skimmed over the waves like a “galloping horse”. The whale dived and then jumped majestically through the air, at which point, Maite writes, “we were so close that I felt its eye staring at me”. The next minute the whale was hit. (She says of the noise from a harpoon impact: “Oh my god it’s terrible. There is a grenade in the tip, so you get a huge boom and you feel your heart stopping.”)
As the whalers hauled in their prey, Mompo’s boat became caught up in the line. As they attempted to free themselves, a sudden pull swept up her colleague, who was left dangling in the air between the whaler’s bow and a 10-tonne corpse. All he could do was climb down the rope and swim through icy water so that the RIB could pick him up. Afterwards, the whalers contacted Greenpeace to apologise. “They put our lives at risk and they felt ashamed about what had happened. They are not bad people,” she shrugs. “They were just tired and wanted to get the whale.”
Despite the perils, Mompo never thinks in terms of dying for the cause. “I’m a very positive person,” she says, “We prepare for the actions. Of course you think maybe you are going to risk your life, or there might be an accident, but your beliefs are your engine.”
A decade after Greenpeace activist Mark Hardingham was left in intensive care after getting in the way of a Norwegian whaler, Mompo sailed into Bergen to campaign for the protection of Norwegian coral reefs. Although many locals supported the project, others still despised Greenpeace for their earlier anti-whaling campaign. Spit, urine, eggs and rubbish were hurled at Rainbow Warrior. All you can do, she says, “is just say: ‘Please don’t do this, please don’t piss.’ The thing is that they just shout at you. If we could sit down and talk, we could solve things.”
More often than not, though, Rainbow Warrior is greeted as an international treasure. Even most of her arresting officers have been polite. “Usually, if you are a woman they are going to treat you better. And they know you’re a Greenpeace activist who can talk to the press, and that you’re non-violent.” Sometimes the authorities are even on her side. “They ask for your identity card and take your name, then whisper: ‘I support what you are doing.’ It happens a lot,” she grins.
Mompo is relaxed company. You would have to be if you’re regularly stuck on a boat with 29 others, sharing a mixed, four-berth cabin. But along with the risky manoeuvres, stormy seas and overnight stays in police holding cells comes the opportunity to make a difference, and forge friendships all over the world, while seeing its wonders first hand. “Sailing with Greenpeace has made my view of the planet bigger,” she says. “I was more pessimistic before, but now I know that wherever you go, you find people fighting to get a better environment. You see these people struggling and feel like there is hope.
“You don’t usually see that,” she says, “if you stay at home.”
Rainbow Warriors: Legendary Stories from Greenpeace Ships by Maite Mompo is published by New Internationalist at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
