One morning last June, David de Rothschild, a thirty-year-old heir to the European banking fortune, arrived on his bicycle at Pier 31, a vast, hangarlike building that juts from the Embarcadero into San Francisco Bay, in the city’s North Beach district. De Rothschild, who has a beard and shoulder-length brown hair, was wearing a flower-patterned shirt, low-slung corduroys, a belt with a skull-and-crossbones buckle, and flip-flops. He entered the building and pedalled toward a group of people at the far end of the space: a gray-haired man in a work apron who was cutting wood with a table saw and a younger man and woman who were hunched over a twenty-foot-long, bow-shaped plywood frame, which cradled, in neat rows, under a white nylon fishing net, thousands of clear-plastic water bottles.
For a month, the group had been constructing a prototype for a sixty-foot “bottle boat,” which de Rothschild and a small crew plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. A highlight of the trip, which de Rothschild hopes will begin in July and, if all goes well, end four months later, will be a visit to a huge region of floating plastic trash and particles, known as the Eastern Garbage Patch. De Rothschild will collect water samples to study and, using a satellite phone, post photographs and video clips on the Web site of Adventure Ecology, an environmental organization that he founded. His goal is to call attention to the perils of ocean pollution and to suggest a solution: waste as a resource. To this end, he had decided that his boat should be made entirely of recyclable plastics, produce its own energy, and generate no noxious emissions. De Rothschild has enlisted twenty-five people to help him realize his vision—consultants to design solar panels, wind turbines, and stationary bikes (to power batteries that would run small motors), along with a system to produce potable water from seawater and a “separating toilet,” so that the crew’s solid and liquid waste can be converted into fertilizer. The expedition is expected to cost several million dollars, much of which he has raised from corporate partners: the International Watch Company and Hewlett-Packard. Inspired, in part, by Thor Heyerdahl’s Pacific crossing in 1947, on a raft called the Kon-Tiki, de Rothschild called his project Plastiki.
As a teen-ager, de Rothschild, who is six feet four, was a top-ranked horse jumper on Britain’s Junior Eventing team, and he is an experienced bungee jumper and kite skier. He is also one of just a handful of people to have skied to both the North and South geographic Poles. (These feats earned him inclusion in the National Geographic Society’s 2007 class of Emerging Explorers.) But Plastiki is of a different order of difficulty and danger from anything he has attempted before. Storms, sharks, isolation, injury, and illness are standard hazards for anyone attempting a Pacific crossing by sailboat, but de Rothschild is proposing to do it in an experimental craft made from materials that have never been tested against ocean waves. He plans to bring an electronic position-indicating radio beacon and radios that can provide up to forty-eight hours’ advance warning of approaching cyclones. Even so, the boat, whose top speed is expected to be about ten knots, and whose steering system will allow only minimal maneuverability, may not be fast enough to dodge a Pacific cyclone, which can measure a thousand miles across.
De Rothschild, arriving at the far end of the pier, hopped off his bike—he does not own a car. (At his home, near London, he uses compact fluorescent light bulbs, buys his electricity from a green supplier, and maintains a colony of earthworms to consume his organic waste. Still, he commutes regularly between Europe and the United States, a habit that he acknowledges is less than ideal for an environmental activist. “My footprint is bigger than average but less than it could be,” he says. “I try and take every action I can.”) He asked Mike Rose, the man in the apron, how the construction of the Plastiki prototype was going. Rose, an Australian in his fifties who had been hired as the boat’s builder, replied that he and his workers were having a “bugger of a time” trying to prevent the bottles from shifting under the nylon fishing net. Any movement, he said, could compromise the boat’s shape.
De Rothschild bent down and poked at one of the bottles, which wiggled beneath his finger. The bottle itself, however, felt as hard as a brick, thanks to a technique that a member of de Rothschild’s team had devised to enable the thin plastic to withstand the pummelling of the waves. Inside each bottle was some dry-ice powder, which had turned into gas and expanded, pressurizing the bottle. Rose’s female worker, a Swedish college student, had spent three days with a couple of helpers putting dry ice into nearly six thousand bottles. (The actual boat will use about twelve thousand.)
“I was talking to Andy,” Rose said, referring to Andy Dovell, the naval architect who is Plastiki’s designer. “We were talking about the possibility of shrink-wrapping the hulls with Saran Wrap to hold the bottles still.”
“It’s a thought,” de Rothschild said, without enthusiasm. “But then what’s the use of having bottles? You could put anything under there.”
He stepped through a doorway at the end of the pier and looked broodingly over the bay. The week before, an environmental group called the Algalita Marine Research Foundation—whose founder, Charles Moore, claimed to have discovered the Eastern Garbage Patch, in the late nineties—had launched its own bottle-boat expedition to Hawaii, and also planned to visit the Patch. Algalita’s boat, the Junk Raft, consisted of little more than fishing-net pontoons full of unpressurized bottles supporting a platform that held a discarded Cessna fuselage and a sail. The Junk Raft had embarked from Long Beach, California, with a crew of two, its sendoff broadcast on local television.
