Troll Wall E-Book

Tony Howard

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Norway, 1965. A team of young climbers from the north of England camp at the bottom of the tallest vertical rock face in Europe - the Troll Wall. No one has dared attempt this gigantic challenge before. Some say it will never be climbed. This will be the adventure of a lifetime. Rain and snow soak them as they climb. Avalanches and loose rock threaten their lives. A Norwegian team arrives to compete for the glory as the world's media look on. Pushed to the limits of exhaustion, the team spends days on the wall, refusing to given in, even when failure seems certain. "Troll Wall" tells the gripping story of one of the most dramatic first ascents in British climbing history. Written days after their success, almost half a century ago, and newly rediscovered, Tony Howard's account is a fascinating insight into the challenges of climbing a big mountain wall.

Leseprobe

Troll Wall

Tony Howard

To the Trolls, for letting us win.

And to the rest of the team, Bill, John, Nick, Rob, Jeff and Maggie, also Smiler for his good company on the winter recce, to our patron, Jack Longland, President of the British Mountaineering Council, and Alan Baker, ‘our man in London’ for liaising with sponsors and our many sponsors for making it possible.

I’ve come so oft to desperate grips With Trolldom’s power God help the man whose foothold slips In such an hour.

Arne Garborg

Illustrations: Simon Norris

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

FOREWORD

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE – A VERY NORWEGIAN SAGA

ONE Antarctic Adventures

TWO Arctic Adventures

PART TWO – TROLL WALL PREPARATIONS

THREE Reconnaissance

FOUR Preparations

FIVE The Journey

PART THREE – ASSAULT PREPARATIONS

SIX Advance Camp

SEVEN First Acquaintance

EIGHT The Fixed Ropes

NINE Equipping the Bivouac

PART FOUR – THE FIRST ATTEMPT

TEN The Nick

ELEVEN The Great Wall

TWELVE Retreat and Despair

PART FIVE – THE FINAL ASCENT

THIRTEEN Good Weather and High Hopes

FOURTEEN The First Day

FIFTEEN The Second Day

SIXTEEN The Third Day

SEVENTEEN The Fourth Day

EIGHTEEN The Fifth Day

NINETEEN The Sixth Day: Success

PART SIX – AFTERWARDS

TWENTY A Lifetime Ago

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

GLOSSARY

Plates

Copyright

FOREWORD

IT IS SOMEWHAT TYPICAL OF Tony Howard and the era when he did his greatest climbs that in 1965 he should write a comprehensive and, as it turns out, riveting account of his epic ascent of Troll Wall, then escape to the hills to avoid the limelight and forget all about it for nearly half a century. How wonderful that we can now read about the life and times of all the characters involved in this gripping Norwegian saga.

It is about time we had more information about this mountaineer, who has contributed so much to climbing here in Britain and abroad. This is a good, honest account, without exaggeration or too much understatement. Once begun, I found his account compulsive reading, a real page-turner, not just for those interested in big-wall climbing, but also for anyone who enjoys reading of epic journeys into the unknown.

The climbing of the Troll Wall by members of the Rimmon Mountaineering Club was significant in many respects. First, it brought into focus a new major area for big walls on a par with the Dolomites and Yosemite, albeit with a character all its own, affected by the cold moist winds blowing in from the North Sea. And the climb itself was an important development by virtue of the difficulties encountered and the commitment required to surmount them.

Of the seven Rimmon members on the Troll Wall expedition Rob Holt, Jeff Heath and Margaret Woodcock were there in support of the more experienced John Amatt, Tony Howard, Tony Nicholls and Bill Tweedale who planned to set off up the most natural line on the wall, straight up the centre with no possibility of escape other than up or back the way they had come.

This was a line Tony had previously reconnoitred. It captured their imagination and became their obsession. Their enthusiasm grew as they worked hard back in the UK to fund the expedition. The northern climbing scene had changed appreciably after the war. Climbing abroad was no longer the preserve of the Alpine Club or Oxbridge types. During the 1960s and 1970s many local club expeditions were launched to faraway places, the Oread of Derby went to the Lyngen Peninsula of Arctic Norway and to Kulu in the Indian Himalaya. The Nottingham Climbing Club went to the Tibesti Mountains of Chad and the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, and so on.

