It may be a small sailboat, but it has a large place in the history of activism against nuclear weapons and other threats to the environment.
The Golden Rule – which made a late-1950s voyage aiming to disrupt nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands that inspired later protest vessels, including Greenpeace – will be coming to White Rock pier this Thursday.
The 30-foot fore-and-aft gaff-rig ketch, now operated by the international organization Veterans For Peace – which restored the Olympia, Wash.-based vessel several years ago – will be mooring at the pier sometime between 4 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., dependent on tides.
"The crew will be distributing information about a non-nuclear world," said Peninsula peace and social activist Stephen Crozier – who was instrumental in having The Golden Rule stop at White Rock as part of its 2024 Pacific Northwest tour.
Crozier told Peace Arch News that while the City has OK'd a visit, he was informed the pier has not been sufficiently repaired from 2018 storm damage to permit overnight docking.
Instead the boat will dock in Blaine and Golden Rule project manager Hellen Jaccard said crew members – including Captain Kiko Johnston-Kitazawa and Captain Terry Lush – will meet with both Washington State and Peninsula residents in Peace Arch Park on Friday in a cross-border potluck picnic from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. (no shelters have been reserved for the event).
"Terry is actually the son of Ed Lush, one of the former owners of The Golden Rule. Ed took it back and forth through the Panama Canal a number of times, and I'm not sure the family knew about its peace-activism history at that time," Jaccard said.
Terry Lush has since become involved in the Golden Rule project, and captained the ketch on its last visit to B.C. in 2016.
Among subsequent stops in the current tour will be Vancouver and Victoria.
"As a member of the White Rock Social Justice Film Society, I got to meet one of the crew members of The Golden Rule," Crozier said.
"When I heard they were coming to Vancouver, I said 'What about White Rock, where the pier is one of the foremost attractions on the West Coast, and the Peace Arch Park is close by?' " he added.
Crozier said he is expecting White Rock city councillors Ernie Klassen and Christopher Trevelyan to be among elected officials on hand to welcome The Golden Rule to the pier on Thursday.
It was early in 1958, shortly after its launching, that The Golden Rule was sailed to the South Pacific from San Pedro, Calif. by four Quaker pacifists intent on disrupting U.S. atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
As the Veterans For Peace website relates, at that time both the Soviet Union and the U.S. were conducting above-ground tests of very large nuclear weapons, leaving clouds of radioactive fallout – and contamination had begun to be detected in mothers' and cows' milk.
Amid growing public concern, Captain Albert Bigelow, a former U.S. naval lieutenant commander, decided it was time for direct action. Convinced, since the Hiroshima atom bomb attack of 1945, that the nuclear arms race was a "race to extinction," Bigelow and his fellow Quakers decided that sailing a small craft into the test area, at the risk of their lives, would focus public attention on the issue.
It was not a secret mission – they wanted full public knowledge of what they were prepared to do, and even wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower to inform him of their plans.
A first attempt was turned back due to illness of one of the crew members, but on March 25 they set sail again for Honolulu, planning to continue from there to the Marshall Islands.
But the U.S. Coast Guard boarded the vessel in Hawaii, and Bigelow and his crew, architect William Huntington, peace activist George Willoughby and graduate engineer Orion Sherwood, were arrested and jailed.
What seemed to be the failure of their mission was actually their greatest success – media attention to the case helped whip up public outrage world-wide about nuclear weapons, and that groundswell of "ban-the-bomb" opinion was so large that it ultimately led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
The example set by The Golden Rule also led to subsequent protest voyages by environmentalists and peace activists, of which the best-known today are the activities of the Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd organizations.
"The connection to the environmental organization Greenpeace is direct," the Veterans For Peace website notes.
"At a Vancouver meeting of activists in the late 1960s, Marie Bohlen, an American inspired by The Golden Rule's exploits, suggested a protest voyage toward the U.S. nuclear test site in the Aleutian Islands," it recounts.
"The rusty trawler Phyllis Cormack, renamed Greenpeace for the protest, soon headed north – and Greenpeace was launched."
For more information on the Veterans For Peace Golden Rule project, including ways to donate, visit vfpgoldenruleproject.org