“That’s the competitiveness of these green groups and adventurers,” de Rothschild said bitterly. “Because we’re competing for corporate sponsors, they nudge in front of you.” He was discovering an unsavory truth about environmental activism—the kind that depends on sponsors and publicity to achieve its aims. The jockeying over money, attention, and ideas taints even the most seemingly virtuous projects with vanity and self-promotion. To de Rothschild’s irritation, for the past few days prospective sponsors had been calling, asking to know how Plastiki differed from the Junk Raft. To him, the differences were self-evident. “They threw a raft together in a few weeks,” he said. “We’re building a boat. It’s not ‘junk’—it’s a resource!” He was relieved that Plastiki had already attracted some press attention, but this was also a reminder that the media interest owed as much to his last name as to the project’s ingenuity. “Nine out of ten articles about Plastiki will begin ‘David, banking this, super-rich that, or family this,’ ” he complained. “But what hopefully happens is that people, when they dig a little deeper, will see that there’s a merit in the content, past just the name.”
To de Rothschild’s right was the dramatic span of the Bay Bridge; to his left, the outcropping of Alcatraz Island. In August, 2002, when he was twenty-three, he competed in the Escape from the Rock Triathlon—which included a thirteen-mile bicycle ride, a two-and-a-half-mile run, and a one-and-a-half-mile swim, from the prison island to the mainland. De Rothschild crossed the gap, whose swift current is thought to have carried escaping prisoners to their deaths, in forty-six minutes, winning the triathlon in his age group.
He shook off his gloom and smiled. “That’s the adventure,” he said. “If it was normal or easy, everyone would be out here in a plastic-bottle boat.”
De Rothschild may be the latest incarnation of the British adventurer-explorer, a hardy and eccentric breed that includes men like Sir Richard Francis Burton, who travelled vast tracts of Asia and Africa in the eighteen-hundreds, dabbled in hypnotism and alternative medicine, was an expert fencer, and translated “The Arabian Nights” from the original Arabic; and Sebastian Snow, who, in 1951, helped locate the source of the Amazon while touring South America on a balsa-wood raft, singing the “Eton Boating Song.” But Snow undertook his explorations largely for his own amusement, and the great Victorian-era explorers typically conducted theirs under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, an institution with imperialist ambitions. De Rothschild brings to his adventures a twenty-first-century environmental consciousness—a desire to expose the desecration of nature by human beings. “David is someone who could sit back and enjoy what life offers,” Terry Garcia, the executive vice-president for Mission Programs at the National Geographic Society, told me. “But, instead, he is daring to voyage across the Pacific to make a point—that humans are trashing the oceans.”
De Rothschild’s most direct precursor may be Michael Rockefeller, another earnest scion of an eminent family who was drawn to remote corners of the globe. In 1961, Rockefeller, the twenty-three-year-old son of Nelson Rockefeller, visited New Guinea, where he helped film a documentary about indigenous tribes. His catamaran capsized in the Arafura Sea, near the mouth of the Eilanden River, and he is presumed to have drowned or been eaten by cannibals. De Rothschild, however, refuses to dwell on the risks of Plastiki. “Ignorance is bliss in these situations,” he says.
Like the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds owe their wealth largely to industrialization. Two hundred years ago, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was born in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto in 1744, was appointed financial overseer to Wilhelm IX. Mayer groomed his five sons to be bankers and dispatched them across Europe to set up businesses in the family name (which acquired regional variations: Rothschild, de Rothschild, von Rothschild). During the nineteenth century, the Rothschilds were perhaps the most influential business family in the world, helping to finance Britain in the Napoleonic Wars and supplying the credit that drove the Industrial Revolution.
David is the youngest of three children of the former Victoria Schott, an American-born interior designer and former fund-raiser for Britain’s Conservative Party, and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who, until his retirement, in 2003, ran the English branch of the banking empire Rothschild’s. David and his older siblings—Jessica, a theatre producer, and Anthony, who heads a music-publishing company—grew up in London and at Ascott House, the family’s thirty-two-hundred-acre ancestral estate, in Buckinghamshire. Lady Victoria, who divorced Sir Evelyn in 2000 and now lives in London, says that David was such a hyperactive child that she worried constantly for his safety.
“I finally called my doctor one day and said, ‘I need help. I don’t know how to control this child,’ ” Lady Victoria told me. She and Sir Evelyn took him for a psychological evaluation at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Under the doctor’s gaze, David became a passive, obedient child—ignoring an open window (“I had told the doctor, ‘He’ll run over and try to leap out,’ ” Lady Victoria said) and playing nicely with a set of bricks (“I’d said, ‘He’ll knock them off the table’ ”). After the appointment, he and his mortified parents entered the elevator to return to the lobby. “At which point, David takes both fists and hits every button on the elevator as we go down. I said, ‘Oh, you are smart, aren’t you?’ ” Lady Victoria later sought help from a relative, Peter Robeson, an equestrian who had competed in four Olympics. Robeson taught David to show-jump, a highly dangerous sport. (Christopher Reeve became a quadriplegic when his horse missed a jump in one such event.) De Rothschild excelled at the sport and, at fourteen, joined the British Junior Eventing team. He might have been an Olympian himself—several of his teammates went on to compete in the Olympics—but, he says, he “realized there was more to life than spending hours and hours and hours on a horse.”