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90% of everything moves by ship, but these days we barely think about shipping. It's just something that happens. Rose George has written an interesting book about the human experience of maritime shipping today, but one that I wish got a little more technical.
The book is structured around a journey from the UK to Singapore on the Maersk Kendal, a 300m containship capable of hauling almost 6500 standard contains or 75000 tons of cargo. Kendal is captained by a senior Brit with 40 years of maritime experience, and crewed by a multi-ethnic group of 20 men and one woman (the cook), mostly Filipino, but with Indians, Ukrainians, and Chinese as well. The first line on being a sailor on one of these ships is "don't". Pay is miserable, conditions are worse, with long hours, bad food, and a very real risk of death.
While tradition has the Captain as sole authority at sea, these days he's the man who responsible for adjudicating costs and risks between the ship, its owners, its management charter, the sailor's commissioning agents, the cargo owner, insurers, the flag registry, etc, with many of these groups hidden behind layers of international shell companies. For the average sailor turning a wrench, this means that a job with 14 hour days, no breaks, no friends, and sub-US minimum wages can easily turn into one where you haven't been paid in months, the shipping company is demanding that you set sail in an unsafe vessel, and the people who have the power to literally save your life are insulated by so many layers of lawyers they're untouchable.
George spices up the rather humdrum voyage with pirate hunting in Somalia, work at a sailor's mission in the UK, whale biologists attempting to reduce the environmental impacts of shipping, and a history of shipwrecks and survival in the open sea. She's a skilled non-fiction writer. But what drops the book a star for me is that George can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the stuff of shipping. Containization and computerized cargo management have revolutionized logistics. The ships are the largest mobile objects ever created by man. But given an opportunity to go down into one of the massive maneuvering thrusters, George demurs: It's too dark, too cramped, too noisy, too clammy.
Please. You're writing 300 pages of shipping. At least see the whole ship.
The book is structured around a journey from the UK to Singapore on the Maersk Kendal, a 300m containship capable of hauling almost 6500 standard contains or 75000 tons of cargo. Kendal is captained by a senior Brit with 40 years of maritime experience, and crewed by a multi-ethnic group of 20 men and one woman (the cook), mostly Filipino, but with Indians, Ukrainians, and Chinese as well. The first line on being a sailor on one of these ships is "don't". Pay is miserable, conditions are worse, with long hours, bad food, and a very real risk of death.
While tradition has the Captain as sole authority at sea, these days he's the man who responsible for adjudicating costs and risks between the ship, its owners, its management charter, the sailor's commissioning agents, the cargo owner, insurers, the flag registry, etc, with many of these groups hidden behind layers of international shell companies. For the average sailor turning a wrench, this means that a job with 14 hour days, no breaks, no friends, and sub-US minimum wages can easily turn into one where you haven't been paid in months, the shipping company is demanding that you set sail in an unsafe vessel, and the people who have the power to literally save your life are insulated by so many layers of lawyers they're untouchable.
George spices up the rather humdrum voyage with pirate hunting in Somalia, work at a sailor's mission in the UK, whale biologists attempting to reduce the environmental impacts of shipping, and a history of shipwrecks and survival in the open sea. She's a skilled non-fiction writer. But what drops the book a star for me is that George can't seem to muster up any enthusiasm for the stuff of shipping. Containization and computerized cargo management have revolutionized logistics. The ships are the largest mobile objects ever created by man. But given an opportunity to go down into one of the massive maneuvering thrusters, George demurs: It's too dark, too cramped, too noisy, too clammy.
Please. You're writing 300 pages of shipping. At least see the whole ship.