Michele Hewitson interview: Paul Watson

Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson says you don't get anywhere unless you've had a little bit of complicated life. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Goodness, Paul Watson, the founder and captain of Sea Shepherd, is a funny fish. I know I should have resisted (and I did try, for about a minute) but he'd probably take the fish part as a compliment, if he cared about compliments, and besides, it's true.

He is supposed to be an eco-terrorist, a pirate, a man who courts confrontation. Almost the first thing he said was: "I don't, you know, get fanatical about it."

He is supposed to be a strict vegan. As it turned out, he was happy to eat dairy and to have a glass of wine. I said I thought there were sometimes fish by-products in wine and that's when he said he wasn't fanatical about these things, which caused me to splutter: Isn't he fanatical about everything? "No, I don't think so."

Surely he's fanatical about stopping whaling? 'No. I'm enforcing existing laws against illegal activities."

I am certainly not going to get into the arguments for or against that statement, or any of his pronouncements on whales, the Japanese, or any of his myriad other causes, or enmities. He has some very rude things to say about Pete Bethune, whose ill-fated Earthrace was renamed the Ady Gill and scuttled at sea, contentiously.

All I'll say about their relationship now is that there isn't one. Isn't that a shame? "No. I don't like him." The rest is unrepeatable, not least because he wouldn't at all mind if I did repeat it. And as he would later tell me that he often says the reverse of what he thinks, "to send opposite messages" to the Japanese, I'm not sending any for him, just in case.

He was, in the 60s, a student of the theories of Marshall McLuhan and he still holds that "media is more important than the message. It conveys that you have to understand the mechanism in order to get your message across [and that is] what people call media manipulation." Which is one of his great talents. "I don't know if it's a talent, but I can do it." For that, then, you can go to his website.

I thought it might be fun to take a pirate out for a posh lunch. I doubt it was his, but his idea of fun is hardly anyone else's idea of a rip-roaring time. Asking him what he does for fun is a loopy question.

His whole life is fun. He likes waking up every day not knowing what will happen next. He likes being on the Southern Ocean in storms and the freezing cold. He likes giving people - bureaucrats, whalers, politicians - hell. He doesn't take holidays because he doesn't "believe" in them.

He does like women, or rather, to strictly reflect his attitude to women: they like him. I thought he must like being married because he's had three wives but, no, he doesn't much. He says his wives always try to change him and he never wanted to get married, he just went along with it because he was too busy to argue. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

He says, by the way, that he never cheats on women; he waits until he's left one before he starts a new relationship. And he's not horrible to his partners. I asked. "God no. I'm never horrible to anybody. My problem, and you can ask any of my friends, is that I'm too nice to everybody. I'm too nice to the girls. I really am."

Then what happens? "It's a little more complicated, but one of the things [is] my father's treatment of my mother so I'm very, very intolerant of domestic abuse." He doesn't count moving on as being horrible. "I'm always honest with them."

He is oldest of seven children. His father who was "a real bastard" vanished for two years then returned to reclaim his family after Watson's mother died, giving birth to a child with her new partner. When Watson was 15, his father slugged him, not for the first time, and he slugged him back and that was the end of family life.

He left home to begin his life as an adventurer, eventually joining the Canadian coast guard. He said, about his childhood, that "I think that's the same reason Colin Powell became one the leading generals ... He had a troubled upbringing. You don't get anywhere unless you've had a little bit of a complicated life."

He hates any confrontation involving human emotions, but he'll argue about anything else under the sun - although in an oddly dispassionate way. He says he doesn't get upset about whales or anything else being killed because he has to be "very detached about those things. Because I have to deal with it on a strategic and tactical level."

He said: "I don't really get involved in human issues that much." He's not interested in politics (he says he's neither "a leftist or a rightist") or religion or what anyone thinks of him, except his 31-year-old daughter, Lani, the result of his first marriage. He is now friends with Lani's mother which rather amazed me because he says: "I didn't see why I should sacrifice my beliefs just because she got pregnant."

His second wife, Lisa Roberts, a former Playboy model, was driven mad by him, he says, because she was half-Sicilian and half- Creole and "has a temper like you wouldn't believe and I don't fight and it would exasperate her beyond belief". (That "I don't fight" is funny, given his reputation for piracy, eco-terrorism and his contentious methods for stopping whaling but there's no use pointing this out. He just repeats his lines about how nobody has ever been injured on any of his campaigns.)

