The Monk Seal Conspiracy

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5. Searching for the Seal

By early February, 1979, we had opened the operations centre of Greenpeace Aegean Sea in the village of Kokkari. It had been a sad and difficult decision to leave Ayios, but in Kokkari we had found a spacious five-roomed house for rent overlooking the sea, which, by a strange quirk of fate, had once been the local police station. It would now become an office and information centre for Greeks and foreign visitors, and also provide living quarters for ourselves and project volunteers.

Out of season, the village reverted to its native calmness. Known as the Seashell, its houses are clustered together over two small and almost identical rocky capes, called the Twin Brothers. The architecture is classical, the houses tall and top-heavy, their upper storeys jutting out over the ones below, their balconies overflowing with flowering plants – magenta bougainvillea, blue morning glory, honeysuckle and jasmine. From the heights of the village, the faded red tiles of the roofs collectively seemed to undulate. Not far from our own house, along a narrow stone street crossing a stream with a humpbacked bridge, was a platea enclosed by four small tavernas and a barber’s shop. At the sea’s edge, the platea forms a mooring stage, and we would often watch the fishermen rowing out to their nets in the fledgling light of dawn.

At sunrise, the shores of Turkey would become definitive, snaking across the eastern horizon as a flush of magenta suffused the early blueness. A silent, searing globe, the sun peers from behind the Anatolian mountains of Asia, and then begins to come across the dark waters, a serpentine fire-glow. Clouds of mist would sometimes encircle the mountain summits or shroud the islets of a distant shore. Broad bands of sable cloud would cling to the horizon, soon to break apart and be scattered into the sky, turning ebony and then crimson before changing with the rising colours of the sun.

Back at Greenpeace Aegean Sea, our action plan for the seals was still in its infancy, and for a whole month our work consisted of little else than writing letters and making phone calls. International support and active commitments were essential to give the project credibility, and stable enough foundations for it to survive any further harassment by YPEA.

By 12 March, we had initiated the first active phase of the campaign. Led by a postgraduate team leader, six zoology students from Athens University arrived on Samos to conduct surveys on the distribution of the monk seal around the island’s coasts. We were still relying on data from 1977, and fresh surveys were essential to locate surviving colonies and whelping sites, which could then be proposed for immediate protection.

In the meantime, the first traces of spring had arrived on the island. The sky was a profound and resplendent blue with dark clouds clinging to the mountain summits. The first wild trees had begun to blossom and fresh green leaves and tendrils were beginning to appear, impetuous to reach light. On the hillsides there were the vivid flowering clusters of the Judas tree. It bears the legend that the betrayer of Christ, confronted by the magnitude of his crime, hanged himself from the branches of this innocent tree, and the then pale flowers blushed pink with shame.

By car, bus, taxi and fisherman’s caique we then set off around the island in search of seals. We had not yet realized just how shy and elusive the monk seal had become, and even the local fishermen sometimes had to smirk at our naively. Often they would say, cryptically, ‘The seals can see us even when we can’t see them.’ But I was irrevocably against more invasive research, even though the fishermen often invited us to sail with them to the nearest seal caves where we would probably have found the animals sleeping during their traditional afternoon siesta. Sometimes the fishermen would catch sight of the seals approaching their nets, but more often than not, the only trace of the creature’s presence would be the unique triangular pattern of holes it made when tearing into the nets with its teeth and flippers. We were often told of the seal’s mischievousness and impudence, its cunning and ingenuity. The animals would wait patiently for the fishermen to lay out their nets at dusk, wait until the boats set off back to port, and wait yet again for the nets to fill with fish before they approached, as stealthy as burglars, to steal their food. But by the end of our search, the monk seal seemed to be as ethereal as a will-o’-the-wisp, as legendary and mythical as the abominable snowman or the Loch Ness monster.

Traditional fishermen near Kokkari, Samos.

Down on the south-east coast we visited the small fishing communities of Posidonion and Psili Amos, scarcely more than a kilometre from the steep and forested slopes of Anatolia. Every fisherman we spoke with was hostile to the five or six seals which eked out a furtive existence along the coast’s flat-bed rocks and sable, sandy beaches. They were occasionally observed feeding or sunning themselves on a deserted shore, but quickly disappeared at the sound of an approaching boat. The habitation was also seasonal, with seals arriving in spring and departing in autumn. We knew that the animals would often swim 50 kilometres in search of food or to reach other colonies for breeding, and they had also been known to travel more than 600 kilometres along the Mediterranean’s coasts. I wondered where the Posidonion seals migrated to, and whether they innocently crossed the narrow straits to visit their friends in Turkish colonies, caring not one jot for the political hostility between the two countries.

