Container ships are the "invisible industry that brings you 90% of everything"--a reference to the fraction of trade that moves by sea. Rose George, a writer and journalist, became the last officially allowed passenger on a British flagged merchant vessel of Maersk, a Danish company whose ships burn more oil than Denmark does, her mission being simply to make it more visible to those who want to see, but don't go to sea.
The Maersk Kendal, a mid sized box carrier, took Ms George from Felixstowe to Singapore over 39 days in 2011, via the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Gulf of Aden (the danger point that has stamped out the business of carrying passengers since), and the Indian Ocean. Along with her it took twenty one crew and six thousand of the "twenty foot equivalent units" (containers) that revolutionised shipping and launched its productivity into orbit. Based on export patterns, one may imagine that the boxes were largely empty on leaving the UK, and considerably more full on the return from the far east. But that isn't true. Shipping is actually so cheap that it is cost effective to send Scottish cod 16,000km to China to be filleted and then returned to be sold in Scottish chippies. Facts like these are the illuminating backbone of this cool book.
Following in this vein, a sweater can be shipped 5,000km for 2.5 cents. And shipping's carbon footprint per mile is a tenth of road freight (which is a tenth of air). That's why it is successful. But its success also means that if shipping was a country it would be a bigger carbon emitter than Germany. And yet it was never considered in the '97 Kyoto protocol.
Part of this cheapness is the ruthless cutting of costs. Quite apart from efficiency gains which drastically reduced dock labour, accompanied by ultimately futile resistance, a ship that is three football pitches long is run by a handful of officers and a non-officer crew that is usually Filipino ("We are cheap and we speak good English"). While they earn enough to attract them to the career (and away from their families for long stretches of time), national labour laws don't reach them. But the risks of the high seas do. Seafaring fatalities are ten times those of land based jobs (and piracy isn't a big source of that statistic). Two thousand of the several hundred million containers that cross the world each year fall into the sea and are lost, occasionally washing up ashore, or doing damage to small boats (such as Robert Redford's in "All is Lost")
And then there is piracy. At the time of this book's writing a few hundred hostages were being held aboard more than a dozen hijacked ships. Violent attack rates on seafarers top those in South Africa (where violent crime is the land-based world's highest). Many pirate attacks are repelled by armed guards on vessels, but Maersk's policy doesn't include these. (Two years prior the Maersk Alabama was hijacked, and a film has since been made of this, centred around the text authored by Alabama's Captain Richard Phillips). Some of the high risk area is patrolled by military ships of counter piracy coalitions, but the distances are huge ("like patrolling western Europe with a couple of police cars whose top speed is 15mph"), and 42,000 merchant ships make the crossing annually. And most intercepted pirates are eventually let go, for lack of willing states to provide trial courts. Thus piracy remains an attractive profession, relative to its land-based alternatives, particularly in (mostly) Somalia where the hazard of coast guards is also absent. Ms George makes a side trip to Mogadishu with an EU navy ship on pirate watch to uncover these observations. There is also an account of the testimony of a former hostage.
More uplifting perhaps is the recollection of the rescue operation undertaken by the captain of Maersk Kendal four years previously (when the ship was new). 19 of 24 crew of a sunk Thai boat were saved. Smaller ships did not all respond to the distress call, contrary to international convention. Responding incurs considerable personal risk, some heroism, and abandoning passage and delaying berth incurs financial costs. For Kendal's British captain (42 years at sea) though, there was no question of doing otherwise.
But the treasure trove of this book is in the detail and observations of a lonely, quite harsh, not particularly glamorous ("I've travelled the world, but it all looks like my gangway/bridge/engine room") but sometimes beautiful life at sea. And a rare window into a business ubiquitous to almost everything, but almost completely hidden from public view.
The Maersk Kendal, a mid sized box carrier, took Ms George from Felixstowe to Singapore over 39 days in 2011, via the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Gulf of Aden (the danger point that has stamped out the business of carrying passengers since), and the Indian Ocean. Along with her it took twenty one crew and six thousand of the "twenty foot equivalent units" (containers) that revolutionised shipping and launched its productivity into orbit. Based on export patterns, one may imagine that the boxes were largely empty on leaving the UK, and considerably more full on the return from the far east. But that isn't true. Shipping is actually so cheap that it is cost effective to send Scottish cod 16,000km to China to be filleted and then returned to be sold in Scottish chippies. Facts like these are the illuminating backbone of this cool book.
Following in this vein, a sweater can be shipped 5,000km for 2.5 cents. And shipping's carbon footprint per mile is a tenth of road freight (which is a tenth of air). That's why it is successful. But its success also means that if shipping was a country it would be a bigger carbon emitter than Germany. And yet it was never considered in the '97 Kyoto protocol.
Part of this cheapness is the ruthless cutting of costs. Quite apart from efficiency gains which drastically reduced dock labour, accompanied by ultimately futile resistance, a ship that is three football pitches long is run by a handful of officers and a non-officer crew that is usually Filipino ("We are cheap and we speak good English"). While they earn enough to attract them to the career (and away from their families for long stretches of time), national labour laws don't reach them. But the risks of the high seas do. Seafaring fatalities are ten times those of land based jobs (and piracy isn't a big source of that statistic). Two thousand of the several hundred million containers that cross the world each year fall into the sea and are lost, occasionally washing up ashore, or doing damage to small boats (such as Robert Redford's in "All is Lost")
And then there is piracy. At the time of this book's writing a few hundred hostages were being held aboard more than a dozen hijacked ships. Violent attack rates on seafarers top those in South Africa (where violent crime is the land-based world's highest). Many pirate attacks are repelled by armed guards on vessels, but Maersk's policy doesn't include these. (Two years prior the Maersk Alabama was hijacked, and a film has since been made of this, centred around the text authored by Alabama's Captain Richard Phillips). Some of the high risk area is patrolled by military ships of counter piracy coalitions, but the distances are huge ("like patrolling western Europe with a couple of police cars whose top speed is 15mph"), and 42,000 merchant ships make the crossing annually. And most intercepted pirates are eventually let go, for lack of willing states to provide trial courts. Thus piracy remains an attractive profession, relative to its land-based alternatives, particularly in (mostly) Somalia where the hazard of coast guards is also absent. Ms George makes a side trip to Mogadishu with an EU navy ship on pirate watch to uncover these observations. There is also an account of the testimony of a former hostage.
More uplifting perhaps is the recollection of the rescue operation undertaken by the captain of Maersk Kendal four years previously (when the ship was new). 19 of 24 crew of a sunk Thai boat were saved. Smaller ships did not all respond to the distress call, contrary to international convention. Responding incurs considerable personal risk, some heroism, and abandoning passage and delaying berth incurs financial costs. For Kendal's British captain (42 years at sea) though, there was no question of doing otherwise.
But the treasure trove of this book is in the detail and observations of a lonely, quite harsh, not particularly glamorous ("I've travelled the world, but it all looks like my gangway/bridge/engine room") but sometimes beautiful life at sea. And a rare window into a business ubiquitous to almost everything, but almost completely hidden from public view.