The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (111 page)

Even if basic delays were not an issue, the detailed investigation of all cargoes is impossible simply due to the overwhelming volume of trade in the container age. In 2007, the strategically located
port of
Singapore handled twenty-eight million TEUs, more than any other port, many of them being transshipped between long-haul ships and vessels serving feeder routes from Australia to India to China. This was more than 10 percent of the world’s containers, equal to more than 80 percent of the containers handled by the four largest European container ports combined, and a third more than passed through the three largest ports in the United States. By far the
busiest long-distance routes are across the Pacific between Asia and North America, between Europe and Asia, and between North America and Europe. Although the linear dimensions of the locks of the
Panama Canal (320 meters long by 33.5 meters across, with a depth of 12.6 meters) long dictated the maximum size of most ships, in the late 1990s shipowners realized that larger ships could profitably spend their entire career shuttling across the Atlantic or the Pacific, or between Asia and Europe, and they began ordering “post-Panamax” ships on the theory that they would never have to transit the canal anyway.

Periodically enlarged since its opening, the
Suez Canal has always been able to accommodate ships too large to fit through the Panama Canal, but
oil
tankers began to outgrow the Suez Canal in the 1960s thanks to the growth of the
Japanese economy and hostilities in the
Middle East, the source of most of the world’s oil. Between 1900 and the 1960s, tankers averaged less than 20,000 deadweight tons (dwt), but the first very large crude carrier (VLCC, up to 250,000 dwt) was built for service between the Middle East and Japan. The closure of the Suez Canal for six years after the Arab-Israeli
Six-Day War in 1967 forced tankers bound from the
Persian Gulf to western Europe or the Americas to sail via the Cape of Good Hope. To offset the cost of the longer distances by improved economies of scale, shippers ordered ever-larger ships and the first ultra-large crude carrier (ULCC, more than 250,000 dwt) slid down the ways in 1968. The largest ship ever built, the Japanese
Seawise Giant
(1979) had a capacity of more than 555,000 dwt, and at 458 meters (1,504 feet) was longer than the Sears Tower is tall. Just as containerization has led to the creation of distinctive new and remote ports, the deep draft of VLCCs and ULCCs—some require up to twenty-six meters of water below the keel—limits the number of ports they can access to off-load their cargoes. In the United States the only facility they can reach is the
Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (the Loop), in the
Gulf of Mexico
eighteen miles south of Grand Isle, the pipeline of entry for about 10 percent of the country’s foreign oil imports.

Increased ship size and faster turnaround times are an inevitable result of a broader trend toward designing merchant ships for ever more specialized purposes, which began with the delineation between cargo and passenger ships.
Bulk cargoes were more susceptible to innovation than break-bulk, and automation brought huge gains in efficiency in loading commodities like grain,
coal, and iron ore even in the nineteenth century. In 1839, the brig
Osceola
delivered the first bulk cargo of grain from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, where it took a week to off-load 1,678 bushels of grain (about fifty-three tons). Today, grain is routinely off-loaded by mechanical crane and bucket systems at rates of a thousand tons per hour. The growth of Europe’s population and economy created high demand for agricultural products from around the world. Shipping grain and wool posed no difficulty, but the next breakthrough was the development of shipboard refrigeration, initiated by the French with shipments from
Argentina in the 1870s and
Australians and
New Zealanders in the 1880s. Perfection of cold storage afloat meant that meat and dairy products could be shipped to markets halfway around the world. By the early 1900s,
refrigerated ships (or reefers, for short) also carried fruits and flowers from growers in the
Caribbean and
West Africa to markets in Europe and North America. Following the success of oil tankers, shippers began to experiment with tankers for liquid chemicals (called packet tankers) and, with the perfection of refrigeration, potables and comestibles. In the 1970s, the
Guinness brewing company maintained a fleet of tankers to carry stout across the
Irish Sea, and following her retirement from that trade the
Miranda Guinness
entered service as a wine and
olive oil tanker in the Mediterranean.

