Sailing on the lawless seas

William Langewiesche is the master of reconstructing disaster, a keen and patient observer who can make man-made behemoths come alive even as they die. A professional pilot and correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, he’s brought his skills of technical analysis to bear in books and articles on the mysterious crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 five years ago and the dismantling of the World Trade Center wreckage after 9/11. In his new book, “The Outlaw Sea,” Langewiesche turns his attention to the ships that sail and sink on the world’s oceans.

In the international shipping industry, Langewiesche finds crime, exploitation and despoilment of frightening proportion. “The ocean is a realm that remains radically free,” he begins. “Expressing that freedom are more than forty thousand large merchant ships that wander the world with little or no regulation.” What follows is a brief for imposing the rule of law on the unruly seas and a study in how difficult -- impossible? -- it would be to do so. Ships go virtually ungoverned despite the fact that (or perhaps because) they are the vessels of global capitalism. The goods they carry across the oceans that cover 70% of the globe include nearly half the total value of American foreign trade. The lack of regulation allows owners and sponsors to maximize profits. It means that the go-between agents who hire the ships’ crews, usually from poor regions of southern Asia, can hide from liability behind the veil of shell corporations. And it means that ship owners can buy “flags of convenience” from the registry of any number of nations.

The United States set up this system at the beginning of World War II to skirt its own neutrality laws: American ships flagged as Panamanian could make delivery runs to Britain without drawing the threat of war. When a host of small countries cashed in by putting up their flags for sale in the 1980s, the major powers lost control. The result has been a race to the bottom, Langewiesche writes, with ship owners free to pick the registry that’s most willing to forgo real oversight. The International Maritime Organization, a creation of the United Nations, is supposed to set standards for large ships. But with no enforcement powers, it’s a toothless bureaucracy. In a world in which paperwork is everything, one industry observer tells Langewiesche that “you can get all the paperwork you want, no problem.”

Langewiesche notes that the lack of regulation has reduced the cost of transporting tea to England, for example, by a hundredfold. But gains in profit and savings for consumers have been losses for security. The lawless anonymity that characterizes the shipping industry is perfectly suited to groups such as Al Qaeda. One of the group’s ships brought to Africa the explosives that were used in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The vessel was never found. Ships are all too easily repainted, re-flagged and sent off on another voyage. “The fear on everyone’s mind is that a nuclear device or some other weapon of mass destruction will pass through a port with little chance of being discovered,” Langewiesche writes. This is well-traveled territory, but in his capable hands the dire predictions come steeped in details that convey the creepy ring of truth.

The book’s most gripping tale is about a cellphone-toting gang of modern-day pirates. In 1999, the Alondra Rainbow was sailing the South China Sea near Indonesia with a cargo of aluminum ingots worth $10 million, when 15 pirates made a swift and effective attack. Stripped of its load of ingots and its crew cast adrift, the Alondra Rainbow disappeared -- and then resurfaced off the coast of India with a new coat of paint and a new name: the Mega Rama. The pirates were eventually caught, tried and sentenced. But to Langewiesche, the lesson of the Alondra returns to the sea’s lawlessness. He visits the pirates in prison and finds them “biding their time, unrepentant and undeterred.”

That essentially sums up Langewiesche’s conclusions: The ocean must be tamed; it is untamable. He dutifully recounts the environmental and human costs of decrepit tankers that spew oil onto coastal waters and beaches, overloaded and neglected ferries that sink hundreds of passengers, and the South Asian shipyards where ancient ships are torn apart at the hands (literally) of soot-covered laborers. But Langewiesche reports about these crises from a distance. He has said that he wants to write “something like history in the present tense,” bringing to his subjects “some of the detachment that history does bring.” To a large degree, he succeeds. Yet his detachment makes him better at things than at people. There’s more energy and emotion in his technical descriptions of a sinking ship, for example, than of the crew and passengers inside.

At the same time, Langewiesche’s dispassionate stance saves him from grasping for easy solutions. The oceans are in serious trouble, as a recent report about America’s coastal waters by a federal commission makes urgently clear. That report calls for a host of changes, like an oceans trust fund and a streamlining of the patchwork of federal and state agencies. Yet Langewiesche won’t shy from saying that such efforts will likely mean little on a global scale. The world is too big for effective governance, and the worst abuses will simply move to different shores.

Consider the Greenpeace campaign to clean up the polluted wasteland of Alang, India, where hundreds of old ships go each year to die. In his concluding chapters, Langewiesche gives us the perspective of a shipyard businessman, who says he’d like to ask the environmentalists if they think poor Indians should prefer to die from starvation rather than pollution. When Langewiesche replies that Greenpeace would say that Indians don’t have to make that choice, the businessman curtly dismisses him. Langewiesche concedes the point. He observes that Greenpeace will probably succeed only in driving such operations to Bangladesh, where wages are lower and regulation even more lax. This may be no kind of choice, but it appears to be all the choice there is. And if that makes for unsettling reading, then rightly so.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Legal Affairs magazine.