Moby-Duck

by Donovan Hohn

  Exactly what happened during that nightmarish hour and a half is difficult to say. Among the cartload of legal files archived at the federal courthouse in the Southern District of Manhattan you will not find transcripts of the depositions taken from the China’s crew, which remain sealed. I asked APL for access to them. They denied my request. I asked for access to the mariners themselves. Again, no.

  One of the lawyers deposing the mariners in Seattle in November of 1998 was Bill France, of Healy & Baillee, a once venerable, now defunct New York firm hired to represent APL and its underwriters. France, who grew up miles from the sea, on a mink farm in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, is not your typical maritime lawyer. When I called him to ask about the APL China, the deep-voiced person who answered agreed to meet with me but, before hanging up, said there were two things I should know: First, in honor of attorney-client confidentiality, we could discuss only what was already in the public record; second, the fifty-nine-year-old person I’d be meeting was no longer a man named Bill but a tall, transgendered, “somewhat mannish woman” called Willa.

  Not only is Willa France transgendered; she is a poet, a student of Jewish theology, and a certified naval architect.29 France knows about the mysticism of Buber and the prosody of Frost. She knows about the physics of waves and the applied science of engineering. I asked whether she wanted me to identify her as Willa in print, and she said yes and, in a characteristically eloquent e-mail, compared her transgendering to the change the China had undergone on its fateful ocean crossing. Not that it had been for her a personal disaster; quite the opposite. But it had been overwhelming, “not unlike the consequence of an elemental and unpredictable force.” Although no actual detectives were assigned to the case of the APL China, of all the lawyers involved, France, with her expertise in naval architecture, came closest to playing the part. She is this mystery’s Sherlock.

  Like the lawyers representing the cargo owners and their underwriters, France was at first skeptical about the story recounted by the China’s crew. The details didn’t make scientific sense. The ship’s anemometer, which measures wind speed, had been on the fritz, so the sea conditions recorded in the logbook were estimates made in darkness, in wildly “confused seas,” by sleep-deprived, tempest-tossed mortals, and the ship had been yawing hard, off its intended course. In confused seas, the waves move every which way, and the prevailing direction is difficult to determine. It would be understandable if the officers had been wildly confused too.

  “It was only after listening to four or five guys that I began to take them seriously,” France told me. Their stories all matched, and France discovered forensic evidence confirming some of the details—green water inside a running light up on the bridge, wave damage to the outermost containers in stacks still standing, a dent on the bow’s protective steel bulwark. But what finally made France a believer was the testimony of the China’s master, Parvez Guard.

  A seasoned mariner from India who’d been captaining container ships for fifteen years, Guard was an exceptionally expert witness, France said. In a deposition lasting three of the six days that the China spent in Seattle, Guard reconstructed the voyage day by day, then, as the time of the disaster neared, hour by hour, then minute by minute, corroborating his testimony with entries in the logbook. While that testimony isn’t in the public record, one very telling quote from it is. Just before the containers began to fall, the ship had suddenly become “uncontrollable,” Guard testified, “as if there were a devil in it.”

  NOT DOWN IN ANY MAP. 47˚6’N, 178˚1’E.

  Today, a little while ago, we came as close to the site of the toy spill as we’ll come, about 180 nautical miles north of the 45th parallel. The conditions were fairly calm. The sky was white, the water gray. There was a light roll to the ship. Wind out of the southeast, but we didn’t know how strong because the Ottawa’s anemometer, like that of the China a decade ago, is on the fritz. Fredrik Nystrom, second mate, was on watch. “You are lucky,” I told him upon entering the bridge after lunch, a bit giddy, and he looked at me with a skeptical smile. “You will be present for an exciting moment!” I said. I’d already recounted to him the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea.

  “Oh, yes?” he said. Humoring me, he calculated as precisely as possible when we would cross the longitudinal line I was waiting for, 178.1° E. For almost three years now I’ve been contemplating this anonymous place on the map, this nowhere, this freak coincidence of coordinates where there are no landmarks to be seen. “An event took place,” we say, and in taking place here, in taking this particular place, in tumbling overboard here, or near here, the toys transformed this middle of nowhere into the middle of somewhere, at least in my imagination. On a computer screen, Nystrom and I watched the degrees tick closer, 177.8, 177.9, 178.0. And then we were there.

