by Donovan Hohn
The opening chapter of Moby-Dick describes what New York’s waterfront used to be like. “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf,” Ishmael writes. Promenaders on the Battery could peep “over the bulwarks of ships from China.” Now if an insular Manhatto wants a good look at a ship from China, he has to take the A train to Queens. Gaze out to the horizon from Rockaway Beach, where on summer days the urban masses lounge and frolic among the orange umbrellas of the New York City Parks Department and pigeons fraternize with the gulls, and you will see them there, the great box boats, converging out of the haze on the Port of Newark, their decks loaded with the provender of the world. They process so silently and slowly, they can almost seem stationary, like oil rigs viewed from the Gulf Coast.
It is at first pleasurable to find oneself marooned by happenstance in a foreign city one knows absolutely nothing about. All around you people are going about their daily lives, rushing to catch commuter trains that will spirit them away to neighborhoods you cannot imagine, while you bob among them like flotsam in a current, aimless, borne along. But after three days the novelty begins to wear off and loneliness sets in. Amazement at the varieties of human strangeness gives way to sentimental thoughts of home.
BAD WEATHER. NIGHT. 35°04’N, 129°06’E.
The sun has sunk behind the mountains and on the blackening foothills the million lit windows look like stars. The Hanjin Ottawa finally arrived this morning at dawn, and an hour or so later Mr. Shin woke me with a phone call. I was to bring myself and my luggage to the customs house by 10 A.M. so that he could usher me through immigration. A day one of his ships comes in is for Mr. Shin a busy one. He had more important things to worry about, more valuable things, than some American idiot willing to throw away good money to cross the North Pacific aboard a container ship at the height of the winter storm season. But my mysterious travel agent had enlisted Mr. Shin’s services, and he’d accepted her payment, and now he was stuck with me.
BEAUTIFUL WONDER KOREA / IMMIGRATION SMART SERVICE, a sign outside the immigration office read. Inside, two uniformed bureaucrats sat behind a long desk under a wall clock. While Mr. Shin glanced frequently at the clock with an air of frantic impatience, the bureaucrat inspecting my passport glanced frequently at me with an air of bemused curiosity. He and Mr. Shin conversed in Korean, and at one point, something Mr. Shin said made them both laugh. Judging from the looks they gave me, I was the joke. At last, with a flurry of rubber stamping, the bureaucrat returned my documents to Mr. Shin, who spun on his heel and out the door to his paneled van, tugging on his leather driving gloves and beckoning me to follow.
Speeding along the docks, through a maze of interchanges and feeder roads, past acres of containers, above which poked the red booms of gantry cranes, we spoke only once, when out of nowhere, Mr. Shin said, “May I ask a question? Why you take the ship? Long time! Ten days!”
It was a good question, to which I had a number of complicated answers, but even if I could have made myself understood, there wasn’t enough time to explain to Mr. Shin about the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, or about turning a map into a world, or about my philosophical interest in the wilderness of water, so instead I told him that I was a writer, as if that explained anything. He shrugged and shook his head, as he did again upon delivering me to the Ottawa’s gangway, where a Filipino oiler named Marco Aaron descended the long, clattering flight of metal stairs to relieve me of my suitcase. “Safe voyage!” Mr. Shin exclaimed, still shaking his head. Then he sprang into his van and sped away.
Aaron handed me and my suitcase off to Joe the Messman, a cherubically youthful Filipino steward dressed in white, who led me down a narrow linoleum corridor. Entering a ship is always disorienting, I’ve found. All the corridors look the same, all the doors look the same. Even after a few days aboard, you still find yourself forgetting which way is froward, which way aft. Rising fourteen stories from the deck to the bridge, the house of the Ottawa—the habitable part—is a bit like a floating business-class hotel, a business-class hotel with a space-age control tower on top (the bridge), a factory (the engine room) in the basement, and lots of big red axes bracketed to the walls. Like a business-class hotel, the Ottawa has a gym, an elevator, even a swimming pool—empty now because it has to be pumped full of seawater, and the Ottawa has been traveling through frigid latitudes.