Now anyone with initiative could take advantage of the increased affluence and ease of travel, which became far cheaper too. It was no longer unusual for young climbers to work for eight months and then take the remainder of the year off climbing, hitchhiking out to the Alps, supplementing the tax rebate with casual work on building sites or, in the case of the Rimmon, on North Sea trawlers.

Ironically, after all those millennia left in the shadows since emerging from the last Ice Age, the Troll Wall saw the arrival of two separate groups in the same week, one from Norway and one from the north of England. The media had a field day and concocted the idea of ‘a race’ to be the first up the Wall.

What concerned Tony and his team when they heard of this ‘race’ was not they would be beaten to the top of the Wall but that they may not be first up ‘their’ route. They would not be the first to go where no-one had gone before, with all the intrinsic interest of discovery, the hidden cracks and ledges for belay and bivouac and the unravelling of the mysteries on this part of the mountain. That can only be experienced once, for once it is done and known there is no longer that compulsive curiosity that keeps a team on course through horrendous storms up exposed rock at great technical difficulty. Another Lancashire lad, Don Whillans, acknowledged that ‘there has always been competition in climbing, but for the route, not to be better than anyone else.’

This was borne out subsequently when the Norwegians and Brits both succeeded in putting up two parallel and independent routes to the mutual admiration of both teams and although the Norwegians, as it happened, completed their route first they received whole-hearted congratulations from Tony, John and Bill and the rest of the Rimmon team. It mattered not a jot that the Norwegians were first up the Wall. In fact, as far as the Rimmon team were concerned, it was fitting that the Norwegians topped out first. It was ‘their’ mountain.

In the course of time the ‘English Route’ was recognised as a classic climb and became ever more popular. The Norwegian Route was not repeated until 1997 and only two or three times since. The Trolls had the last laugh, however, when the central part of the English Route peeled off in a massive avalanche. It has not been climbed since.

In taking on the challenge of the Troll Wall, the Rimmon lads took a huge step into the unknown. This was quite beyond anything any of them had attempted before. Consequently, the outcome remained uncertain until the end, which is always the hallmark of a great adventure. Modern climbers will find it hard to imagine how it was back in the 1960s on a 1,200-metre route surmounting huge overhanging sections, lashed by rain and sleet, climbing without harnesses, waterproofs and bivouac equipment, without ‘portal edges’, belay and abseil devices, pulley systems, or the modern protection we now take for granted.

They didn’t take walkie-talkies so as not to ‘rob the climb of the essence of being there alone and committed’ and were therefore reliant upon their own judgement as to the weather, route finding and for each other’s physical and psychological well-being.

It’s true it wasn’t an alpine-style ascent. They had cut down the odds against failure a little. Fixed polypropylene rope was employed on the lower approach slabs. The team did have to retreat when their bivouac gear failed in a prolonged storm leaving gear and food at their high point for a later attempt. They also had a few bolts, but didn’t use them.

Tony Nicholls had led some of the hardest pitches on the first attempt and a done lot of sack hauling without a pulley. He was exhausted and with damaged hands decided he would only be a burden on the others so opted to stay down with the support party. The other three had to adjust to their depleted team and the sadness at leaving a good mate behind.

Nowadays, it is not always appreciated that pegging is vastly different to bolting. Climbing up an overhanging wall for the first time, even with 280 pegs and wedges was never a foregone conclusion. If, however, the climbers resort to bolting, then with perseverance there is no doubt progress can be made. Drilling, therefore, really does ‘murder the impossible.’ Pegging, on the other hand, depends on the configuration of the crack systems. Progress is governed by the geography of the mountain and the climber’s chances are restricted to using what features are available. Tony’s description of negotiating the final part of the Great Wall shows pegging is not without risk and uncertainty. Only by stretching his strength, resourcefulness, imagination and courage to the limit could it be climbed even on pegs. Would today’s climber armed with a battery operated drill have struggled so hard to avoid drilling? To have done so would have robbed the climb of its essence and diminished the great effort it was.