  I rushed out onto a bridge wing, then down the metal staircases, six flights, to the main deck, all the while thinking of that day—or night—sixteen years ago, all the while wondering: Which twelve containers fell? Did two columns fall? Or containers from different columns? Were they to starboard or to port? Fore? Aft?

  As we steamed on at twenty-three knots, I felt as though the toys were still out there, as though the point I’d marked on my map were already slipping away, as if I were leaving the toys behind. I made my way to the Ottawa’s stern, where—below the aftmost rows of containers, stacked overhead, water raining down between them—there was a great cavern. Standing at the taffrail, I studied the horizon to the southeast, the horizon toward which the Ottawa’s wake foamed and frothed and stretched.

  The containers would still have been afloat. Perhaps, standing at the taffrail of the Ever Laurel on that day—if it had been day still and not night—you could have seen the colorful boxes, appearing and disappearing from behind the waves. Had the one containing the toys burst open yet? Had the brown cardboard boxes inside yet escaped? Perhaps. And perhaps even one or two of the cardboard boxes had already opened. Doubtful, but possible, depending on the physics of the spill and the qualities of the glue. Perhaps the little packages had already come bobbing to the surface and begun to drift apart.

  I had my own yellow duck in the pocket of my windbreaker, the duck Ebbesmeyer had given me, not the one I’d retrieved from Gore Point, and seriously considered chucking him overboard just to see with my own eyes that image I had been imagining, the image of a lone duck on the open sea. No one was around to stop me. I put my hand in my pocket. I felt the little plastic ball of its head. How easy it would be.

  The movement of water along the hull of a boat is deceiving. With no fixed point, it’s hard to separate the speed of the ship from the movement of the waves, which is why sailors in the past would throw a log overboard and count the knots of rope that unraveled behind it in order to calculate speed. How would the duck move across the chaos of the surface? I wondered. The Ottawa, big as it was, seemed hardly to move at all, but surely a little plastic duck would change the scale, making the ocean seem all the grander. Surely it would topple about, overturning and righting and overturning again, though I supposed it was possible that it might ride upright over the waves, the way we would like to picture it, sliding backward up to the crest, and then tipping as it slid down the other side, the waves moving beneath it. I withdrew my duck from my pocket, held it the way you’d hold a baseball, and leaned over the rail.

  But I hesitated. Jettisoning it seemed wrong, and not simply because I wanted to keep it, nor because I had promised to return it to Curtis Ebbesmeyer when I was done with it and still meant to keep my promise, nor because by jettisoning it I would be violating international law and making an infinitesimal contribution to the pollution of the sea. It seemed wrong because Moby Duck is and has always been a dream. The story I and others were enchanted by was enchanting because it was illusory, and no matter how much forensic evidence I assembled, it would remain illusory. A reenactment would get me no closer to that event. That event had taken place, but that place could not be visit
ed, because not even a container ship can subdue the seas of time. I knew that if I threw my duck overboard it would fall far short of the dream. I knew that if I threw it overboard, watching that yellow evanescent dot drift off, I’d be filled not with exhilaration but with disappointment and regret.

  Pocketing my duck, I opened my notebook. What to write? I should have prepared something! “Fare thee well,” I began, then scribbled it out, remembering the line from Moby-Dick. “Good-bye, Moby Duck!” I began again. “Thou cans’t never return! God keep thee!” Writing this, I wasn’t even sure what I meant by this. To what would Moby Duck wish to return?

  I tore the page free and folded it into quarters. On one side I drew a little duck, inscribing THE FIRST YEARS across its wing. On the other side, I wrote, QUACK! Then over the port rail of the deck I flung this little folded farewell, this prayer, the wind snatching it away faster than I’d anticipated. I lost sight of it the instant it left my fingers, and my heart sank. I had wanted to watch it drift away. But then, running to the taffrail, I saw it, leaping and spinning and diving over the boiling churn, blown open, fluttering, borne aloft by gusts of turbulence as if it were alive, dancing in the air. Then it dove suddenly down onto the white wake and was gone.

