The gleeming skyscrapers were each adorned with the logos of the banks they housed. JP Morgan. HSBC. Barclays. And, in front of this capitalist backdrop, was another, somewhat juxtaposed, logo. That of Greenpeace.
It was from one of Greenpeace's three ships, the Arctic Sunrise. This is the ship that has throughout its 18 years of service been fighting to stop the environmentally destructive actions of companies financed by such banks as those whose buildings were towering over it in the West India dock of Canary Wharf.
But while the Arctic Sunrise could not compete with the physical scale of its surroundings for one sunny weekend in June, its sense of history, and the scale of its achievements, made the nearby banks look like little bugs compared to its astronomical magnitude. Anyone lucky enough to take a tour of this incredible ship while it stopped briefly in UK would have agreed.
Dave O'Carroll and Steve Baker from Greenpeace Waltham Forest were among those helping to explain some of the amazing stories of its past. Such as how it came to be a Greenpeace ship in the first place, when, in 1995, it was purchased from Norweigan sealers by way of a fake company set up to fool them into thinking it would only be used
for tourist excursions.
Greenpeace knew how good a ship Arctic Sunrise was since they already had a run-in with her during an anti-sealing mission, when the ship was called Polarbjorn. She is designed as an icebreaker and her rounded, keelless hull allows her to navigate through sea ice – but can also make her crew very sick in heavy seas! After the sneeky acquisition, she was renamed to Arctic Sunrise, and has been fighting to protect the ice caps and the oceans ever since.
In 1997 she became the first ship to circumnavigate James Ross Island in the Antarctic - a feat only possible becuase of a collapsed ice shelf - and last year she also helped document the record-breaking loss of sea ice in the Arctic. Then there have been the daring protests on oil rig platforms, the collisions with Japanese whaling ships and the run-ins with police in Edinburgh.
Walking around the ship, this history is there staring back at you everywhere you look. It's in the cabins that have been raided, on the decks that have been invaded and in the windows on the bridge that have been frozen up for weeks on end during various forays to the ends of the Earth.
Seeing Arctic Sunrise in the flesh is an unforgettable experience, but if you missed out, I urge you to bookmark this link. It shows the latest pictures taken by the webcams from each of Greenpeace's ships, and enables anyone to see for themselves exactly where in the world they are at any one time.
All three ships are on the frontline of the global resistance to corporate and governmental abuses against the planet, and long may they continue to be so.
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