The wounds of this historical antagonism are still deep and sore. Ancient suspicions die hard, and it is doubtful that Greeks will ever forget the tyranny which the Turks waged for centuries on their blood-stained soil. Here, at the narrow straits of Mykalis, many a cruel battle was fought until Samos gained its independence by expelling the occupying troops of the Sultan. Only in 1913 had Samos voted for a union with Greece, shedding the last vestiges of its dealings with a powerful and coercive neighbour.

In the middle of these blue straits can be seen a tiny island flying the red Turkish flag with star and crescent moon. To the south, the first of the Dodecanese loom: Agathonissi, Patmos, Kalimnos and Kos, where Hippocrates established his school of medicine and observed rows of seals languid on the hot sandy beaches far below.

Yet the tranquillity of this seashore is belied by a smouldering tension between these island outposts of Greece and the Turkish mainland. Although these coasts are supposed to be demilitarized under joint treaty, they are clearly armed to the teeth. An all-out war nearly erupted when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, though thankfully Turkish aggression precipitated the fall of the Greek Junta instead. But as we saw, living on Samos, tensions could flare at a moment’s notice. Recently, sparring between the two NATO allies had become distinctly ominous, with Turkey apparently determined to snatch territorial rights in the eastern Aegean. The government in Ankara would threaten to extend unilaterally its territorial waters, virtually enveloping the string of Greek islands from Lesbos to Rhodes. Determined to claim its share of the oil- and mineral-rich continental shelf, it had recently announced its intention to send one of its research vessels to conduct seismic surveys of the seabed, and the Greeks had threatened to sink the ship if it entered disputed waters. Over the following months there would be numerous border incidents: a Turkish submarine sighted near the island of Samothraki, Turkish fighters violating Greek airspace, Turkish ground-to-air missiles falling on a Greek cruise ship during a military exercise, sporadic exchanges of cannon-fire between artillery batteries on Samos and trespassing Turkish warships.

Sometimes, Phantom jets would come screaming over the coast, so perilously low over the villages that the windows of the houses would rattle violently and dust and plaster would fall from the walls and ceilings. To the stranger, Samos could sometimes seem like an island under military occupation, although the tourist centres usually remained free of khaki uniforms during the height of the season. But venturing out of the seaside resorts, holiday-makers might be startled to find many of the island’s ancient monasteries taken over by the army as observation posts. They could also come across army camps, convoys of tanks and camouflaged military trucks full of conscripts. And like us, they might even find their way down to the broad minefields on the south-east coast near Psili Amos. There are rusty signs of warning here and there, but only the word MINES written in Greek and English, and we heard of a farmer who had recently been killed when he inadvertently wandered into them, searching for his stray goats. The minefields are said to reach down to the long and deserted beaches stretching further east, which led us to believe that the seals would also be in danger if they scrambled up onto the sands to sun themselves.

Towards the west, there is the picturesque village of Pythagorion, the ancient capital of the island and the birthplace of Pythagoras, the visionary philosopher and mathematician. White houses with red-tiled roofs are clustered over the hillside and in May, mimosa, honeysuckle and jasmine begin to blossom along its little streets, their mesmerizing fragrance permeating the air.

Once an important gateway of maritime trade between East and West, Pythagorion is now a thriving tourist resort whose ancient harbour attracts the sleek and graceful yachts of the jet-set. The island is drier here in the south, but the hillsides above the town are still green in spring. As the rains cease, they become smothered in aromatic herbs.

The few fishermen here who have not turned their caiques into taxis, ferrying tourists to some of the more lonely sandy beaches, told us of three or four seals inhabiting caves with underwater entrances six kilometres to the east. All spoke of the seals loafing on flat rocks and of having seen several grey-black pups. One fisherman mentioned how he had observed the seals greeting each other by touching noses, a behaviour typical of most seal | species.

They also told us how the seals scrambled ashore, using the claws and webbed toes of their flippers. If disturbed they would bounce down the beach again in the typically ungainly manner of seals when on dry land. Pregnancy in the monk seal lasts 11 months, so that breeding takes place only once every other year, at which time a single pup is born. None of the fishermen had ever witnessed the birth of a seal, which now almost invariably takes place in the most inaccessible caves between May and November. At birth, the pups are about one metre in length and weigh around 20 kilos. After moulting their soft and fluffy fur, the pelt will become short and bristly. Their whiskers will turn light gold or brown, smooth and incredibly sensitive, able to detect vibrations through the water caused by fish movements and so help the seal when hunting, especially at night. Echo location or biological sonar is also said to enable the seals to hunt in complete darkness, although their abilities in this respect are certainly less sophisticated than those of dolphins.