The paradox is that despite the wild proliferation of ship types for niche markets, the gigantic size of many ships, and the growth in the sheer numbers of the world fleet—45,000 ships of more than a thousand tons in 2010, half again as many as a century ago—the shipping industry as a whole has largely faded from view. Not only has the supporting infrastructure been moved away from population centers, but the number of
people employed at sea and alongshore has actually shrunk. The dockworkers who feared that tankers like the
Glückauf
would lead to a decline in the number of people needed to handle the ship at sea or wharfside were proven correct almost immediately, and break-bulk cargo handlers faced the same fate with containerization. An English study showed that by 1970 productivity per man-hour had risen eighteenfold, from 1.67 tons to 30 tons. Global figures are not available, but despite huge increases in the volume of goods handled, the story was the same everywhere: waterfront employment crashed—on the East Coast of the United States from
51,000 in 1952 to 15,000 twenty years later; from 60,000 in England in the 1960s to 15,000 in 1972; from 30,000 in the 1950s to around 2,000 at the turn of the millennium in Australia. Since the nineteenth century, maritime labor unions had been among the most active, radical, and successful in the call for workers’ rights. The rise of containerization coincided with the peak of their power, which all but guaranteed that efforts to resist downsizing the workforce would be fierce. Yet the change was not without positive consequences for dockworkers able to keep their jobs, as wages tended to rise owing to the more technically sophisticated nature of the work, and what had been a largely casual workforce gave rise to one with more permanent employment.

If the
Glückauf
’s dockworkers could have even envisioned a ship the size of the
Seawise Giant,
with a capacity more than two hundred times that of its forerunner, they would never have believed that it could be sailed by a crew of forty—only ten more men than the
Glückauf
itself. Comparable reductions in manning requirements can be found across the board. As automation has taken hold in engine rooms, on deck, in galleys, and on the bridge, the size of crews has fallen sharply. No more than seventeen people are needed for the average modern ship employed in blue-water trades, and some naval architects have been working to develop fully automated vessels requiring no crew at all. At the same time, unions, governments, and other organizations concerned about lost jobs, environmental protection, crew morale, and safety have fought to keep manning requirements at what some shipbuilders and accountants consider artificially high levels. The container ship
President Truman
of 61,875 gross tons was designed to sail with a crew of only eleven, but under United States regulations the ship is required to carry a crew of twenty-one. Such efficiencies have implications for working conditions aboard ship, safety from
piracy, and the relationship between seafarers and the shoreside communities they ultimately serve but to whom they are all but invisible and unknown.

The working conditions and wages of shoreside laborers are subject to the law of the land, and so are those of sailors. However, thanks to shipowners’ growing reliance on flags of convenience and the emergence of a global labor market for merchant mariners, sailors increasingly work on ships of a different nationality from their own or that of their employers. The national flag has long afforded a ship the protection of the country it represents, and the custom of flying another nation’s flag to benefit from diplomatic privileges it offers is an old one. The French allowed foreign vessels to fly the tricolor
to trade to Ottoman ports in the Black Sea in the sixteenth century, and by the twentieth it was widely accepted that any country had
the right to grant nationality, including its laws and the protection of its flag, to ships. The practice of registering ships began in Britain, where the first registry was published as a way to determine where a vessel was owned to ensure that it was in conformity with the
Navigation Acts stipulating which ships could legally land goods in English ports. Other countries followed suit, and in the nineteenth century the intent of registration came to focus on ships’ technical details for reasons of safety. Information published in registers now includes when and where a ship was built, particulars about its hull material, dimensions, propulsion, alterations, and inspections. But authorities’ interest in such matters varies from country to country, a fact that shippers have eagerly exploited.