I still don't understand why he keeps getting married and then getting unmarried (at 60, he hopes he won't do it again but he can't rule it out, and I certainly wouldn't.) That he does makes him sound pliable, if not passive, which is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect him to be like.

The problem, he says, is that women "pursue" him and he thinks real love would only come from him doing the chasing. None of this is exactly complimentary to his three wives, but he appears either unaware or unconcerned about this. Oh, really, why doesn't he just stop having these relationships when he's obviously useless at maintaining them? He looked amazed. "I'm a man! Of course I'm going to have women. I'm not gay!"

You can see why he might drive you mad. If he is able to be detached about whales, which he cares about more than humans, what must he be like to live with? That's part of the problem, of course. He has an apartment at Friday Harbour, Washington, but that's mostly so he has a place to keep his books. He rents; because he doesn't understand the idea of owning property.

You couldn't argue with him about taking the rubbish out because he's only home about two weeks a year. We managed to have a ridiculous argument about a "friendly" tiger shark called Emma. I said you couldn't give a shark a name and you certainly couldn't call it friendly.

He said you certainly could and that he and his crew have been in the water with Emma, "petting her". He then gave me a lesson on how sharks are not, as I said "vicious" and how playing golf and "soda pop machines" falling on people kill more people every year than sharks. You still can't say a shark is friendly. "I can. It's friendly to me." I said it was a shame he couldn't find a nice whale to marry, which I thought was a bit funny. He didn't; he completely ignored it.

Anyway, he says he is actually is a great romantic - which might be part of the problem - and writes "historical romantic poetry". Are they any good? "Well, Leonard Cohen said they were." Really? What did he say? "He said they were good."

HE was in Auckland to attend a fundraiser screening of a feature-length documentary: Eco-Pirate: the Story of Paul Watson (in cinemas now.) You couldn't say he was here to promote it, particularly; he promotes Sea Shepherd, and, according to me but denied by him, Paul Watson.

He is held up to be some sort of eco-guru by certain sectors of the conservation movement. There were, I was told, squeals of excitement at the screening from young women when they saw him, but you can't, I suppose, hold him responsible for any of that. (Girls, do not marry him!) I imagine public adoration and public opprobrium are pretty much the same to him: It's all publicity, and he responds to almost every situation in the same cool way.

You could hook him up to a heart monitor during the most dangerous game of chase-the-Japanese whalers and his pulse rate wouldn't rise. He never feels fear. He doesn't understand fear.

"No, it doesn't make any sense to me." He has no fear of old age and decrepitude because he won't be old and decrepit. He knows this because his father's father died at 89 and was working on his potato farm until the day he died. And his mother's father worked until the day he died, at 93. "And he was murdered ... and he had enough strength to pull the knife out and stab him [the robber] back." That sounded like myth to me.

"No. My grandfather carried me around on his shoulders at 85." I do believe this actually; he would come from a line of long-lived, leathery macho types. This might be why another thing he really doesn't understand is self-doubt. When I asked, he said, "well, what do you mean by self-doubt?", which answered that one. He was completely baffled when I told him, in response to him telling me that he really doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, that most people do. "Why?", he said and so that was that answered too.

He's more likely to care what whales think of him because he really does believe they're more intelligent than people. But based on what? "Well, I was arguing with a Norwegian whaler one time and he said, 'Watson, you think whales are more intelligent than people.

That's a stupid thing to say.' I said, 'well, I measure intelligence by the ability to live in harmony with the natural world and by that criteria, whales are far more intelligent than we are.' He said, 'well, by that criteria, cockroaches are more intelligent than we are.'

And I said, 'George, you're beginning to understand what I'm trying to tell you.' It wasn't until much later that I understood that he'd just compared me with a cockroach! But it was so casually and cleverly done that I did have to admire him for it."

And I do admire him. He's brave, probably a bit mad, and certainly interesting, but he's a difficult man to like. He's too smug, too right all the time, too detached. Not that he cares what I, or anyone else thinks. As long as the whales like him, that's what really matters, surely?