There are two lounges, one for the officers, one for the crew. Though similarly appointed—with wet bars, home theater systems, couches—the officers’ lounge is more ornately decorated. It has a painting of a mountain, a long box of surprisingly lifelike plastic plants, and a big glass case displaying a Japanese doll, a white-faced geisha in a kimono. In the crew’s lounge, by contrast, the only decoration is a poster-size pinup calendar, compliments of United Shipchandlers Ltd., on which a golden-haired bathing beauty can be seen lifting up her halter-top, offering the sex-starved Filipino oilers and deckhands a charitable peek at her shiny, suntanned, and preternaturally orbicular hooters.
In light of Mr. Shin’s bafflement, I was surprised to learn—from Joe the Messman—that I wasn’t the Ottawa’s only passenger. A retired couple named Bob and Claire are taking the round-trip from Seattle to East Asia and back. As soon as Joe had delivered me via elevator to my cabin—I have my own desk, television, DVD player, bathroom, and enough glassware to host a cocktail party—Bob and Claire turned up to welcome me aboard. They’d decided to take this voyage on a whim, Claire explained. Before marrying Bob, a divorcé with grown children, Claire had spent a few years living on a boat docked near Portland—not Portland, Maine, mind you, Portland, Oregon, which is where she and Bob live, though not in Portland, exactly, in a small town on its outskirts, a really lovely town, which Claire likes quite a lot. Anyway, as she was saying, she lived on this boat, this antique boat, that she’d spent all her free time restoring, a beautiful wooden boat, but it wasn’t really seaworthy, and she wasn’t really any kind of sailor, though living on that boat made her want to take an ocean voyage someday. As for Bob, well, until he retired two years ago, Bob was an engineer, and feats of engineering like container ships always interested him, and furthermore his grandfather had been a captain in the merchant marine during the last years of the age of sail. Claire had heard about this travel agency that arranged voyages on container ships, and so, well, next thing you knew, they were embarking from Seattle aboard the Ottawa, and now, two weeks later, after stopping in Yokohama and Shanghai, here they were in Pusan. So far they hadn’t been disappointed. The eastbound trip had been just lovely, a little rocky at first, but mostly lovely, Claire said, and the cook, who was getting off here in Pusan, sadly—sadly for us, not him, of course; he’d been at sea seven months, pour soul—the cook was absolutely wonderful, just wonderful, it was like eating in a fancy restaurant. She favors the first person plural (“We had to wait at anchor off Shanghai for three days because of a storm; it was just lovely”), whereas he prefers the all-knowing third person (“The storm had already passed, but they were backed up in the port”).
There’s nothing to dispel one’s fantasies of adventure like a retired couple on holiday. It’s as though, having attained base camp on Everest, one were to find a pair of senior citizens lounging in lawn chairs beneath the awning of a Winnebago.
One of my cabin’s two portholes looks out at the end of a maroon container, the other at the end of a white one. They are both the uppermost containers in their respective stacks, and they are close enough to my cabin that I could poke them with a broom handle if I had both the desire and a broom handle. Between the containers and the house is a sort of crevasse several feet wide and fifty feet deep. I undogged one of the portholes and, peeping down into the crevasse, felt a bit like a prisoner in a medieval dungeon.
Unlike my cabin, the officers’ lounge affords an excellent view of the forecastle deck, where two gantry cranes were at work, loading and unloading cont
ainers; a third was at work astern. I spent the afternoon watching them. Most of the time you see a gantry crane, it’s at rest, its boom pointing toward the sky, so that it resembles a steel brontosaurus. After a container ship has finished docking and the longshoremen have rolled the cranes into position on their enormous tires, the booms come groaning down.
At the shoreward end of the boom, where eighteen-wheelers had queued up, the operator sent down a kind of rectangular hoist called a “spreader.” It grasped a container by the corners, plucked it daintily from the trailer bed of an eighteen-wheeler, hoisted it 160 feet into the air, and slung it out to the ship. A skilled crane operator can move forty containers an hour. It is surprisingly graceful, this logistical trapeze, this ballet for heavy machinery, one crane operator zipping out as another zips back toward shore, one container dropping on steel cables like a spider on its thread, as another comes rising up out of the hold’s shadowy depths. A single container can weigh as much as forty tons, and whenever a crane lowers one into place, there is a great metallic kaboom that makes the bulkheads shudder.
