David McTaggart, who died on March 23rd aged 68, built Greenpeace into a worldwide organisation. He was seen by many in the environment movement as a tenacious hero, and a pioneer of non-violent direct action. Others, notably the French government, treated him at times like a terrorist.
Despite his extraordinary flair in gaining publicity for the causes he believed in, he rarely talked about himself and when he did some of the stories were so surprising it was hard to believe them. He had astonishing adventures and successes - notably stopping the French continuing atmospheric testing on nuclear weapons in the 1970s, and a seven-year campaign, ending in 1991, to save Antarctica from mining.
He was born in Vancouver. His teens were spent skiing, playing tennis, squash and golf. He particularly excelled at badminton, becoming Canadian national champion three times.
He left school at 17, went into construction and for 20 years built up a very large business, first in Canada and then in the United States. All this came to an abrupt end when an explosion wrecked a ski lodge he was building in Bear Mountain, east of San Francisco. Several workers were hurt and he blamed himself - paying out a considerable part of his fortune in compensation.
This accident changed his life. He abandoned his wife and children, bought a yacht, and set off on a trip round the Pacific to find out about himself - as he put it. Three years later he was still travelling rather aimlessly when he answered an advertisement asking for volunteers to sail to Mururoa to protest at the French government's atmospheric nuclear tests.
The story is told in his long out-of-print book Greenpeace III, Journey into the Bomb. He was more annoyed by the French government's unilateral decision to close part of the Pacific to all shipping than about the issue of nuclear testing, but his encounters with the French changed all that.
Despite every effort of the New Zealand government to stop him leaving, and a cat and mouse game with the French navy, he succeeded in holding up the tests by sailing within a few miles of the about-to-be detonated bomb. His tiny yacht was eventually rammed and taken in tow by a minesweeper, an action the French tried to pass off as a rescue.
It was a lesson in propaganda he was not to forget. The yacht was boarded again and he was badly beaten by French commandos, nearly losing the sight of an eye. The French tried to claim he had had an accident, but the graphic photographs taken by a fellow crew member showed the French had lied. This gave David McTaggart worldwide publicity. The French abandoned atmospheric testing.
Although in his mid-40s, he set about creating a Greenpeace in Europe, finding like-minded people and setting up national organisations. By 1979, Greenpeace was unified across the Atlantic and David McTaggart was running it - remaining chairman until 1991.
He made sure that where his boats went film crews went too. The most astonishing miscalculation was by the French in 1985, when two of its secret service agents sank the Greenpeace flagship in New Zealand on the eve of a new trip to Mururoa. The resulting death of one of the ship's crew transformed Greenpeace into a huge organisation. Money poured in from all over the world and it was able to run a fleet of ships and dozens of campaigns at once.
David McTaggart lived at Paciano in Italy, but still travelled to campaign. In 1995, he sailed with three others back into the Mururoa test zone and went into hiding on the atoll to frustrate the underground tests. When discovered, he spent three weeks as part of a peace-protest flotilla outside the exclusion zone, long after Greenpeace's two big ships, the Rainbow Warrior and the Greenpeace, had been boarded and captured by French marines. His reward for bobbing about in the Pacific once more, was to see the French finally abandon all testing in the Pacific - a victory that took 22 years to achieve.