Deep Sea and Foreign Going is
subtitled Inside Shipping: the invisible industry that brings you
90% of everything. It's an account of a voyage from Felixstowe to
Singapore and is written to counter “sea-blindness”. As Rose
George makes her way through the chain link fences and security
checks at Port of Felixstowe she attempts to make the reader
understand the size of the vessel she's about to board and the scale
of the industry generally. She looks up 60 metres to the top of the
Maersk Kendal, the vessel she's about to board; above her are
gantry cranes 10 stories high. She blasts us with statistics “If
the containers of Maersk alone were lined up, they would
stretch11,000 miles, or more than half way around the planet. If they
were stacked instead, they would be 1500 miles high, 7530 Eiffel
Towers. If the Kendal discharged her containers onto trucks
the line of traffic would be 60 miles long.”
Her overall contention is that the
larger these ships have grown, the smaller the place they occupy in
our imagination. And not only the ships but the companies who manage
them: Maersk, she points out is a global corporation with revenues
only slightly less that that of Microsoft. “Microsoft provides the
software that runs the computers: Maersk brings us the computers, One
is infamous; somehow the other is mostly invisible.”
Deep Sea and Foreign Going is a
gloriously crusading book. George is outraged by the flag of
convenience system “even offshore bankers have not developed a
system as intricately elusive”, by the conditions of employment for
crew-members (especially Asiatics), by the ecological implications (a fascinating chapter on
noise trauma suffered by whales) and above all by the apparently
casual acceptance of the piracy by the global community. As George
embarked from Felixstowe in June 2011 she records that 544 seafarers
were currently being held hostage by Somali pirates. “I try to
translate this into other transport industries. 544 bus drivers, or
544 can drivers, or nearly two jumbo jets of passengers mutilated and
tortured for years for doing their job. When 33 Chilean miners were
trapped under ground for 69 days in 2010 there was a media frenzy […]
The 24 men on MV Iceberg held captive for 1000 days were given
nothing much more than silence and disregard.”
There are complex reasons for this –
not least the flag of convenience system which allows nations and
owners to shuffle off responsibility. When I watched the film Captain
Philips recently, the first thing that struck me was how unusual
it was to see the US flag on the stern of a merchant ship. The second
thing, how surprising to see a crew of Westerners manning a container
ship and finally, how extraordinary to see a response of such
brutality and effectiveness as the Navy SEALS killing of the pirates.
The fourth pirate, Abdulwali Muse is currently serving 34 years in a
US gaol and has made several suicide attempts. In the normal course
of events – as documented by George – pirates are very rarely
prosecuted. The UK has never prosecuted a Somali pirate: neither has
Portugal. George spends a week on board the Portuguese warship Vasco
da Gama on anti-piracy patrol duty from Mombasa. The Commanding
Officer tells her of his frustration when he has “17 pirates on
board for 12 days and no-one wants to take them. I have to leave them
on a beach to be pirates again two weeks later.” There should, says
George, be “meaningful risk” for the pirates as there is for
their potential victims.
Deep Sea and Foreign Going is
one of the best books I've read. It won a Mountbatten Maritime Award
for best literary contribution in 2013 but somehow that doesn't feel
sufficient. A maritime award is likely to promote the book to the
people who should already be aware of the issues addressed. If the
“invisible industry” is to take its proper place in public
consciousness this is a book that should be read by everyone.
 |
| Container ships at Felixstowe I am sailing past in Peter Duck |
No comments:
Post a Comment