The cranes do not merely unload the containers bound for Pusan and load the new ones bound for North America. They also rearrange containers according to a computer-generated stowage plan that takes into account a host of variables—the shape of the ship’s hull, the total weight of the cargo, the size and location of the ballast tanks. The calculations that the stowage software performs are complex, but their purpose is not. Their purpose, like that of everything in the shipping industry, is to maximize efficiency and minimize risk.28
The most important variable in the stowage software’s calculations is something naval architects call metacentric height, which is determined by the ship’s buoyancy and center of gravity. Think of an old-fashioned, windup metronome, an upside-down pendulum with a weight that slides up and down the stem. Slide the weight to the bottom of the pendulum and the pendulum will rock back and forth in short, quick, arpeggio arcs: tictoctictoctictoc. Slide the weight up to the pendulum’s tip and it will sweep from side to side in wide, slow andante arcs: tic . . . toc . . . tic . . . toc. A ship rolls the way an upside-down pendulum swings, with the keel at the base of the pendulum and the crow’s nest at its tip.
A vessel’s center of gravity is analogous to the metronome’s sliding weight. You can adjust it by adding or discharging cargo or ballast water. Make the center of gravity too low and the ship will be “stiff ”; a stiff ship is stable, but like a metronome set to allegro, it will jerk violently back and forth in short, quick rolls. Make the center of gravity too high and the ship will be “tender,” rolling steeply, righting itself slowly. With every roll the crow’s nest will swing way out over the water to starboard, then way out over the water to port, describing long, gut-wrenching arcs.
Once the crane operators finish their work, the lashing crew will have to finish theirs, and then the lashings and hatch covers will have to be inspected, and all this must be done according to strict stowage guidelines issued by the classification society, Germanischer Lloyd, that has certified the Ottawa as seaworthy. Classification societies, of which there are only several in the world, exist to minimize risks, but also to minimize liability. Underwriters will not insure an unclassified ship. If the officers of the Ottawa do not adhere strictly to Germanischer Lloyd’s stowage guidelines and something goes wrong at sea, the Ottawa’s owners rather than its underwriters could be held liable. Preventing liability is the second most important part of the captain’s job, after ensuring the safety of his crew. This night will be for the Ottawa’s captain a long one. It could be dawn before we get under way, he said.
Busy with preparations for our departure, he came to dinner late, just as the other officers were leaving, and, alone at his table, a linen napkin tucked into his collar, ate his pork stew in preoccupied silence, until Claire decided to bother him. His name is Uwe Jakubowski. A German of Russian descent, he is a big-shouldered, soft-voiced, white-haired man with a gap between his front teeth and a beaky wedge of a nose. His cheeks are ruddy with burst capillaries. Donning wire-rim glasses to study a logbook or an instrument, he resembles a professor reviewing his lecture notes.
Like all the officers, and most of the crew, Captain Jakubowski speaks English with an accent, but speaks it well. A modern container ship is a polyglot place. With the exception of the ship’s German mechanic, Klaus Scharmach, the Ottawa has an entirely Filipino crew. With the exception of the Filipino third mate, Ricardo Salva, and the Finnish second mate, Fredrik Nystrom, the officers are all German. You’ll hear Filipino deckhands speaking Tagalog or officers speaking German, but the lingua franca is English.
Claire asked the captain when he thought we’d reach Seattle, now that our departure from Pusan had been delayed. “They have us coming in on the 26th,” he said, untucking his napkin and pushing back his chair, “but I don’t think we’ll make it, because of the weather. It’s winter after all. Who knows? We may get lucky. But it looks like we will have bad weather.” Then, with a courteous, distracted gap-toothed smile, he excused himself to catch a few hours’ sleep.
This afternoon, up on the bridge, I checked the latest forecast, a litany of warnings. There are storms and gales expected in the western Aleutians, the waters east of Hokkaido, and the Sea of Okhotsk. Although it forebodes sleepless nights for the captain, this is good news for me. So long as I survive to tell the tale, I want to see just what the North Pacific can dish out. Odds are I will survive it, all too easily, but the odds are also good that we’ll see a little action, a little Sturm and possibly some Drang, before we make Seattle.