This section required great determination from all three of the team to hang throughout the night from their belays and etriers. Three days later, they reached the top of the Trollveggen to complete their odyssey. The climb opened up many possibilities for the Rimmon lads and for climbers everywhere, especially in Britain. The Troll Wall climb demonstrated what could follow from a ground-ing in British and Alpine rock and ice climbing. Local climbing clubs launched trips to the remote mountains of Alaska, Patagonia, Baffin Island and the Himalaya. Within ten years much harder, longer, steeper and higher routes were being established up in the Karakoram and Himalaya. By then climbers had the benefit of all the latest American climbing hardware and the software the Troll Climbing Equipment Company produced, the company started by Tony and two other members of the Rimmon Club, Paul Seddon and Alan Waterhouse. Perhaps the most important factor was the more rapid dissemination of information with climbers knowing far more, and more quickly, about other climbers’ achievements everywhere.

In 1967, John Amatt, with Rusty Baillie, armed with skyhooks, rurps and the complete range of American hard steel pegs as well as bongs, climbed the 1,650-metre North Wall of Semletind in alpine style. John went on to become an accomplished public speaker and motivational lecturer. He emigrated to Canada where he established the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Tony also continued, with other members of the Rimmon Club, to contribute, with a host of new climbs and the first walking and climbing guide to Romsdal. With Bill Tweedale, in 1967, he made the first ascent of Breitind’s 2,000-metre East Pillar, and the equally long Pillar of Semletind with Rob Holt and Wayne Gartside. Tony, Bill, Rob and Wayne also climbed the 1,800-metre South East Face of Kongen.

Working as designer at Troll, Tony developed the world’s first sit harness and later the Whillans harness. The lightweight version is, in the opinion of many, still the best mountain harness around. The day to day running of Troll was often largely left in the hands of Tony’s co-directors, such was the call of the wild.

Tony, with his partner Di Taylor, discovered one new climbing and trekking area after another, in Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Madagascar, Nagaland, Oman and, in particular, the Wadi Rum in Jordan. As a result of explorations there by Tony and his friends, and the guidebook Tony produced, Wadi Rum has become among the most popular desert climbing areas anywhere.

Dubbed with affection ‘Howard of Arabia’ by his friends, his title was confirmed when he brought out a walking guide to the hills of Palestine. It wasn’t a best-seller but a plucky effort in view of the troubles afflicting Palestine then and since. In all the places Tony climbed he showed enormous respect for the environment and the local people, never more so than in Norway all those years ago.

Doug Scott, Cumbria

January 2011

‘The Trolltind Wall is probably the highest sheer precipice in Europe, partly overhanging, and first mentioned in print in an article in the Alpine Journal about the highest mountain walls in the world. No one has ever tried the Trolltind wall – it looks too awful for ordinary climbers to aim at. There seem to be few places for resting on the wall and I have no hope that it is possible by normal mountaineering. However, as this is the most interesting and chief question among European climbers today, it is wholly worth a trial.’

Arne Randers Heen, Romsdal resident and the elder statesman of Norwegian mountaineering, in a letter to the author prior to the expedition.

PREFACE

IN MAY 2010 I WAS ASKED by Dave Durkan, who was gathering information on Norwegian climbing history for the Norwegian Alpine Club, if I had any unpublished articles on the Troll Wall and my other climbs in Norway in the 1960s. Searching through old files, my partner, Di Taylor, found the faded, typed foolscap draft for this book. Written immediately after the climb, it was put to one side as other projects took over. I became involved in a lecture tour, wrote a guidebook and began forming Troll Climbing Equipment to market the gear we had designed for our ascent.

Then I was invited to crew a yacht sailing from Majorca to England. Soon afterwards I joined lads from our climbing club on a trip to Iceland. Following two hard winter months on the Icelandic trawlers, two of us then worked our passage to Norway on a small Danish cargo boat. This came close to sinking when the steering broke in a Force Eleven just off the cliffs of the Norwegian coast, but we arrived in Romsdal in time for the New Year festivities, staying there until the following autumn, doing new climbs and living, for the most part, off our trawling money supplemented through the summer by guiding. By then two years had passed since writing this book, more adventures beckoned and it stayed on its shelf, mostly forgotten. Forty-five years later, half a lifetime, and thanks to Dave, I rediscovered the manuscript, written by my younger self. What I read took me back to another world, an altogether different climbing era, and what had been a great first ascent. It seemed to me to have all the freshness and enthusiasm of a youthful adventure. I hope you feel the same. To give our climb some context, necessary after almost half a century, I’ve added an introduction and expanded the start of the book to include some of my relevant adventures in the Arctic and Antarctic. I’ve also added a postscript. Otherwise, it’s as I wrote it, all those years ago.

