The seaman Jon Castle, who has died of cancer aged 67, led many of Greenpeace’s most dramatic marine campaigns, including the occupation of the Brent Spar oil platform and the opposition to nuclear testing.
After 25 years with Greenpeace he turned his skills to wider humanitarian causes, including rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean and sailing to the Chagos Islands in protest at the British refusal to allow people to return to their homeland following their eviction to allow the US to build a military base. He always acted, he said, not just out of a love of nature but for right against wrong.
Jon was brought up at Cobo Bay in Guernsey, the son of Robert Castle, who taught English, and his wife, Mary (nee Bussey), who ran a nursery school at home. He went to the Castel primary school, then won a scholarship to Elizabeth college in St Peter Port. Preferring a life at sea to public school, he left as soon as possible to join the merchant navy college in Southampton. After graduating, he worked for several years as a second and then first mate on cargo ships.
In 1978, while volunteering for charities in London, Jon was in touch with the founders of the nascent Greenpeace UK. The Sir William Hardy, a fisheries research vessel moored in West India dock, took on a new lease of life as the Rainbow Warrior, and Jon helped repaint it.
Jon sailed as first mate on the second Greenpeace UK campaign, confronting Icelandic whalers, and became a Greenpeace captain in 1980. A quietly spoken man, he commanded extraordinary loyalty and trust in his crews. Although the first choice to lead the group’s dangerous maritime actions, he saw himself as an ordinary seaman.
He was captain of the Rainbow Warrior when it was seized in 1980 by the Spanish navy for opposing whaling. It was towed into El Ferrol military base, where its engines were disabled and Jon and his crew were trapped for five months. But the engineer made detailed drawings of the missing parts and two men were sent to London to have them made up. They smuggled the parts aboard by acting drunk and shoving the bits down their trousers, and the next night Jon slipped the Rainbow Warrior out of the base from under the nose of the Spanish navy.
In 1981 he had married Caroline Jacobs, and they had a son, Morgan, and a daughter, Eowyn. The couple divorced in 1988 but remained friends.
As Greenpeace grew, Castle led maritime actions against British and French nuclear plants, illegal dumping, whaling, overfishing and logging. In 1985 he evacuated islanders from Rongelap, one of the Marshall Islands contaminated by radioactive fallout from US nuclear tests.
In 1995 he headed to the Pacific atoll of Moruroa, where France planned six nuclear tests. He was prepared, without HQ permission, to scuttle the Rainbow Warrior at the mouth of the atoll to prevent the tests taking place. But, certain that French commandos would try to stop them, he devised a way to thwart them.
He had a cable run from the bridge to the crows’ nest, from where he could control the ship’s engine and steering. The access ladder was cut, the mast greased, then Jon went above. When the commandos boarded as expected, they locked the wheelhouse and rounded up the crew. But it took them 12 hours to twig why the empty ship kept heading towards Moruroa.
In 1996 the group challenged Shell’s plans to sink the Brent Spar, a giant North Sea oil storage platform. Castle and others objected to the message it gave that the seas could become an industrial dustbin. After four climbers boarded the platform, he took command of the Spar and, with 20-odd protesters and journalists, camped out for three weeks.
When Shell secured permission to evict them, Castle had himself welded behind a bulkhead and was the last man to leave. Greenpeace had made a genuine mistake in calculating how much oil was aboard the Spar, and this was leapt on by the British government. But Shell had lost the war of public opinion and gave up its plan to sink the vessel, forcing all oil companies to rethink how they disposed of their rigs.
But by then Greenpeace was a large operation racked by internal conflict. Castle increasingly thought it had betrayed its ideals and become over-concerned with money and image; by the late 1990s, he was deeply disillusioned and was distancing himself from the organisation.
In later years he worked with the Isle of Scilly steamship company and lived for a time on the Snow Goose, a small yacht he was restoring in Penzance harbour. In 2008 he and the ex-Greenpeace skipper Peter Bouquet travelled from Malaysia to the Chagos Islands to protest at their use by the US military and at the eviction of the islanders. They were arrested and charged with entering the waters illegally, given suspended prison sentences and deported.
In 2016 he volunteered for the German Seawatch organisation, rescuing refugees from the Mediterranean. As a seaman he felt strongly that he should rescue anyone in trouble. A Quaker since 2007, Castle was motivated by the movement’s ideal that you should bear witness to a crime, even if you cannot stop it happening. It was important, he said, that the perpetrators knew they were being watched.
With the Snow Goose nearly finished, he was planning to sail it back to Guernsey when the cancer returned.
He is survived by his children and two grandchildren.
- Jonathan Graham Castle, seaman and activist, born 7 December 1950; died 11 January 2018
- This article was amended on 23 February 2018. It originally said that Jon Castle was not a Quaker, but in fact he joined the movement in 2007. It was further amended on 9 March 2018. Mention of Jon Castle and David McTaggart choosing the ship that became the Rainbow Warrior has been deleted.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/30/jon-castle-obituary
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