Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  AN UNPROFITABLE SHIP

  In the fall of 1998, Paul Frankel, a furniture importer in Englewood, New Jersey, was waiting for his ship to come in, and on November 2 he began to wonder if it would. Really, it wasn’t the ship Frankel was waiting for but one of the containers it was carrying, a jumbo-size forty-footer full of tables that his company, Collezione Europa, had purchased from a factory in the Philippines. A freight forwarder—the cargo industry’s equivalent of a travel agent—had arranged to have Frankel’s 237 tables shipped from Manila to Seattle aboard the APL China. In the fall of 1998, the APL China was one of the largest container ships plying the seas. It was also, so far as maritime engineers were concerned, one of the safest.

  Like most successful importers in the age of containerization, Paul Frankel was not given to worrying whether his cargo would reach his warehouse intact, for a simple reason: it almost always did. Sure, every now and then a piece of furniture got scuffed or dinged in transit and had to be repaired by a furniture repairman (a furniture repairman very much like Charlie Moore, in his previous life), but it arrived nonetheless. What made Frankel start wondering now was a fax he received from the headquarters of APL, American President Lines, which, despite what its name suggests, belongs to a shipping company in Singapore. “Please be advised that the APL China v. 030 has been delayed due to severe weather encountered enroute to Seattle,” the fax began. “The ship has suffered some weather damage, but we do not yet know the full extent.”

  To appreciate the full extent of the damage the APL China had suffered, one must first appreciate the full extent of the APL China. The China was a C-11-class post-Panamax ship, meaning that—at 906 feet long and 131 feet wide—it was too big for the locks of the Panama Canal. Standing on a dock beside it, you would have felt as though you were standing at the foot of an unnaturally smooth cliff, a palisade of steel. The carrying capacity of a container ship is measured in TEUs, or twenty-foot-equivalent units, because a standard shipping container is twenty feet long. One twenty-footer equals one TEU, a forty-footer, two. The China had a carrying capacity of 4,832 TEUs. (That of the Evergreen Ever Laurel, by contrast, was a mere 1,180 TEUs.)

  Imagine a train pulling 4,832 boxcars: it would stretch for nineteen miles, from the southern tip of Manhattan up into Westchester. Or imagine this: both the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station and the Chartres Cathedral would have fit inside the China’s hull. Or imagine this: you could have fit Noah’s ark inside its hull and had room for another ark of equal size. And the dimensions of the ark set down in Genesis were meant to suggest a vessel of fabulous grandeur, a vessel bigger than any ship built before the flood or since, a vessel—in short—of biblical proportions.

  Now imagine if Noah had gone to sea in the APL China instead of his ark: A single twenty-foot-container could accommodate hundreds of thousands of insects, tens of thousands of frogs—plague in a box. A twenty-footer could comfortably house six horses, or, uncomfortably, a single elephant. The flood would have posed no danger to whales, but if Noah had wanted to, and if he’d had the skills and materials to carpenter a really big fish tank, he could have squeezed a gray whale into a jumbo-size forty-foot container like the one Paul Frankel was waiting for. If Noah had sailed in the China instead of his ark, he might not have been able to save every species on earth, but he could have come close. On the other hand, if Noah’s luck were as bad as that of Parvez Guard, captain of the China, thousands of the animals he was trying to save would have been lost at sea. (The whale, at least, might have survived.)

  Paul Frankel wasn’t alone in his wondering. All across North America that autumn, people were waiting for the China to come in, and all across North America people began to wonder if it would. Not long after APL’s fax arrived at the offices of Collezione Europa, an even more worrisome message reached the offices of Consolidated Transportation Services Inc., a freight forwarder in Carson, California. The message concerned two containers of clothing that the company had arranged to be shipped to New Jersey from Palau, an island five hundred miles east of the Philippines. “Both containers have gone overboard,” the message reported. A few weeks later, another freight forwarder, H. W. Robinson & Co., based near JFK Airport in New York, also received a worrisome fax. “As you may know, the APL China encountered heavy weather in the Pacific Ocean on or around October 26, on its voyage from the Far East,” this fax began. “The information we have received thus far indicates the storm was unusually severe with wave heights exceeding fifty feet.”

