The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (112 page)

To balance the conflicting expectations of owners, sailors, flag states, and ports of call that these and similar disasters revealed, the
International Maritime Organization (IMO) has adopted
a raft of conventions covering almost every conceivable aspect of shipping from pollution and ship design to labor and personal safety. A direct result of the
Torrey Canyon
disaster, the IMO’s convention on pollution from ships (
MARPOL) covers problems resulting from catastrophic failures as well as more mundane but incrementally more significant problems like the disposal of sewage and garbage at sea as well as air pollution from ship’s engines. The
International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers established minimum standards for ships’ crews from the engine room to the bridge. Still others mandate the establishment and observance of traffic separation schemes in constricted waters not unlike those proposed by Matthew Fontaine Maury in the nineteenth century. The
English Channel had been so divided in the 1960s, but among the first reforms following the
Amoco Cadiz
was the creation of a third traffic lane thirty miles west of Ushant for inbound
tankers, which forces these leviathans to give the
Breton coast a wide berth and affords them more “drift time” in the event of a catastrophic failure.

The most comprehensive and effective regulations are those encompassed in the
Safety of Life at Sea (
SOLAS) conventions, the first of which was adopted in 1914 in response to the
Titanic
disaster. These now cover all aspects of shipboard operations, occupational safety, medical care and survival functions, ship design, fire detection and protection, life preservers and lifeboats, radio communications and navigational practice, and the carriage of cargoes including dangerous or hazardous goods, as well as special provisions governing the operation of nuclear-powered ships. All told, these highly technical and legalistic regulations run to tens of thousands of pages, but the result has been astonishing. Between 2005 and 2008, ferries, cruise ships, and other commercial vessels over a hundred gross tons carried an average of 1.7 billion people annually, but no more than a thousand people died in any one year, and the
odds of dying in a shipboard accident were only 1 in 1.6 million, a record that would stagger late nineteenth-century travel advisors like
Katherine Ledoux and maritime industry reformers like
Samuel Plimsoll.

These statistics on mortality among seagoing people do not include fishermen, the great majority of whom work on vessels of less than one hundred gross tons in what has always been among the most dangerous industries in the world. As a fisherman’s wife remarked to Sir
Walter Scott in the early 1800s, “
It’s no fish ye’re buying—it’s men’s lives.” Until the nineteenth century, fishing was a small-scale, domestic venture, as it remains throughout much of the world. This is so even in industrialized countries like the United States, where lobstering, for instance, is the livelihood of sole proprietors who own and operate their own boats through four seasons, sometimes assisted by one or two sternmen, but in many cases alone. The world’s fishing industry has undergone as much change over the past century and a half as any other maritime enterprise. This began with the introduction of steam engines, the growth of the
ice trade (and later the invention of icemakers) to preserve fish, and the proliferation of new and more durable types of fishing gear. The twentieth century saw the deployment of sophisticated targeting apparatus ranging from
sonar to spotter planes, and the launching of large factory ships to which smaller vessels can transfer their catch for processing, so enabling them to remain at sea for months at a time. Equally important for the globalization of the fish market is the jet plane, which allows fish to be sold halfway around the world within twenty-four hours of being landed.

The principal tools of the commercial fisheries are the longline, otter trawls and beam trawls, and seine nets. At an artisanal level, these are labor-intensive technologies that result in fairly limited but sustainable returns. Since World War II, however, they have been employed on an industrial scale that threatens the stability of the fish stocks themselves. As a retired English fisherman observed in a 1972 documentary:

One innovation was the introduction of nylon fishing gear, which made it possible to make much longer nets and lines than was possible with natural
fibers. Today longlines can be up to a hundred kilometers long, with shorter lines and baited hooks placed at regular intervals. Longlines are generally intended to target specific species, whether pelagic fish like tuna and swordfish or demersal species like
cod and haddock, but they also catch an enormous quantity of nontargeted fish and other animals, including sharks, sea turtles, and albatrosses. More degrading to the environment are trawls, gaping nets the width of a football field designed to be dragged across the seafloor to catch cod, monkfish, pollock, shrimp, and other species. Universally regarded as the most destructive form of fishing, their impact on the ocean floor has been
likened to clear-cutting a forest, and they have been widely implicated in the destruction of coral reefs and other undersea habitats.