“For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars, and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the infinite,” Joseph Conrad asks in The Mirror of the Sea, “but thistle stalks, cobwebs, and gossamer?” Of course, a modern freighter like the Ottawa, or the China, or the Ever Laurel resembles a sailboat about as much as a 747 does a hang glider. Spars and canvas have given way to seventy-thousand-horsepower engines that burn two hundred metric tons of fuel per day. Wooden hulls have given way to steel, the astrolabe and sextant to gyrocompasses and satellites. And yet, today’s cargo vessels also take riskier routes.
When the trucking magnate Malcolm McLean perfected the humble intermodal shipping container in the early fifties, he revolutionized the stolid shipping industry. Containerization introduced efficiencies and economies of scale that made shipping fees plummet. The only way to make more money was to increase volume by making bigger vessels deliver more cargo faster. Hulls had to be enlarged—by 2006 they would exceed 1,300 feet in length, 340 feet longer than the QE2. Port times and transit times had to be shortened. Now, instead of keeping well away from winter storms, freighters travel between them, like cyclists riding the drafts of semis. And storms, like sleepy truckers, can sometimes take sudden, unforeseen turns.
This is one reason merchant seafaring is still, by some accounts, the world’s second most dangerous occupation, after commercial fishing. According to Imperial College London, two hundred supertankers and container ships have sunk in the past two decades because of weather. Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the European Space Agency, which studies sea conditions via satellite, estimates that two “large ships” sink every week on average. Most of these, he says, “simply get put down to ‘bad weather.’ ”
“The shipping industry is decades behind the airline industry” in its management of risk, says Geoffrey Gill, the maritime attorney I’d spoken with. Why?
“Because there are no passengers, and because most merchant mariners these days are Filipino. A lot of people don’t seem to care if twenty-five Filipino sailors drown.”
And drown they do. How many, exactly? Nobody knows for sure, but the number of accidental seafaring fatalities appears to exceed one thousand lives per year, and the number-one cause of death is believed to be drowning. Maritime losses—of cargo, vessels, digits, limbs, life—are enough to fill a few pages of the Lloyd’s List weekly Casua
lty Report. There are accounts of collisions, of fires, of piracy. Most of the casualties can be attributed to mechanical failures, human nefariousness, or human error, but around 10 percent of shipping casualties are indeed ascribed to bad weather and left otherwise unexplained. And dozens of the most catastrophic weather-related mishaps to have befallen container ships—such as the 2003 Maersk Carolina disaster, the 2006 P&O Nedlloyd Genoa disaster, the 2006 CMA CGM Otello disaster—bear a mysterious resemblance to the China disaster.
There’s no doubt that the China had encountered severe weather, as APL claimed, but severe weather at sea is routine during winter, when winds between Taiwan and Seattle often attain hurricane force, and waves routinely exceed thirty feet or, less routinely, forty to fifty feet. Sometimes, under the worst conditions, waves as high as seventy, eighty, ninety, even a hundred feet can loom up out of nowhere, spelling catastrophe. These great and sudden waves have seized the popular imagination, sinking a cruiser called the Poseidon in not one but two cheesy films. Their names make them sound as fabulous as the kraken—freak waves, rogue waves, extreme waves. My personal favorite is the German term Monsterwellen.
Was it a Monsterwelle that had ravaged the Evergreen Ever Laurel? Probably not. According to Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the ship had encountered hurricane-force winds and forty-foot waves—rough conditions, to be sure, but altogether typical of the North Pacific in winter, and twelve containers overboard isn’t, comparatively speaking, all that much; not enough to upset the underwriters. What about the China? To people like the longshoreman Rich Austin, it sure as hell looked like something monstrous had happened out there in the Graveyard of the Pacific. Still, even when a captain, with help from weather-routing services that recommend course changes via fax, can’t avoid severe weather, the ship is supposed to survive it. If the cargo has been properly lashed and the hatch covers tightly battened, if the engines have not failed and the helmsman has time to take evasive action, not even eighty-foot waves are supposed to send stacks of containers tumbling over the rails—certainly not 407 of them in a single night.