  People at the headquarters of Eddie Bauer began wondering what had happened to the 1,583 cartons of cotton dresses they’d ordered from Sri Lanka. People at Schwinn Cycling & Fitness wondered about the bicycles they’d ordered from Taiwan. People at Pier 1 Imports were wondering about their 236 cartons of acrylic bottle stoppers. And at Azuma Foods, people wondered what fate had befallen 940 cartons of seafood that had been packed onto the China inside special, refrigerated containers known as reefers. Most worried of all, perhaps, were executives at Toshiba, who were waiting for nine containers of cordless phones, $4.2 million worth. Paul Frankel’s tables, by comparison, had cost him a mere $7,000.

  The China had staggered into port in Seattle on November 1. It was a bluebird day, the sun bright and sparkly on the water of Puget Sound. A container ship crossing a harbor on such a day, passing among fishing boats and yachts with the imperturbable majesty of a zeppelin among gulls, is a beautiful sight. The sight of such a ship on such a day suggests that human ingenuity has succeeded in taming the sea, turning Melville’s “watery wilderness” into so many watery highways, along which freighters travel as routinely as eighteen-wheelers travel the roads.

  A Seattle longshoreman named Rich Austin was dispatched to the China salvage operation that day. As he drove into port, the sight wasn’t picturesque at all; it was, he remembers, “ominous.” From bow to stern, stacks of containers had toppled like dominoes, some to starboard, some to port. Some containers were crumpled up like wads of aluminum foil, others were pancaked flat. One of the China’s sixty-two cargo bays gaped like a missing tooth; an entire row of containers, stacked six high and sixteen across, had been swept away.

  Later that afternoon, hoisted up in a man basket by a crane, Rich Austin got a better view of the devastation. “It looked almost like a landfill in some areas,” he remembers. Containers had split like dropped melons, spewing cargo: remote-control boats, golf clubs, frozen lobster tails, thousands of plastic air fresheners. Many photographs of the ravaged China were taken that week. Photos of bay 1 show boxes stuffed with clothing labels yet to be stitched on. With a magnifying glass, you can read what the labels say: DANNY & NICOLE. Scrolled bolts of cloth protrude from the ruins of a container in bay 15. Striped, child-size shirts of the sort favored by Sesame Street’s Ernie drape the scaffolding in bay 17. In photos of bay 36, you can see packages of frozen shrimp; in those of bay 58, Kenwood bookshelf stereo systems. Perhaps most impressive of all are the photos of bay 59, which show a smorgasbord of consumer goods—stainless steel pots, bouquets of plastic flowers, white sneakers, gray trousers from the Gap, all intermingled and strewn about. One pair of white sneakers hangs from a rail by its tied laces, like shoes thrown over a telephone wire. “Whatever Americans were consuming at that time, there it was,” another longshoreman, Dan McKisson, told me. “There was Christmas, laying on the deck.”

  Salvaging this wreckage was slow, dangerous work, like playing pick-up sticks with thirty-ton sticks. While a pair of cranes lifted stevedores up in man baskets, another crane swung four steel hooks out to them. The stevedores would catch the hooks, latch them one by one into a container’s corner castings, the man basket would swing clear, and up and away the snared container would go.

  At least that’s how it was supposed to work. Sometimes to reach the corner castings, a stevedore would have to climb out of the man basket onto a tipped container. Sometimes when a crane lifted one container, those
leaning against it would topple. Sometimes when the hooks rose, the container would sunder, spilling cargo onto the decks and docks. There was melting seafood everywhere, and after a couple of days the smell was so bad that Austin started swiping spilled air fresheners and rubbing the fragrance onto his mustache. “Other guys put earplugs in their nostrils,” he recalls. Dan McKisson remembers that as one container rose into the air, its contents suddenly shifted. There was a crash. Then the steel wall of the container gave way at one end, opening like a hatch. Down came “a rain shower” of cardboard boxes, some of which tore open when they hit the decks. Inside? Bicycles. The people at Schwinn could stop wondering.

