The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (110 page)

Although usually regarded as an episode of the
Cold War between western-style democracies and communist regimes, in its geostrategic background the Korean War had more in common with the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century than with those of the second. The explicit appeal to the status quo of 1904 at the
Yalta Conference and the role of amphibious operations would be forgotten quickly in the rhetoric and nuclear posturing of the Cold War. But as one historian has noted, “
what created ‘an entirely new strategic situation in the Far East’ was not that Russia was interested in Korea—it had been for decades—but that the United States was interested.” This was of a piece with America’s self-imposed postwar burden, which began with the occupation of Germany and Japan, but grew as the United States anxiously embroiled itself in the assorted conflicts of the Cold War to contain communism and the petro-war to guarantee the flow of
Middle East oil.

The technological and tactical metamorphosis of naval warfare in the century between the start of the
Crimean War and the end of the Korean War was stunning in speed and scope. In barely three or four generations, the wooden walls that had characterized naval warfare since antiquity vanished utterly. In their place came previously unimaginable propulsion plants, navigation systems, and weaponry wielded with a precision and lethality that redefined the nature of naval combat and extended the range and speed at which fleets could fight. This transformation both required and made possible wholesale changes to the ways in which ships’ crews were recruited and prepared for service ashore and
afloat, and specialization and professionalization became watchwords of the service. Yet as in the merchant marine, the pace of change accelerated in the 1950s, and by the latter part of the decade the tactics and strategies so highly refined in two world wars were rendered obsolete, replaced by doctrines that addressed new concerns from the power of the atom to asymmetrical warfare.

At the start of the twentieth century, the size of a country’s merchant marine and navy served as a barometer of economic and military prestige, but this was no longer the case by the start of the third millennium, when it could be justly said, “
The world maritime industry increasingly operates without reference to specific national interests.” There are many reasons for this, but the summary explanation is globalization, a process to which the maritime industries have been both midwife and mirror, most obviously in their embrace of
containerization and flags of convenience. One aim of this book has been to consider the ways in which mariners have fostered cross-cultural interdependence over five thousand years of literate civilization and for many millennia before that. As in all spheres of life, progress has been fitful, with bursts of creative, expansionist energy punctuated by longer periods of settled routine and at times contraction. At present we are in the midst of an era of sustained and dynamic change. Developments in maritime technology, commerce, warfare,
exploration, and exploitation have altered our collective and individual relationships to the sea and maritime enterprise more in two or three generations than at any other time on record. Our interactions have been dictated by a host of new and in many cases previously unimaginable circumstances ranging from technology and legal regimens to international relations and the application of military force.

The most obvious reason for the shift in people’s appreciation of seafaring and its related disciplines is that maritime industries have largely vanished from public view, thanks to almost incalculable increases in automation and efficiency. Today, there are about
1.2 million seafarers in international trade worldwide, which means that less than half of one percent of the population moves 90 percent of the world’s freight over seas that cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Taken in these terms, shipping is a hyper-efficient industry. The introduction of steam and steel in the nineteenth century led to transformative increases in economic efficiency, reliability, range, speed, and, in the case of warships, killing power. While ships’ profiles and crew assignments changed, merchantmen and warships alike still required large companies of men. Instead of fisting canvas high in the rigging, they had descended to the infernos below deck to sweat as trimmers, stokers, and oilers in the bowels of steamships. But ships still called in the same ports, their crews flooded sailor towns as they had for millennia, and denizens of seaports the world over were wreathed in the sights, smells, and sounds of the sea and distant lands. This is no longer the case.

Ships have long been capable of carrying vastly more cargo than unmechanized or low-tech handling systems could effectively absorb, but stevedores in the 1950s performed essentially the same work in much the same way as stevedores in antiquity. Cranes facilitated lifting bundles of various kinds from the wharf into the hold and vice versa, but the real work was trying to arrange goods below deck, a physically demanding, often dangerous, and always time-consuming process that kept most vessels in port for as much time as they spent at sea. The contents of a ship’s hold frequently took as long to cross a pier as it did to cross an ocean.

A 1954 study of
the freighter
Warrior
revealed that it carried a little more than five thousand tons of goods divided among 194,582 cases, cartons, reels, barrels, drums, and other packages, as well as fifty-three vehicles. These arrived at the Brooklyn pier where the ship berthed in more than eleven hundred shipments. Loading the ship took six days (of one eight-hour shift per day) and more than five thousand dollars in rope and lumber was needed to secure the cargo above and below deck. The ship reached
Bremerhaven in ten and a half days, and stevedores working around the clock took four days to off-load the cargo, the last piece of which reached its ultimate destination more than a month later, and more than three months after the first item in the
Warrior
’s cargo had been sent from its point of origin to Brooklyn. The actual sea voyage from Brooklyn to Bremerhaven accounted for less than 12 percent of the cost of shipping and handling the goods; more than half went to loading and unloading the ship.

Into this morass of expense and inefficiency drove American trucking magnate
Malcom McLean, who purchased a shipping line so that he could wheel
his trucks onto the ship, forward them to a distant port, and drive them off to their ultimate destination. McLean decided that he could achieve even greater savings by removing the trailer bodies—or containers—from their wheelbase and stacking them, so in 1956 he purchased a surplus tanker, which he renamed the
Ideal-X
, and converted it to carry fifty-eight containers from
Newark,
New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. Loading the containers proceeded at a brisk pace of seven minutes per container, and when the voyage was complete, McLean discovered that the cost of loading the ship came to less than 16 cents per ton, compared with $5.83 per ton for loading the same amount of cargo in break-bulk form. Study after study found comparable results and in the 1960s, before the container revolution was fully realized,
Belgian
researchers showed that twenty men operating in a container terminal could load five thousand tons of cargo—about 165 containers—in the time it would take a hundred men to handle only twelve hundred tons of break-bulk goods. Even in its infancy, containerized goods required less than one-twentieth the manpower of break-
bulk cargo.