The Troll Wall. At over 4,000 vertical feet, Europe's tallest rock face. Photo: Tony Howard

INTRODUCTION

AS ROBERT SERVICE, great bard of the Klondike said, ‘There are strange things done in the midnight sun.’ The 1965 ascent of the Troll Wall in Norway, Europe’s land of the midnight sun, by a bunch of unknown English lads was undoubtedly one of them. The Troll Wall was known as ‘The Vertical Mile’ and Europe’s biggest unclimbed north face. It was also said to be impossible.

Our ascent took place in a different epoch as far as climbing goes. Equipment in the early 1960s had only just begun to develop from that used by the Victorian pioneers. True, their heavy hemp ropes had been replaced by stronger and lighter nylon following the successful British Everest Expedition in 1953 – the year I started climbing. Nailed boots had also rapidly vanished from the scene in the mid 1950s, being replaced by Vibram rubber. New lightweight climbing footwear was just coming onto the market. But climbing – especially leading – was still a bold undertaking with little in the way of leader protection. There were no belay devices. You held the rope in your hands and around your waist. There were also no abseil devices. You wound the rope around your body and slid down it, which was uncomfortable and quite dangerous. There were no comfortable portaledges for spending the night on big walls, nor had the great variety of American hard steel pegs arrived in the UK. The only pegs we had were soft steel that bent or crumpled if they met any obstacles when hammered into cracks. Jumar rope ascenders were also unavailable in the UK. We had the European version, Heibeler Prusiks, which were awkward to use and had a reputation for popping off ropes when in use, so we only carried them for emergencies.

Perhaps most surprisingly, there were no harnesses. The rope was simply tied round the waist or fastened to a waist-cord by a screw carabiner, made, like most carabiners at that time, not from aluminium alloy, but out of heavy steel with a thumb-tearing tooth in its gate. A rack of steel carabiners was almost as much a handicap as a necessity but luckily alloy crabs were just coming onto the market. And while we had pegs, they were considered unethical in Britain. Though their use had long been acceptable in the Alps and Dolomites, there was almost no aid climbing in Britain until the 1960s, when climbers began to develop their aid-climbing skills on overhanging limestone cliffs in Derbyshire and the Yorkshire Dales. Such places were, in those days, beyond the abilities of free-climbers. Even then, pegs were generally taboo on other climbs and rarely used.

Back in the early 1950s, when I started climbing, the only leader protection was via rope slings, the knots of which were sometimes jammed in cracks. Or else the slings themselves were hung on spikes of rock, or threaded round chockstones, which were sometimes carried up by the leader and inserted in cracks. By the end of that decade, the great innovation was old engineering nuts in various sizes that were threaded onto slings for jamming in cracks.

Special ‘nuts’ manufactured by climbers and designed purely for climbing only started to appear in the early 1960s, along with the lightweight alloy carabiners. The myriad shapes, styles and sizes of alloy wedges or ‘nuts’ on wire hadn’t yet been dreamt of. Cams weren’t produced until the late 1970s. The only protection in the wet, off-width, overhanging Exit Cracks of the Troll Wall were heavy and bulky wooden wedges that we had cut from the birch trees down at our Base Camp and carried all the way up the climb. The maxim of the day was still the same as it ever was: ‘The leader never falls.’

Amongst these equipment pioneers were Alan Waterhouse, Paul Seddon and myself, all members of the Rimmon Mountaineering Club, one of the many new clubs that sprang up in and around the Peak District at this time, such as the Manchester Grit, the Black and Tans, the Nottingham CC and the Alpha. The Rimmon were particularly active on northern gritstone, working on a new British Mountaineering Council guidebook to the Chew Valley. In 1963, they put up fifty-two new climbs on the remote cliff of Ravenstones in one day. Dave Cook later wrote in his article True Grit for Mountain magazine: ‘There was a time in the late 1960s when it looked as if the ethos and traditions of gritstone were taking over everywhere. The big jamming fists, and the big jammed mouths of the Rock and Ice, the Alpha, the Black and Tans, the YMC and the Rimmon, proselytised by word and deed all over Britain brainwashing everyone else into an acceptance of inferiority.’