  Austin and McKisson had seen cargo losses before. Almost every winter at least one container ship turns up in Seattle with containers damaged or missing. But they’d never seen devastation like this. Neither had their foreman, Don Minnekan, and Minnekan was nearing retirement. Neither had any other longshoreman, ever. What the longshoremen bore witness to that November morning was, in monetary terms, the worst shipping disaster in maritime history. Of the 1,300 containers the China had been carrying when it departed Taiwan for Seattle eleven days before, 407 had been lost at sea. Of those remaining onboard, another few hundred had been damaged or destroyed.

  “I’ve been out at sea on tugboats and fishing boats. When it’s snotty out, it’s no fun,” Austin told me. “But I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in something that would do that much damage to a ship like that.”

  By the time I made my pilgrimage to the toy factory in Dongguan, I’d gone to sea several times—on the Malaspina, the Opus, the Alguita. And yet I could no more imagine what it would be like to ride a container ship through snotty weather than Rich Austin could. Nor could I imagine what it would take to make containers tumble overboard. The accident that had set the toys adrift remained to me mysterious. By process of elimination, after contacting the Port of Tacoma and consulting old shipping schedules in the Journal of Commerce, I managed to identify the ship—the Evergreen Ever Laurel—from which the toys I was chasing had fallen. But there was no mention of the accident anywhere in the public record, not in Lloyd’s List, not in the Journal of Commerce, not in the Port of Tacoma’s archives. The Coast Guard’s records did contain an inspection report, which I acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, but all it said was that the Ever Laurel, on January 16, 1992, while in Tacoma, had been subjected to a Coast Guard inspection, which it had passed.

  Except under extraordinary circumstances—if a law has been broken in American waters, for instance, or a hazardous substance has spilled—the U.S. Coast Guard does not investigate shipping accidents. Most of the time, it’s left to lawyers and insurance adjusters to reconstruct the sequence of events and assign blame. If small sums of money are involved, the ship’s owners and underwriters will dispense with the investigation, accept liability, and settle the claims. The case of the China was different. The damages were too costly for APL to absorb; 361 claimants represented by twenty-five lawyers would eventually file for damages exceeding $100 million, more than the ship itself was worth, and because APL decided to contest their claims, the details of the China disaster are part of the public record. If you visit the federal courthouse in the Southern District of Manhattan and give the file clerk the correct docket number, she will emerge from the archives wheeling a cartload of legal files in which you will find bills of lading, invoices, faxes, memos, claims for damages, motions and counter-motions, thousands of documents—the sort of archival mother lode for which, in the case of the Ever Laurel, I’d searched in vain.

  I’d heard about the China from a number of sources. A maritime lawyer named Geoff Gill had told me about it. Charlie Moore had told me about it. Mariners I’d met had told me about it. The China disaster had become as legendary as the rubber ducks lost at sea. Perversely perhaps, listening to the legend, I wanted more than ever, if only briefly, to join the merchant marine, but joining the merchant marine turns out to be far harder than it used to be. You can’t just show up at a port and offer your services as a cabin boy—at least not as a cabin boy on a container ship; on a tramp steamer, maybe. To join the crew of a container ship you have to go to school and secure a license, and even then, in America, whose merchant fleet has dwindled, atrophied by globalization, licensed mariners have trouble finding work. I asked a few different shipping lines—including Evergreen—if they’d let me hitch a ride. Those that returned my calls said no. I offered to pay. Still, the answer was no. Taking on passengers is more trouble than it’s worth, I was informed, especially with all the security restrictions put in place after 9/11. Then someone told me about a German shipping line called Reederei NSB, NSB for short, one of the last shipping lines that still does a side business in tourism. So long as I was willing to attain a doctor’s note attesting to my good health, sign a legal waiver six pages long, and fork over a couple grand, I could learn “first hand what it means to ‘sail the seven seas’ aboard an ocean-going giant,” the NSB website promised. I would return from my voyage “able to tell no end of sailor’s yarns.”