Stevedores, or longshoremen, off-loading cargo from a ship on the Mississippi River at New Orleans in the 1940s. While deck cranes provided some degree of automation, handling cargo remained a labor-intensive occupation, and a total of thirteen people can be seen in this tight picture of a relatively small ship. Within twenty years, the nature of commercial shipping had changed beyond all recognition, as is easily seen in the aerial photograph of the port of Singapore (see insert,
figure 24
). Courtesy of the Louisiana Digital Library.

Reducing inefficiencies in cargo handling was hardly a new goal. The Dutch had all but standardized the cargo-carrying
fluit
in the seventeenth century, and two hundred years later, short-haul ferries carried fully loaded railroad cars across rivers and lakes. A further step was taken in the 1920s with the
Seatrain Lines’ launch of two ships capable of carrying nearly a hundred railroad cars, loaded by crane, but this service never expanded beyond the original route between New Orleans and
Havana. McLean’s innovation stemmed from his ability to think outside the box, as it were, and ignore everything that shippers knew or thought they knew about shipping. This was facilitated by his having virtually no experience of ships or many of the other areas of expertise that would be affected by his ideas. “
McLean understood that reducing the cost of shipping goods required not just a metal box but an entire new way of handling freight. Every part of the system—ports, ships, cranes, storage facilities, trucks, trains, and the operations of shippers themselves—would have to change.” And, in less than a generation, everything did.

Efficiency required purpose-built “fully cellular container ships,” the holds of which comprise a series of deep bays lined with vertical guides that keep stacks of containers aligned. It took several years before there was international agreement on standard sizes for containers, the basic unit being a box twenty feet long, eight feet wide, and eight and a half feet tall. Although the most common unit is twice as long, container ships are customarily measured in terms of twenty-foot equivalent units, or
TEUs; a forty-foot container hauled by an eighteen-wheeler counts as two TEUs. The hull of the 9,600 TEU
Xin Los Angeles
(the biggest container ship in the world when launched in 2006; the largest being built as of 2013 are 18,000 TEU) is 337 meters long, 46 meters across, and can carry eighteen rows of containers on deck in stacks of up to eight tiers; below deck, the hold is sixteen containers wide and ten tiers deep. Loading containers is done by huge shoreside gantry cranes that pluck a container from the back of a truck, lower it into the hold, pluck another container from inside the hold and lower it onto the back of another truck. Cranes in a small port like Oranjestad, Aruba, can move twenty to thirty containers per hour. Larger individual cranes move at twice that rate, and in the most efficient ports, several cranes work a ship simultaneously to ensure turnaround times of only eighteen hours for even the largest vessels.

Containerization required completely new approaches to shoreside
shiphandling, and effectively spelled the end of the cosmopolitan seaport. Container terminals are situated on large, flat areas with easy access to highways and railways and ample space for storing containers and parking trucks, and they are dominated by massive gantry cranes that run parallel to the water’s edge and are capable of hoisting or lowering a thirty-ton container into the lowest tier in the outermost row of a ship nearly fifty meters wide. Ensuring the smooth flow of containers requires the intricate choreography of ships, trucks, and trains so that the right container goes on the right vehicle in the right order. The last is crucial to a ship’s stability, and
computer-generated loading plans have to take into account a container’s weight (the heaviest generally going lower in the hold) and the port where it is to be offloaded. Determining the bay, tier, and row for each container on a ship that may carry upward of four thousand of them requires complex algorithms. This infrastructure makes
container ports completely incompatible with traditional working waterfronts, and from the start new ports had to be built, usually on marginal land well away from congested urban areas. But these sprawling centers of material distribution lack the cultural amenities of city life, and with crews given only a few hours for shore leave, if any, they have none of the feel of seaports as they were up until the middle of the twentieth century.
Alexandria,
Quanzhou, Venice, Batavia,
San Francisco, and
Rio de Janeiro were centers not just of commerce but of people. Even ports that served as gateways to a more prominent parent city developed complex, cosmopolitan identities in their own right, as was the case with Piraeus and Ostia. Container ports like the Port
Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal on New York Harbor and the Port of Felixstowe on the
North Sea coast of England bear the same relationship to traditional ports that suburban malls have to downtown shopping districts, and even the nomenclature is the same: box ships supply box stores.

Containerization could not reach its potential without a thorough overhaul of rules and regulations governing
freight forwarding, customs clearance, and insurance. A container in an intermodal environment might be “stuffed” at a factory in one country, driven or put on a train through one or more countries en route to a port in a third, shipped overseas to a fourth country, and delivered for “unstuffing” in a fifth. Subjecting the cargo to customs inspections at each border would slow the delivery time and thus run counter to the spirit of expediting trade, so new methods of approving cross-border shipments had to be devised. Insuring containerized cargo against loss was also problematic when it became nearly impossible to determine who was at fault for damages in a closed container that passed through five or more hands. And shippers resisted delaying cargoes for inspection by law enforcement officials trying to stop smuggling, human trafficking, and, in recent years, bombs.
Once regarded as insoluble obstacles to the success of containerization, these bureaucratic issues were ultimately solved thanks to computerization and the revision of rules regarding bills of lading and insurance liability.