Moby-Duck (42 page)

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 visited, 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 model 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.

Would any of these waves have qualified as genuine
Monsterwellen
? Probably not. The wave the officers described was monstrously large (taller than France's brownstone) but, computerized hindcasts showed, not statistically improbable. The ship was rolling so heavily, dipping its bridge wings so close to the water as it pitched into the troughs, that even a fifty-foot wave could have splashed them. Officers reported rolls as steep as 40 degrees—steeper and more violent than the steel lashings had been designed to endure. At 40 degrees, the stacks of containers would have been almost as horizontal as vertical, and a mariner standing on a bridge wing would have been staring into the abyss. The experiment proved that, under such conditions, if Parvez Guard had done everything he'd been trained to do, if he'd hove to and decelerated and the engines had not yet failed, the accident still would have occurred. And ironically, if Guard had not done what he'd been trained to do—if he'd maintained his speed, for instance—disaster might never have struck.

No judge ever decided whether France's explanation solved the mystery. APL settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. But France's discoveries did help limit APL's liability. “We got a very favorable settlement,” France told me. Not all of France's colleagues understood her fascination with the
China
disaster any better than they understood her poetry, or the mysticism of Buber, or, later, her metamorphosis, but in 2003, after the legal proceedings had all been settled, France published her findings in the journal of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. A few months later, under the headline “Parametric Rolling Will Rock Insurers,”
Lloyd's List
warned the marine-insurance industry of this “alarming new danger,” which appears to be an unintended consequence of the oversize, U-shaped, post-Panamax hull. France's findings not only helped explain the mystery of the
China;
they would later help explain what had happened to the Maersk
Carolina,
the
P&O Nedlloyd Genoa,
the
CMA CGM Otello,
and an unknown number of other maritime mysteries. In July of 2008 the American Bureau of Shipping and the Polish Registry of Shipping announced that they were embarking on a “multi-year, joint research and development program” to find technology that would help prevent parametric rolling in “extreme wave conditions,” hoping to exorcise once and for all the devil that possessed the
China.