  That sounded pretty good to me. I’ve always been a sucker for sailor’s yarns. And ever since I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, I’ve wondered what it would be like to ship out on one of those oceangoing giants, which, on clear days, I could see from my childhood bedroom, out on San Francisco Bay, going to and from the docks in Alameda, transacting their mysterious business with the faraway. In mid-January, when I’d be returning from China, there were no NSB ships departing from Hong Kong for Seattle, but there was one ship—the Hanjin Ottawa—departing from Pusan, South Korea, for Seattle, following roughly the same route the Ever Laurel had taken sixteen years before, and roughly the same route the China had taken in 1998. Along this route, the toys had broken free, changing from containerized cargo into legendary characters. Along this route, some oceanic force had beaten a post-Panamax ship to ribbons. Now, from Pusan, I’d travel this route.

  I also had other, vaguer, more philosophical reasons for shipping out, reasons that the actuarial phrase “act of God” helps explain. I didn’t expect an ocean crossing to restore my faith in God, exactly—at least not in a biblical God; I lost that irretrievably long ago. But I did hope that it might refresh my capacity for awe. Rich Austin thought the sight of the devastated China was ominous. I agreed. The toy spill was ominous, too. What these omens seemed to portend was this: that the high seas may yet be the wildest wilderness in the world after all; that despite the cargo industry’s best, most technologically advanced efforts to turn shipping lanes into watery highways, there remain on this diminishing, warming, terraqueous globe of ours tropics of mystery, seasons of astonishment, zones of the sublime, which not even vast expenditures of capital and ingenuity may ever fully tame. After exploring the Pearl River Delta, I set out to test this augury of mine, this wish.

  PORT OF CALL. PUSAN. 35°04’N, 129°06’E.

  It seems that my ship, the Hanjin Ottawa—a 5,618-TEU post-Panamax box boat built right here, in the South Korean shipyards—has been delayed by dirty weather in Shanghai. I’ve called Mr. Shin every day for the past three days, and every day he tells me the same thing: call back tomorrow. Mr. Shin is a freight forwarder, whose name and number my travel agent, a woman with a Slavic accent and a mailing address in upstate New York, sent me along with my ticket and my six-page legal waiver. I was to contact Mr. Shin upon my arrival in Pusan.

  Flying from Hong Kong to Pusan was like flying from summer into winter. While waiting, I’ve been living at the Hotel Phoenix, down in the city’s Cinema District, where pedestrians in down coats, breath steaming, gather around pushcarts to eat fried pancakes full of bean paste from little folded circles of paper. My first day here, I bought one for five won, a pittance, and watched the woman turn it three times in the hot oil with her tongs, before dropping it into its little paper pocket. The first bite burned my mouth, but I didn’t mind because I was cold and short on cash and it was so sweet and
greasy and cheap that when I finished it, I bought another. That’s all I ate my first day in South Korea, waiting for my ship to come in: bean paste pancakes.

  In the top floor of the building across the street from the Hotel Phoenix is a grooming parlor for poodles. From my room, you can catch glimpses of the poodles through the parlor’s windows, poodles almost epileptic with fear, claws skittering on the stainless steel tables, while disembodied hands tease their forelocks into poofs. Beyond the grooming parlor is the Jagalchi fish market, the largest fish market I have ever seen. Yesterday, I walked through it, biding time.

  The muddy, bloody streets were lined with fishmongers, all women—the wives and daughters of fishermen, I presumed. Their heads covered in neat little kerchiefs, they crouched beside basins and plastic laundry baskets in which much slithering and crawling and dying was taking place. Other women in kerchiefs pushed wooden carts heaped high with assorted vegetables and crustaceans, shouting like carnival barkers as they went, and down along the water, inside what I at first mistook for a convention center or an opera house—a three-story edifice gleaming with architectural ambition, its silhouette suggestive of billowing spinnakers and silvery waves—were still more fishmongers, selling octopuses puddled atop beds of ice and flayed fish drying on racks like zombie laundry.

  This seemed to me an auspicious beginning to my transpacific voyage. In Manhattan, the once vibrant downtown waterfront has been turned into Stamford, Connecticut. They’ve upholstered one pier in Astroturf, built a playground on another, while of others all that remains is a grid of moldering piles, past which joggers on the meticulously landscaped promenade go bouncing along, listening to their iPods and enjoying the view of condominiums in Hoboken.