The lengthy four-month weaning period poses one of the greatest threats to the monk seal, since mother and pup are most vulnerable during this time. Some pups may now be literally starving to death because their mothers are unable to find sufficient food in the sea’s exhausted fishing grounds.

Over in Turkey, Professor B. Mursaloglu of Ankara University was leading one of the most comprehensive behavioural studies on the species ever conducted. In a secluded cave on the Anatolian coast not far from Samos, her small research team was able to observe the life of a monk seal family – a mother seal, her newborn pup and an elderly female. Following the birth of her pup, the mother remained in the cave for several days, but in the second week she ventured out twice a day in search of food to nourish herself. Even so, as the nursing pup grew strong and healthy, the mother became distinctly leaner, so that after the four-month lactation period they were almost the same size. The pup stayed within the cave from the day of his birth to the end of his weaning, learning to swim only in the confines of the grotto after the first month. On stormy days, all three seals used to crowd into the highest part of the cave, strictly avoiding the water. On one occasion, breaking storm waves began to sweep the pup towards the mouth of the cave and only a rocky barrier prevented him from being swept out to sea. Professor Mursaloglu also described a touching and rarely observed display of mother-pup affection. If the pup was not sleeping when his mother began to leave the cave, he would rush over to her, pressing his cheek and body against hers. He would also cover her fore-flipper with his body to hinder her from going out. At this, the mother would gently push her pup’s head away, using her nose and flipper, and only then was she able to leave the cave.

Seal pups will remain with their mothers for three years and will perhaps breed by the time they are four. They may live up to thirty years. A fully grown female will be almost three metres in length and weigh more than 300 kilos. Their fur is usually dark brown with slight yellow tips to the hairs. The adult males are larger and weigh up to 400 kilos. Their colour varies from black to dark brown with slight yellowish patches on the lower belly.

Further west, towards the small fishing village of Ormos Marathokampos, we were told of ten or more seals inhabiting a deserted coastline of pebble beaches, flat rocks and caves. But the population decreased in winter and rose again in spring, j indicating a seasonal migration, perhaps from the Fourni islands in the west. Again, the seals were ash-grey and chestnut and pups were seen quite often. But there was a bitter resentment and hostility towards the animals. Two seals had only recently drowned in nets and, to most of the fishermen, they had simply received their just deserts. They complained of persistent net damage which deprived them of up to three months’ fishing a year, and threatened repeatedly to put an end to the ‘ seal scourge’.

In the north-west of Samos, beyond the large town of Karlovassi, there lies Seitani, several kilometres of uninhabited coastline endowed by Nature with a stunning and sensuous beauty. Even its name, Satan, derived from ancient, animistic superstitions, reflects its wild, spiritual power, its pristine mountains, forests and coves, its strange rock formations jutting out to sea like petrified prehistoric monsters, its cliffs riddled with caves. There is the yawning ravine of Megalo Seitani or Great Satan, with its raging spring and winter torrent. Here, if you stand on Megalo Seitani’s broad sandy beach, you seem dwarfed into insignificance by the immense gorge, its rock face dripping with giant stalactites. Higher up, there are the rugged slopes of Mount Kerkis, its bare peak piercing the sky at over 1,400 metres. Down below, the lower slopes of Seitani become gentle, feminine and undulating, covered with pine, juniper and tamarisk, carob and gnarled and ancient olive trees gone wild. At Mikro Seitani, or Little Satan, the sea has carved out numerous caves, many with underwater entrances which then open up into limestone palaces with crystalline, icicle-like stalactites, fresh water springs and sandy beaches. Sometimes, as the sea is sucked into the caves, the air is driven out through the pores of the rocks above or through small, whale-like blow-holes. It is an uncanny experience to sit perched on the rocks and hear them breathe and sigh with the heartbeat rhythm of the sea, a deep, almost supernatural breath. No wonder then that Seitani has always been steeped in mystery. Even the name of the nearest settlement, Drakei or the Dragon, seems to reflect an ancient awe of Seitani’s innate power.

A general view of the Seitani area in 1979, before developers moved into this ‘Strictly Protected’ area.