Faced with a glut of merchant shipping after World War I, the United States government sought to sell surplus tonnage without disadvantaging American companies in a saturated market. In 1922, six American freighters were transferred to the
Panamanian flag. As one of the Americans involved in the transaction explained, “
The chief advantage of Panamanian registry is that the owner is relieved of the continual but irregular boiler and hull inspections and the regulations as to crew’s quarters and subsistence. We are under absolutely no restrictions. So long as we pay the $1 a net ton registry fee and 10 cents yearly a net ton tax” to the government of Panama. Because the freighters were entering the transpacific trade where the primary competition was from
Japanese ships, the American owners crewed their Panamanian-flagged ships with Japanese and Chinese seamen whom they could pay much less than the going rate for American mariners. With “
German stewards, Cuban firemen, and West Indian sailors, or crews of any nationality the management may wish,” the operating expenses of the passenger ships
Reliance
and
Resolute
under Panamanian registry were lower than what they would have been with American crews protected by union agreements. (A subsidiary incentive for the transfer of passenger ships was that during
Prohibition, U.S. courts ruled that American ships could not serve alcohol even when in international waters.) Although these two ships were soon sold to German owners, this was effectively the start of the adoption of flags of convenience for the explicit purpose of avoiding onerous safety regulations, domestic tax obligations, and labor laws.

More ships transferred to Panamanian registry throughout the 1930s, and especially after the start of
World War II, when shipowners sought to circumvent restrictions of the
Neutrality Act, which barred American ships from entering a war zone and so idled much of the fleet. By war’s end, a combination of
political instability in Panama, grievances by American labor unions,
and opposition from Europe’s traditional maritime states began to sour owners on Panamanian registry. To capitalize on this disaffection as well as to promote economic development in
Liberia, Edward R. Stettinius, a secretary of state under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, proposed the creation of a Liberian ship registry to compete with Panama’s. Drafted by members of Stettinus’s staff with the approval and input by maritime
lawyers from
Esso, the forerunner of Exxon and operator of one of the world’s premier tanker fleets, the new registry was up and running by 1949. Among the other advantages to the foreign “beneficial” owners of
Liberian-flagged ships were that they did not need to incorporate in Liberia or hire Liberian seamen, and there was no provision for Liberian inspection or control of any ships registered there. The government also contracted with a U.S. company established by Stettinus and Associates to collect the $1.20 per ton registry fee, of which it retained 27 percent. By 1968 Liberia’s was the biggest registry in the world.

The growth of the flag of convenience registries continues to provoke opposition from labor unions and traditional shipowning nations, who argue that ships should be subject to the “
legal restraints of the nations of the owners, of the crews, or of the ports at which they [call].” Maintaining that “flag of convenience” is a misnomer, shipowners insist that these registries are really “flags of necessity” and that the law of the country where the ship is registered should prevail. An uneasy compromise has evolved. Flags of convenience provide corporations with tax shelters and allow them to hire crews from an ever-expanding
global labor market dominated by sailors from developing nations. As of 2000, Filipinos (230,000 officers and ratings) and Indonesians (83,500) comprised about a quarter of all the seafarers employed worldwide. However, their
conditions are often substandard, with poor pay, inadequate training or qualifications, limited time off, and social isolation. Many of the worst problems have been addressed by international treaties, while labor unions, notably the
International Transport Workers’ Federation, are vigilant in rooting out abuses and advocating for better conditions.

Flags of convenience received little public scrutiny until a series of shipwrecks with devastating commercial and environmental consequences brought them to world attention. In 1967, the supertanker
Torrey Canyon
ran aground and split in two off
Cornwall, England, spilling 123,000 tons of
oil that spread across 120 miles of the English coast and 55 miles of
Brittany. Assigning liability for the disaster was complicated by the fact that the Italian-crewed ship had been chartered to British Petroleum by a Liberian subsidiary of an American company, while the plaintiffs hailed from Great Britain and France. Subsequent accidents also aroused public ire, but the environmental and economic impact of the
Torrey Canyon
was not exceeded until 1978, when the VLCC
Amoco Cadiz
grounded a mile off the coast of Brittany about a hundred miles south of where the
Torrey Canyon
came to grief. The wreck devastated one of the most diverse and abundant fisheries in Europe and underscored problems in supertanker design and operations. In the course of twelve hours, three unrelated pieces of equipment critical for steering, towing, and anchoring failed utterly and official inquiries showed that structural and safety standards were inappropriate for the huge vessels then being launched.