  I stood there, inside the thunderous cavern of the Ottawa’s stern, gazing at the spot while water dripped down onto my head from the containers above, and my hands went numb on the cold rail, and my ears ached in the wind, and I felt sad—not unsatisfied. Not wishing I could do something more. Not wishing I could tip 28,800 toys into the sea to watch them float away, or uncork a bottle of champagne. Not disappointed, exactly, but sad, as though I had lost something.

  I’m back in my little cabin now. It’s a slushy, half-frozen rain that I can see falling at an angle past my two portholes, the one looking out onto the maroon container, the other onto the white one. Although we are five days from Seattle, I think this trip may already be over. I just realized that we are, quite possibly at this very moment, crossing the international date line, which means that although yesterday was Tuesday, today it is Tuesday again, and for the first time since I flew to Hong Kong two weeks ago, it is the same day here as it is in New York. A minute ago, I was more than a day ahead of Beth and Bruno. Now I am six hours behind them. Only six more time zones to go.

  I’ve begun to wonder if the greatest peril modern-day merchant mariners face isn’t the life-threatening Monsterwellen but the mind-numbing boredom. The other night on the bridge Chief Officer Hermann Josef Bollig pointed out that there were “blue skies,” meaning clear ones. Stars were shining, the first we’d seen in days. Hanging above the horizon like an incandescent peach was the moon, bigger and yellower than it’s been. “That’s quite a moon,” I said. And Bollig said, “There’s a rumor they put a man on it.” He reminisced about watching the moonwalk on television as a boy. I asked if he’d wanted to be an astronaut. “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” he said. “I’m only intelligent enough to drive this ship.”

  Bollig, it turns out, is a perfectly friendly German giant, who has the charming habit of wearing his glasses on the back of his head when he doesn’t need them. Twice now he has delivered what is obviously a favorite line. Last night the line went like this: “The children they want the champagne and caviar.” Tonight it was “caviar and chocolate.” He has children, and so he rides the sea. That is all there is to it. Beside him, swaying with the rolls, listening to the ninety-five-revolutions-perminute throb of the engine far below, I asked him, “Do you still find it beautiful? The sea?”

  “No,” he said, still staring straight ahead. The one good thing about his job is that after four months away, he gets to spend three months at home in Saxony, lying in his hammock in his garden, his garden of apples and plums.

  All the Ottawa’s mariners seem to have terrestrial dreams. Captain Jakubowski dreams of New Zealand, where he hopes to vacation soon with his wife and two daughters. This morning during his coffee break in the ship’s office, he told me that in his youth he had read Conrad, and Melville, all the classics of naufragia, and they had fueled in him a yearning for the age of sail and for portages many weeks long and for the freedom shipmasters formerly enjoyed. Someday, he thought back when he was young, he’d buy a small freighter of his own, so that he could be both commander and boss, but in the sixties, when he first shipped out, such a dream had already been foredoomed by the container. “And so,” he said, “I have always been an employee.”

  “Who aint a slave?” Ishmael famously asks, but on a container ship one encounters degrees of slavery, as well as of freedom, six of them, at least. Ships have always been microcosms of the world onshore. The Ottawa is a little chip of Europe afloat on the North Pacific. Here, too, there are the executives and middle managers and menial laborers of a darker race, and even a few American tourists seeking pleasure, or thrills, or truth, or God, or wildness, or a hollow plastic duck.

  The other night, after taking my forbidden nocturnal walk, I spent an hour in the crew’s lounge drinking cheap red with the oilers Marco Aaron and Joel Nipales. On his last trip, Aaron’s ship, one even larger than the Ottawa, failed to escape a hurricane. “You know the distance from one wave to another wave?” he said. “It’s four hundred meters. Our ship’s four hundred meters also. It was rolling, pitching, everything.” Belowdecks in a storm like that, “every time you walk you have to carry your empty glass or empty bucket. So that you not throw up anywhere. As long as the engine’s running, nothing can happen to you. But once the engine stops, you have to pray. You have to call all the saints.”