I was also doing a lot of aid climbing at the time, both on summer trips to the Dolomites and on Derbyshire’s recently discovered overhangs, soloing routes such as Big Plum, Avernus and most of the first pitch of Mecca, whilst waiting for my late-sleeping climbing partner to arrive. Bob Dearman hung just a few feet away shouting encouragement as he worked on the first ascent of The Prow. The skills developed on these routes were, I suppose, partly responsible for giving me the confidence to attempt the Troll Wall. Aid-climbing also gave me the motivation to design a broad waist belt, both for the added comfort but also as a means of carrying gear. With a sling to form a seat, held in place by the belt, it made hanging around under big roofs, carrying gear, falling off and abseiling much more comfortable. And as I was mostly unemployed at that time, I could also earn a few quid making them for Bob Brigham to sell in his Manchester shop.

After the Troll Wall climb, this harness arrangement was successfully marketed as the Mark 2, before it was superseded five years later. By then, Alan, Paul and myself were partner sin Troll Climbing Equipment. Working with Don Whillans, we came up with the design for the world’s first true sit-harness – The Whillans – manufactured for the 1970 British Annapurna South Face Expedition. Another nine years were to pass before the best features of the Mark 2 and The Whillans were combined to form the Mark 5, a system linking a waist belt and leg loops with a front belay loop. This rapidly became the norm for almost all climbing harnesses. Troll also pioneered sewn tape slings, another important innovation. But ignorance is bliss, and in 1965 we were more than happy with our Mark 2 belts and our knotted slings on the Troll Wall.

Outdoor clothing and equipment was similarly primitive in the 1960s compared with today’s sophisticated products. Lightweight fabrics used for waterproof clothing and the bivouac tents we designed for use on the Troll Wall were only marginally waterproof and definitely not breathable. Their failures led to our retreat from our first attempt at the climb. We were also acutely aware that rescue equipment was cumbersome and rudimentary. A rescue from high on the Troll Wall would have been a desperate, if not impossible, undertaking.

All these factors meant the wall was a huge challenge and a bold undertaking, far exceeding anything any of us had done previously. More experienced climbers than us advised us against attempting it, which was undoubtedly good advice. But we had the brash confidence of youth and it was waiting to be climbed. My maxim then as now was simple: ‘You never know until you go.’

The Norwegian and British press had a field day. We were the ‘The Magnificent Seven’, aiming ‘to beat the impossible north wall’, variously described as anything from 3,000 to 6,000 feet. When it turned out that a team of Norwegian climbers were already at the foot of the wall when we arrived, the press were ecstatic. Their reports on the so-called ‘race for the top’ through ‘fog hazard’ and a ‘blinding blizzard’ which ‘beat British team’s bid’ before we returned to ‘inch up wall’ then ‘vanish in mist’ until ‘an observer saw a red thing creeping over the summit’ were both unexpected and hilarious. Sometimes they were total fantasy. I have used extracts from some of these reports throughout the book.

The newspapers sensationalised the hazards and difficulties we encountered, bordering at times on the surreal. One reported how ‘from their bivouacs [the climbers] watched huge boulders drift away in the wind’ – a rather bizarre image. This tendency to exaggerate the experiences of climbers is commented on by Simon Thompson in his book Unjustifiable Risk? The Story of British Climbing, when he writes that a certain ‘Donald Robinson, who died in a climbing accident in 1910, observed that a truly honest account of a climbing day has yet to be written.’ Thompson goes on to say that that ‘there are only two approaches to writing about climbing: exaggeration and understatement.’ This story is neither, I hope. Understatement may be a peculiarly English trait and is certainly common among climbers, but in telling the story of this climb, I tried to tell an honest tale while it was still fresh in my mind. Accounts of other climbs in this book were also written immediately afterwards.

We named our climb the Rimmon Route, but it also became known internationally as the English Route. With all pegs left in place and more added by subsequent climbers, it became the most popular climb on the wall. John Middendorf and Aslak Aastorp described it as being ‘a masterpiece of route finding at the highest free and aid standards of the day.’ Even so, with its fabled invincibility gone, and as equipment and climbing standards improved, it was inevitably climbed free of aid as well as being soloed and climbed in winter.

