Whale of a War off Iceland

A battle at sea on the eve of a summit to save the leviathans

In the choppy, chilly waters 100 miles west of the Icelandic coast, the black-hulled Hvalur-8 was chasing a pod of fin whales. The fins, second only in size (75 ft.) to the mammoth blues, are an endangered species fully protected everywhere else in the world, but the Icelanders are permitted to take a few hundred every year, most of which are shipped off to whale-eating Japan. Suddenly, as the whaler was about to zero in on its prey, a small, outboard-powered Zodiac inflatable materialized under the ship's towering bow.

The buzzing little boat and three sister craft were manned by members of an international conservation group called Greenpeace, which was founded a decade ago and has been protesting whaling operations throughout the world. Whenever a fin whale rose up from the depths to blow out air in a watery spray, the inflatable would run brazen interference for the giant mammal, interposing itself between the whaler and its quarry. With growing frustration, Captain Thordur Eythorsson, 36, stood by his ominous-looking harpoon gun atop the whaler's bow, unable to make his kill.

For 18 hours, the stalemate continued. Every time the whaler angled close enough to the fins for a shot, one of Greenpeace's four inflatables would dodge into its way. The contemporary Ahab was forced to hold his fire lest he hit the protesters. Finally, after two misses, the captain got off his shot when one fin surfaced directly in front of the catch boat. It was a painfully slow demise for the beast; to minimize the danger to the protesters, Eythorsson had removed the explosive cap from the harpoon. Cabled TIME Correspondent Erik Amfitheatrof of the grisly action: "The creature's struggle was unusually harrowing. Without the explosive, the fin lingered on until the captain fired a second 'cold' harpoon into it and then, at last, an explosive harpoon. It took 16 minutes to end the whale's agony."

As usual, the fin was pumped with air and towed to the Icelandic whaling station 30 miles from Reykjavik to be carved up. Back on shore, Greenpeace Leader David McTaggart, 47, a dedicated environmentalist who had sailed a ketch into France's South Pacific nuclear proving grounds in an effort to halt atomic testing, addressed his companions: "What we saw today was disgusting ... disgusting. The whale is a mammal. It makes love. It is warm-blooded. It has been here 40 million years longer than we have."

Soon the confrontation took a different turn. A few days later, the ship's operator, Whale Ltd., Iceland's only whaling company, went into the Icelandic courts to request an injunction that would restrain McTaggart and company from further interference with its four whalers. But Greenpeace was not ready to call it quits. Early one morning, the anti-whalers' mother ship, Rainbow Warrior* slipped out of Reykjavik in hopes of making it to the whaling grounds. Said McTaggart: "I think we've been so successful they will have to arrest us." Not quite. During the first attempt, an Icelandic gunboat simply signaled them back just a few miles beyond the harbor entrance. But when the Rainbow Warrior tried to sneak out again, both ship and protesters were detained. After McTaggart pledged to call off further interference, at least for the moment, the protesters' ship sailed out of Reykjavik at week's end.

The skirmishing off Iceland was only a warmup for next week's activities in London. At the plush Cafe Royal banquet hall, representatives of the 22 member nations of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will gather for their 31st annual conference since the protective body's founding in 1946. Disdained in past years as a private whalers' club that supports the estimated $650 million industry by setting excessively liberal whale-kill quotas (this year's total was 20,102), the IWC, under its youthful new chairman, Thordur Asgeirsson, 37, could do much this year to change its image.

On the agenda are three strong whaling-moratorium proposals that require a 75% majority for passage. The most dramatic idea comes from Australia, until last year a vigorous whaling country. It wants an indefinite ban on all whaling. The Carter Administration, backed only last week by Congress, has submitted a similar suggestion, with one loophole: Eskimos in Alaska would be allowed to maintain subsistence hunting of the endangered bowhead whale under strict quotas (last year's ceiling: 18 kills). If the conference fails to act on the U.S. proposal or a similar one, Congress may toss out a legislative harpoon of its own: a bill sponsored by Senators Warren Magnuson of Washington and Bob Packwood of Oregon would deny U.S. fishing rights within a 200-mile coastal limit to any countries that ignore IWC rulings. Such legislation would strongly bolster any moratorium passed by the IWC, which has no enforcement authority. Says U.S. Delegate Tom Garrett: "We're finally starting to put our money where our mouths are."

The third and most modest moratorium call has been submitted by the Seychelles, an archipelago 1,000 miles off Africa's eastern coast. The young nation wants a three-year ban on all sperm whaling. It is also asking for creation of a whaling sanctuary in the Indian Ocean, where all species would be protected. The suggestion, given the best chance of passing, would allow scientists to test what many marine biologists regard as shaky thinking behind the IWC's current quotas.

At present, the IWC takes a rough guess at the numbers of a species and, using little more than simple arithmetic, decides how many whales can be killed without endangering the population's survival. But many scientists argue that the calculations should take other factors into account. Some of these marine mammals are believed to be monogamous, and the slaughter of one whale may break up a family unit, with a drastic effect on breeding. Since certain species have the largest brains of any creatures, they may be intelligent enough to fear such sounds as ships' propellers, even at distances of hundreds of miles. This too could disturb their mating habits.

Even if none of the moratorium calls are approved, the whaling industry may soon be sunk by dwindling profits. Greenpeace has observed that the whaling ships of the U.S.S.R. are rusted and worn and that Japan's are only slightly better--a clear sign that the world's most rapacious whalers are hesitant to invest more money in a losing business where catches are ever smaller. Some species like the bowhead and right whales may now number no more than 3,000 and perhaps are headed irreversibly toward extinction. Thus as the meeting convenes in London, the question may really be: Of whalers or whales, which will die out first?

* The name traces to an old North American Indian legend that when the earth's animals have been hunted almost to extinction, a rainbow warrior will come down from the sky to protect them.

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