  Seasick as he was, the homesickness may be worse. Every day at sea, Aaron misses his wife and baby daughter. She’ll be turning one next week, and he’s planning a long phone call as soon as we reach Seattle. He’s not sure he’ll last as long as Nipales, who, at forty-two, is eleven years older. But at sea, an oiler can make a decent living. “For one month we get $1,300 U.S.,” Aaron said. “But in the Philippines, if you’re going to work there, the maximum for the beginners, you’ll only earn $200.” Unlike the officers, the oilers and deckhands are not employees of NSB but temp workers subcontracted by an agency in Cyprus. The officers do four months on, three months off, whereas the oilers and deckhands ship out for seven months at a time; at the end of those seven months many sign on for seven more, and in some ports of call there’s not even time for shore leave. “It’s very hard. Seven months is too much,” Aaron said. “Almost 70 percent of your life you spend on a ship.” Nipales once spent twenty-six consecutive months at sea. Even more than what it would take to send the Ever Laurel’s twelve containers overboard, let alone the China’s 407, that’s something I have difficulty imagining.

  No one besides the mariners who were there will likely ever know exactly what happened aboard the Evergreen Ever Laurel that stormy day or night in January of 1992. Likewise no one will ever know what Parvez Guard and his crew went through on that stormy October night in 1998 aboard the China. Demonic possession, however, would never stand up in court. Given the stakes involved, APL subsidized an expensive forensic investigation led by Willa France.

  France hired three meteorological consultants to hindcast the sea conditions with computers. Next, she hired oceanographers to computeranimate what would happen to a C-11 container ship under the conditions the China encountered, and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands to conduct model tests in a wave tank three times as long as an Olympic swimming pool.

  If Parvez Guard was to be believed, the China, already hove to, couldn’t have fallen prey to synchronous rolling. Furthermore, the waves were too close together to sync with the ship’s roll period. But in 1973, experiments conducted with a scale model revealed that the hull shape of container ships made them vulnerable to a kind of rolling rarer and quite possibly more dangerous than synchronous rolling: “parametric rolling,” so called because it occurs not when a ship’s roll period is in sync with the waves but when the waves come exactly twice as fast as the ship rolls. Those mode
l tests proved that parametric rolling could be excited by stern-quartering seas—that is, when the waves hit the ship askance on either corner of the stern. France set out to prove that it could also occur in bow-quartering seas.

  Months after my trip aboard the Ottawa, she invited me to the East Harlem brownstone where she still lives with her wife of thirty-five years. While we ate sandwiches and pickles off silver plastic trays, France played me footage of the 1973 model tests. I watched as the toy boat first yawed a few degrees off its bearing, then suddenly began rolling hard—so hard the damn thing keeled right over. Next came the computer animations of a C-11 container ship hove to in bow-quartering seas. Away the China’s avatar went, pitching merrily along, up and down, over a red grid of giant waves until, suddenly, for no perceptible reason, something changed. The digital ship rolled. At first a little. Then more. Then more, until the bridge wings were ticktocking like a metronome.

  Then came the wave-tank experiment. Here again was a model boat, a replica of the China, which also went pitching merrily along in confused seas, actual ones this time, created by hydraulic paddles. For a minute it seemed as though the experiment would fail. “Nothing is happening,” France said, narrating for me, remembering for herself. “I’m beginning to bite my nails, because we’ve invested so much money in this and we’re not seeing what the computer program has predicted.” She stood next to the screen now to deliver her closing argument, pointing out details, like a weatherman delivering the forecast, a gray-haired weatherman in drag. “Now watch,” she said. As in the simulations, something subtly changed. The toy boat rolled a little to starboard as the bow pitched down, a little to port as the stern rocked back. Steadily, the amplitudes steepened. Finally there it was: full-on demonic possession, green water over the rails, waves swiping at the stacks.