Phyllis Cormack

The vessel was renamed or nicknamed Greenpeace for the voyage, a name subsequently used by the organisation that sprang from the organising committee.[9] Greenpeace International calls this expedition "the founding voyage".[10] The nickname for the boat arose from "the dual ecological and antiwar nature of their mission". At the time, the boat was deemed to be "a bit jury-rigged."[11] The boat's crew was Canadian, and included Bob Hunter, Ben Metcalfe, John Cormack, Jim Bohlen, Patrick Moore and Terry A Simmons.[lower-alpha 5][12] The boat's departure and arrival point was Vancouver, British Columbia, though an unauthorised stop was made in Akutan, Alaska, resulting on a U.S. Coast Guard boarding and a charge of a U.S. customs violation. The crew's sight of a grisly, abandoned whaling station in Akutan was compared to the Communist Party of Kampuchea's Khmer Rouge Killing Fields and it was called a "pivotal" moment that turned Greenpeace on to the idea of saving the whales.[7][lower-alpha 6]

In June 1975, the Phyllis Cormack was chartered by the Greenpeace Foundation, a Vancouver, B.C. ecological organization,[13] to harass USSR and Japanese whaling; the crew included persons fluent in Japanese and in Russian. Greenpeace named the season's campaign "Project Ahab"; it ran about 50 miles offshore California, from Eureka in the north to past San Francisco in the south. The New York Times reported that for "the first time in the history of whaling, human beings had put their lives on the line for whales". The Japanese Fisheries Agency stated the harassers were fanatics for whom their movement "is like a religion".[5]