Sadly, the Rimmon Route became an early victim of global warming when permafrost within the mountain melted, causing the centre of the face to fall away in a huge rockfall in 1998. The section of our climb from above the Great Wall up to and including the Narrow Slab was lost, along with pitches of other more recent routes on this part of the face.

Tony Howard, Greenfield, on the northern edge of the Peak District January 2011

PART ONE

A Very Norwegian Saga

ONE

Antarctic Adventures

‘The chief harpoonist, a Norwegian of massive build… recalled the frustration of the storms they had had at the start of the season. It was impossible to hunt in that sort of weather. You could never spot the whale spouts because of the spindrift, and anyway the bow dipped too violently to aim the harpoon gun. For long stretches they had to shelter in the lee of an iceberg; a week once went by without a “Blaast!” (“There she blows!”) He personally had bagged 323 whales this time and only two of them were blues. He was pretty sure they were disappearing.’

From The Observer on a voyage of the Southern Venturer in 1962

MY PERSONAL NORWEGIAN SAGA started in 1958, the year I left school, and it took me first not to Norway but to the Antarctic. Our headmaster at Oldham Hulme Grammar lined us up in the school hall at the end of our final term. ‘And where do you intend to continue your studies,’ he asked each boy as he walked down the row: ‘Oxford, Sir, reading History’; ‘Cambridge, Sir, reading Physics.’ Then it was my turn: ‘The Antarctic, Sir, going whaling.’ It felt wildly exciting, even anarchic. Who could resist?

My poor father wasn’t at all happy with my decision, but my uncle had a contact in the Norwegian whaling business and at my request had fixed me up as a mess boy on the Southern Venturer, a name to conjure up dreams of Antarctic exploration in a seventeen-year-old boy. ‘We should let him go,’ Mum said. ‘If we do, he’ll never settle down’, my father replied, prophetically as it turned out. The concept of a ‘gap year’ didn’t exist in the 1950s; for those that made the grade, university followed on from school and that’s how it was. Unluckily for Dad, it had been him that had encouraged my wanderlust with his books of adventure in the far corners of the British Empire. He had also introduced me to the hills, walking the moors of the northern Peak District with me in my pre-teens and a couple of times seeing climbers on cliffs like Laddow, a rare event even though Laddow was popular at the time.

After that I used to dream about climbing, playing around on boulders up the Chew Valley with my mates and one day at the age of thirteen, finding a guidebook below the cliffs of Alderman, the nearest thing we had to a mountain. Not being aware that guidebooks even existed, this discovery changed everything. I discovered that my home hills were full of recorded cliffs and climbs and that my friends and I had even done some of the easier routes without knowing. After this there was no going back. I never settled down to serious study, preferring the hills and crags to schoolwork. The chance of an Antarctic adventure was too much to resist.

Being born into a poor family, Dad never had the chance to go to university, and had to leave the same school that I went to, to earn a living, despite having good qualifications. Now here I was following in his footsteps but about to squander the opportunity he had valued so highly. But Mum won the day. She knew it was important to follow your dreams and, in October 1958, now aged eighteen, I boarded the Southern Venturer, bunking in a cabin with a lad of my age from Newcastle who had also signed on as a mess boy, and sailing to Norway to pick up most of the crew. Then we sailed south. Before long the ship’s doctor spotted my A-level credentials and asked if I would like to join him and his assistant in the ship’s hospital. This sounded better than serving food in the mess and washing pots, so I happily accepted.

You may wonder what on earth I was doing on a whaler. Had I no ethics? Didn’t I care about whales nearing extinction? I won’t make excuses, but it was, back then, a different world. No one thought the seas might be fished out within fifty years. No one thought whales were nearing extinction. The International Whaling Commission was in charge. They decided the permissible catch: how many sperm whales, how many fin, humpback and blue. Not only that but the ship’s captain wasn’t informed which species of whale could be hunted, and how long for, until the day before, so everything was okay – or so I thought. And yes, it was bloody and cruel, and on occasion the ocean ran red with blood, but for an eighteen-year-old lad fresh from school, it was life in the raw, the life of the hunter, of Moby Dick. But when Greenpeace began its campaign against whaling in 1975, I joined immediately. I had seen the slaughter.

When Greenpeace began its campaign against whaling in 1975, I joined immediately. I had seen the slaughter. Photo: Tony Howard