According to some of the older fishermen, twenty or thirty years ago Seitani had been the home of numerous seals, and in pairs or families they had even been seen swimming into Karlovassi’s busy harbour, curious and unafraid.

Indeed, the seals may have lived here for thousands of years. The monk seal, after all, is the oldest living seal in the world and has existed for more than 15 million years, long preceding homo sapiens on this Earth. It is thought by some theorists of evolution that there was a common ancestor for all of the 32 different species of seal and their three families, the phocids such as the monk seal, the otariids whose members include fur seals and sea lions, and the odobenids composed of the world’s two species of walrus. These theorists propose that all of these seals evolved from the same stem as dogs and bears some 40 million years ago in the Arctic basin and gradually migrated across the world, becoming distinct families and species. But another theory proposes that the three families of seal evolved separately and that the phocids developed not from a bear-like ancestor but from the otters which inhabited Lake Baikal in Siberia. Only then did the phocids migrate towards the west. In any event, both theories seem to explain why the Mediterranean seal has tropical cousins, the Hawaiian and Caribbean monk seals. The fate of the latter is a chilling illustration of what may befall the Mediterranean monk seal. Observing these ‘sea wolves’ on the coast of Santo Domingo in 1494, and making yet another of his belated ‘discoveries’, Columbus promptly ordered his crew to kill eight of the animals for food, paving the way for a relentless exploitation of the species by the European immigrants who came in his wake. The slaughter continued up until the 20th century, with hunters killing as many as a hundred seals every night, and the last surviving colony of zoo animals was massacred by fishermen in 1911. The last individual was sighted off Cuba in 1949, and by the early 1950s the species had officially been pronounced extinct. The Hawaiian monk seal has fared little better than its Caribbean cousin, its population having declined by 50 per cent in the last twenty years, leaving no more than 700 individuals to inhabit the coral-sanded atolls of the Leeward chain.

Here at Seitani, the stretch of coastline with its pitted rock face had been known as ‘Seal Caves’ for untold centuries. No more than eight fishermen in four or five small caiques were working the Seitani fishing grounds. As we spoke to them in the harbour, mending their nets, or in a local taverna over a glass of retsina or ouzo, it became evident that no more than six seals were now living at Seitani, though there were probably seasonal fluctuations with seals migrating to and fro along the coast. This seemed to explain why several of the fishermen spoke of up to ten seals inhabiting the area during the summer. For some seals, Seitani was perhaps a staging point on a migration to and from the Fourni islands in the west on their way towards Turkey. These migrants apparently arrived in spring, perhaps visiting the Seitani seals for breeding, and then disappeared again in the late autumn. The last pups the fishermen had seen had been in 1977, two or three individuals who had kept close to their mothers, sometimes playing around the entrance of the large grotto known simply as ‘Seal Cave’. It was therefore conceivable that more pups would be born towards the end of the year. They had also observed various colours of seals, from black to ash-grey and chestnut, indicating perhaps both young and adult seals of both sexes. They were often heard ‘barking’ at night and occasionally, in the sun, were even seen loafing on Megalo Seitani beach. Compared to other fishermen around the island these seemed remarkably friendly towards the seals. Indeed, it was most unusual to hear several of the fishermen defending the animals, and telling us that their relationship was one of mutual benefit since the minor net damage they suffered was more than offset by the seals helping to chase shoals of fish towards them when they were feeding.

From the small settlement of Potami, just on the outskirts of Karlovassi, renowned for its radioactive hot springs and its 14th-century church of the Transfiguration of Christ, there was only a difficult and meandering pathway to Megalo Seitani, an exhausting walk of over an hour in the hot summer sun. But even so, there were undeniable threats to the survival of the Seitani seals, especially from tourists arriving by speedboat. In autumn, there was also the hunting season which has often been used as a cover for the illegal killing of seals. We had found several spent cartridges at Megalo Seitani which seemed to confirm that the seals might be in danger. Further east, there was also the risk of pollution from Karlovassi’s few surviving tanneries, which still drained concentrated sulphuric acid, blood and hair into the sea. A year earlier, an unfortunate British tourist who went for a morning dip at the stony beach of the town swam directly into the outflow of acid. He suffered severe burns to his skin and eyes, all his hair fell out, and he had to be rushed to Athens by helicopter.

