The next day, May 24, we reached the Dellwood Knolls, 60 miles west of Triangle Island, in the open Pacific... The tallest of these seamounts rise within 100 feet of the ocean surface and bear scars from the wind and waves that carved their shorelines during past ice ages... red and green algae grow on the terraces... Rockfish, halibut, cod, and sole feed in the slopes. Shark, octopus, and squid stalk the crab and fish. The giant squid hunts them all. And the sperm whale hunts the squid. Human whalers hunt the sperm whale, and here, over the Dellwood Knolls, we hunted the whalers.

On the evening of May 25, the sea turned dead calm, the sky filled with stars, and the nearly full moon lit up the ocean and the decks of the boat. In this environment, we imagined the first mariners who navigated by the heavenly bodies. In the rocking of the sea, we felt the slow twist of time. With the stars reflected in the mirror-like sea, the horizon vanished and we appeared to float free in space.

After weeks at sea, just as the Whaling Commission meetings are drawing to a close and our heroes' opportunity to make worldwide waves is about to drain away, they catch up to the Russian whalers. And these are not Melville's whalers, but a phalanx of fast boats armed with exploding harpoons circling a massive and gruesome "factory ship." The "warriors of the rainbow" risk their lives zooming around in inflatable motorboats trying to literally block the harpoons. They watch whales butchered, manage to save a few, and most importantly, take dramatic photos and film footage.

Although we did not fully appreciate the fact at the time, the broadcast on the US evening news, and the subsequent media frenzy about whales, began the transformation of Greenpeace from an effective, but decidedly underground, international heckler into a global cultural celebrity. Already, however, the teeth of public scrutiny were grinding... "The problem is," said Hunter, "we planned to find the whalers, but we didn't plan what to do after that."

Greenpeace never arrives at a complete solution to that problem, at least not by the time Weyler ends his tale. At the close of the 1970s, the original Greenpeace Foundation sadly, but with Zen-like acceptance, ceded control to a council of national Greenpeace groups. But, crucially, "Greenpeace had endowed ecology with a public mythology. Statistics and polemics could not have achieved this. Peaceful insurgents in rainbow ships: that was news. Saving the environment had become heroic." And Greenpeace was by no means all mindbombs; it had many concrete successes in its first decade. Nuclear testing went underground. Entire nations gave up whaling, as "popular support had made ecology not only acceptable but also important to politicians in democratic nations."