Peter Willcox (born March 6, 1953) is an American sea captain best known for his activism with the environmental organization Greenpeace.
[1] He was on board as captain of the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed and sunk by the DGSE (French intelligence service) in New Zealand in 1985.
Sharpe, a member of the U.S Ski team at the time, was unmarried and gave the baby up for adoption at the urging of her family.
Elsie, who died in 1973, was a middle school science teacher in Norwalk and founded an environmental club in the late 1960s.
Both his mother and grandparents, Henry and Anita Willcox, were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and their careers were ruined as a result.
Elsie, fearful that a subpoena would endanger her chances of adopting another child, took Peter and his brother Michael underground for three months in 1956.
These culminated in 1965, when Willcox and his father attended the last day of the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights march.
After spending a year doing humpback whale research on an old square rigger, Willcox saw an ad for mates and engineers on the newly-arrived Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior.
1982: Stopping National Lead Industries from dumping a million gallons of sulfuric acid off the New Jersey beaches every day.
Rainbow Warrior was blown up in Auckland by French military personnel, killing shipmate Fernando Pereira.
Demonstrations were held all over the world urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to release the Arctic 30.
2016 Peter captains the second Rainbow Warrior near Fukushima, Japan to monitor radiation levels being released into the environment by the damaged nuclear reactors.
In 2013, he married Maggy Aston, whom he had met on the Clearwater in the late 1970s, on Islesboro island in Maine, where he now lives.
His father Roger was a multiple class national champion, who took his son big boat racing in the early 1960s.
Willcox's memoir Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet[3] was released on April 18, 2016 in the United States and Canada by St. Martin's Press.