From what we could gather from other surveys along the north coast, the seals did indeed migrate further east, but how far they travelled was anyone’s guess. Yet the more we learnt about seal migration, the more we realized how crucial a network of sanctuaries would be to save the species. Over the following months, we were able to trace the seals as far as Kotsikas and Nissi on the whale’s tail of the island. We drove over the vivid, rust-red dust track towards the monastery of Kotsikas. The green hillsides were ablaze with golden broom or sparta as it is known in Greece. The ancient monastery was engulfed by trees and wild flowers, overlooking the sea and several tiny islets. The few soldiers there greeted us warmly and insisted that we drink retsina with them. They were bored stiff with looking out across the sea to the enemy coasts of Turkey. Conscript friends of theirs, they said, serving their time in the south, used to take a boat and row out towards Anatolia. Halfway across the narrow straits they would meet Turkish soldiers, buy hashish, have a smoke together and talk in very broken English.

Day after day they take turns in looking through an old telescope to the misty Anatolian shores. ‘It’s my career!’ one of them told us sardonically. ‘All I have to do is look through the telescope and if I see a warship I telephone the big men and say, "They’re coming! They’re coming!" and then we all run away.’ And he laughed, an ambiguous light in his eyes, a laugh that was brittle and mirthless at the corners of his lips. He resented being kept here by coercion and blackmail. He wanted to go home, back to Attica to his family and the girl he was planning to marry, and forget all about the army, forget about the island which he had begun to detest because of his imprisonment and exile here. But had the soldiers seen any seals? They laughed and said yes, once or twice, swimming around the little islets below. Picking up his gun and pointing it down to the sea, one of them declared, as the others broke into uproarious laughter, ‘And if we get the chance, bang! bang! bang! they’re dead.’

Later on in March, it became obvious that we were under almost constant surveillance. Yet again, the affair was characterized by its utter absurdity. Whenever we ventured out of the house, one or both of the two spies in question would begin tailing us, in such an indiscreet and obvious manner that it eventually became quite tiresome and embarrassing. Perhaps they harboured pretensions of being international secret agents, but as the novelty began to wear off, it was almost like being followed about by stray dogs wherever we went. They never made any gesture of recognition, even though we would see them several times a day. In the evenings, if we went out to a taverna for dinner or to a caféneon for a drink, these spies would inevitably sit down next to us with newspapers and listen to our conversations. And yet their English was evidently so poor that they were even obliged to lean towards our table to be able to catch what we were saying.

By 24 March, however, it seemed as though we were heading for a new turn of events. Either we warranted more professional attention, or else the support we had drummed up in Athens was at last having its effect. It was on this day that I discovered that the films stolen in January had mysteriously been returned, two completely blank and one processed in a very poor manner. What surprised us most of all was that they had not been left on the doorstep or pushed through the window. They had actually been replaced in their original canisters, which were kept on the top shelf of the office cupboard. The efficiency seemed quite extraordinary, and definitely beyond the capacities of the local spies who by this time were already beginning to fade away from the scene. We began to suspect that one of the older volunteers, who had answered our advertisement in Athens, might well have had other loyalties.

On 6 April we at last received official approval for the project from an inter-ministerial committee composed of representatives of the Ministries of Co-ordination, Foreign Affairs and Defence. Dr Constantine Vamvakas, director of the Institute for Oceanographic and Fisheries Research, was a member of the committee on behalf of the Ministry of Co-ordination. Only later, in 1982, did he admit to me that the representatives of Foreign Affairs and Defence had harboured grave doubts about the project. But after all the fanfare surrounding the Rhodes conference, it might have been diplomatically embarrassing to reject the WWF/IUCN-sponsored initiative, an argument which began to sway the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Proposing a final compromise to placate concerns over national security, to which the committee member from Defence grudgingly acceded, the project would be approved only if Vamvakas and Yeroulanos were prepared to take personal responsibility for it, and ‘ensure that no monk seal research takes place in the sensitive border areas of the eastern Aegean’. We knew nothing of this agreement at the time, and so were blindly walking into trouble with the intelligence services. Even Penny Marinos and Elias Kainadas, our colleagues from the NCPPE, were unaware of this restriction.

Looking back on it now, perhaps the arguments of Vamvakas and Yeroulanos had not prevailed after all, and maybe despite appearances and a fragile compromise, a test of wills was already developing between the Ministries of Co-ordination and Defence, with Foreign Affairs scuttling back and forth between the two, unable to make up its own mind. And despite the official approval of the committee, which specifically requested local authorities to co-operate with our endeavours to cut down human disturbance in seal areas, back on Samos the project was now under more professional surveillance, by agents either of YPEA or of KYP, the intelligence service of the Ministry of Defence. At the time, it was bewildering, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the battle-lines in the secret tug of war were being drawn.

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