The transformation from research vessel to protest ship was not just cosmetic. Greenpeace fitted Rainbow Warrior with sails on a ketch rig in 1985, reducing her dependence on engines and extending her range across oceans where fuel was scarce. Her campaigns in the North Atlantic earned international attention -- and international enemies. During operations against Spanish whalers, she was seized twice by Spanish authorities. Both times, her crew escaped. The second escape reportedly contributed to the resignation of the Admiral of the Spanish Navy. By the early 1980s, the ship had become shorthand for environmental confrontation: small, stubborn, willing to put a hull between a harpoon and a whale.

In May 1985, Rainbow Warrior carried out what may have been her most consequential mission. She relocated 300 Marshall Islanders from Rongelap Atoll, which had been contaminated by radioactive fallout from American nuclear tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds. The people of Rongelap had lived with the consequences of the 1954 Castle Bravo test for three decades, watching rates of cancer and birth defects climb while petitioning for relocation that never came. Greenpeace provided what their own government and the United States had not: a way out. The evacuation took multiple trips, moving families and their possessions to Mejato Island, 180 kilometres away. For the people of Rongelap, Rainbow Warrior was not a symbol of protest. She was a lifeline.

Rainbow Warrior sailed to Auckland to lead a flotilla of yachts protesting French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. The French government decided she would not arrive. DGSE agent Christine Cabon infiltrated Greenpeace's Auckland office, monitoring communications and mapping the ship's equipment. Other agents toured the vessel while it was open to visitors, posing as tourists and supporters. Just before midnight on 10 July 1985, Captain Peter Willcox and eleven others were aboard when the first explosion rocked the hull. Most evacuated immediately, but Fernando Pereira -- a Portuguese-Dutch photographer -- went below to retrieve his camera equipment. The second, larger bomb detonated while he was still inside. The ship sank at its berth with Pereira trapped below. He was 35 years old.

New Zealand police arrested two French agents, and the investigation that followed unravelled a state-sponsored operation. French Defence Minister Charles Hernu resigned. The captured agents were imprisoned in New Zealand, then transferred to French custody on Hao atoll, where their confinement was brief. On 22 September 1985, French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius summoned journalists and read a 200-word statement. "The truth is cruel," he said. "Agents of the French secret service sank this boat. They were acting on orders." An international arbitration tribunal ordered France to pay Greenpeace US$8.1 million in 1987 -- a sum that could not restore Pereira's life or undo the political damage the affair inflicted on France. The cost of the entire scandal reached 115 million francs. Rainbow Warrior's hull was scuttled at Matauri Bay in Northland, where it became an artificial reef now covered in sea anemones. Her salvaged masts stand outside the Dargaville Museum. A second Rainbow Warrior was acquired in 1989, and a purpose-built third launched in 2011. The ship is gone. The name persists.