The 24-meter fishing vessel *Phyllis Cormack* stank of diesel and fish. Its hull was painted green. A motley crew of twelve ecologists, journalists, and sailors crowded aboard as it slipped from its Vancouver mooring on the morning of September 15. Their mission was to sail the *Phyllis Cormack*, which they had renamed *Greenpeace* for the journey, into the U.S. nuclear test zone at Amchitka Island, Alaska. They aimed to halt the five-megaton Cannikin bomb test through sheer physical presence. The boat was slow, leaky, and profoundly unseaworthy for the North Pacific’s autumn storms.
The voyage was conceived by the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, a small Vancouver-based group. Their tactic was non-violent witness, borrowed from Quaker peace activism and the civil rights movement. They believed a bomb that could trigger earthquakes and tsunamis should not be detonated in a fragile seismic zone. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter *Confidence* intercepted them before they reached the test site. Forced to turn back, the crew heard the detonation’s seismic rumble over their radio on November 6. They returned to port feeling like failures.
They had not failed. The voyage generated massive media coverage, framing nuclear testing as an environmental issue. It forged an identity: direct action, media savvy, and a blend of ecological and pacifist ideals. The Don’t Make a Wave Committee formally adopted the name Greenpeace. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, citing the public outcry Greenpeace helped amplify, canceled the Amchitka test program. The leaky boat’s journey established a template. Greenpeace would later send ships to confront whalers in the Pacific and seal hunters in the North Atlantic, turning each confrontation into a global story. The organization became a multinational entity, but its founding act was a quixotic, underfunded, and very damp protest voyage on a borrowed boat.