Bermudians were given the chance to tour a modern-day pirate ship over the weekend.

John Paul Dejoria, an anti-whaling vessel owned by the conservation group Neptune’s Pirates, had dozens of visitors on Saturday while it was docked in the West End.

Larry Routledge, the manager of the ship, said that he wanted people to walk away with a better understanding of how pervasive whaling was — and how to stop it.

He said: “Often you find a minimum of two kids who really latch on to it.

“I hope that one day it would inspire them to travel this direction as far as career goes or be proactive as far as conservation goes.”

John Paul Dejoria has been docked in Bermuda since October after it sailed in from Halifax, Canada.

The vessel, funded by the Captain Paul Wilson Foundation, a non-profit conservation group, obstructs the work of whalers and seal hunters with non-violent but controversial tactics.

Mr Routledge said that the ship initially planned to sail the Northwest Passage through Canada and into the Pacific Ocean to challenge Japanese whalers.

However, when they stopped in Greenland, Danish police arrested Paul Wilson, the ship captain and founder of Neptune’s Pirates.

Mr Routledge said they later found out Japan had renewed a red notice from Interpol for him on charges of damage to property, boarding a ship without permission, interrupting commercial business and assault.

He said: “We waited to see if there was going to be any chance that he might be released on a technicality or something like that.

“When we saw that wasn’t going to happen, we had to change our strategy.”

The John Paul Dejoria docked in Halifax for two months before moving to Bermuda for the winter.

Mr Routledge said that his skeleton crew of eight, many of whom were volunteers from across Europe and North America, survived off local produce they bought from farmers.

He said: “The crew really love the people. The people have been so friendly and heart-warming.”

Mr Routledge added: “You can go to some ports that are very icy cold and you don’t get along with the locals, so you just want to get out of there.

“But people have been so friendly and it’s overwhelming.

“They can’t do enough for you — if you ask them for advice or where you can get something, everybody just falls over themselves trying to help you.”

Mr Routledge said, that as a token of their gratitude, they wanted to let the public tour the ship and learn about what they do.

He said that their outreach in the past had been popular with schools and children, who were eager to learn about conservation.

Mr Routledge added that many people were open to learning about the organisation.

He said: “I don’t really find that there are too many misconceptions about what we do.

“I find that if you get people questioning the practice of whaling, you’ve achieved something.”

Mr Watson and his previous group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, have been accused of ecoterrorism by the Japanese Government and Greenpeace, another environmentalist group that he cofounded, for their tactics.

The website for the Captain Paul Wilson Foundation maintains that the groups operate with “the strategic philosophy of aggressive non-violence”.

Mr Routledge hopes to sail to Iceland again to confront whalers who have received permits to hunt in the region.