While people’s growing appetite for fish is the major impetus behind the
expansion of the fisheries in recent years, 20 percent of all fish is simply ground into fishmeal, and about 7 percent is unwanted bycatch that is simply dumped back into the sea dead or dying. Scientists have been assessing fish stocks since the nineteenth century and in recent decades the U.N.’s
Food and Agriculture Organization has taken a lead in monitoring fisheries worldwide, devising management programs, establishing marine protected areas where no fishing is allowed so that depleted species can revive, and regulating the types of fishing gear that can be employed. An additional mandate is cracking down on
illegal, unreported, and unregulated fisheries, which may be the biggest threat to the long-term viability of many species. As with commercial shipping, the best approach to solving the most intractable issues facing the fisheries and the people who work them has proven to be international cooperation as agreed to in various conventions on high-seas fishing.
The Agreement on Conservation and Management of Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, for example, specifically addresses fish populations that straddle the boundaries between a nation’s
exclusive economic zone (EEZ)—an area of the sea out to two hundred miles from shore—and the high seas, as well as fish that routinely migrate between national EEZs and the high seas. The agreement seeks to establish the basis for the conservation of fisheries by improving the measurement of fish stocks and establishing catch quotas, regional fishing organizations, and mechanisms for ensuring compliance, including the right to board and inspect vessels.

The unintended consequences of industrial fishing have not been limited to the environment. The drive for larger boats and tougher, more advanced gear has made fishing an increasingly capital-intensive enterprise that has marginalized many fishermen, in much the same way that medieval seamen went from being members of a ship’s company to mere hired crew. Traditionally, fishing was a
fundamentally democratic business in which members of the
crew divided a fixed portion of the boat’s catch and contributed the same share of expenses for running the boat as they received in profits. But many now work for fixed salaries as employees on boats whose owners’ only connection to the industry is as investors. The uncertainty of life in the fishing industry is compounded by governments’ endless tinkering with requirements for fishing gear (to reduce bycatch, for instance) and catch limits, which can result in entire fishing grounds being put off-limits, thus leaving
fishermen without any livelihood. The case of the United States and
Canada is instructive. In the 1960s, foreign fleets complete with factory ships descended on the
Gulf of Maine, where landings of haddock,
herring, and cod collapsed. In the United States, congressional legislation prohibited foreign fishing vessels from operating within the EEZ, but this was a political rather than a scientific solution that did little to ease the strain on fish stocks from domestic fishermen. Likewise, the
Canadian cod fishery declined so precipitously that in 1996 the Canadian government banned cod fishing, at the cost of about twenty to thirty thousand jobs, less than five hundred years after
Matthew Cabot’s reports of the abundance of cod had opened North America to European exploration.

The United States was able to define and enforce its right to its EEZ in part because it is a global superpower. Citizens of countries at the other end of the geopolitical spectrum—failed states like
Somalia, where central authority collapsed in 1995—have no such options. Taking advantage of Somalia’s lack of a government, foreign fleets descended on the Somali coast, often within the territorial limit, and began overfishing stocks that coastal communities had recently begun to harvest for themselves. With no coast guard to protect their interests and no voice in the international community,
local fishermen began seizing and ransoming foreign fishing vessels and their crews. This retributive
privateering quickly attracted the interest of local warlords, terrorists, and others who expanded the scope of their operations to seize piratically and indiscriminately anything from container ships and
tankers to cruise ships and private yachts regardless of flag. While this has become an obvious criminal problem, the underlying cause, namely illegal fishing, is a more disturbing threat to the global commons.

The
SOLAS provisions on nuclear-powered ships have the narrowest application of any in the convention, but they were drafted in response to one of the most technically sophisticated engineering feats of the postwar era, one achieved almost simultaneously in the United States and the
Soviet Union.
The driving force in the United States was
Hyman G. Rickover, who first considered nuclear propulsion for ships as a naval off
icer on assignment to the
Atomic Energy Commission’s reactor complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1946. As head of both the navy’s Bureau of Ships’ Nuclear Power Division and, concurrently, the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission, Rickover went on to develop plans for the world’s first nuclear-powered vessel, the submarine USS
Nautilus,
commissioned in 1955.

One advantage of nuclear fuel over fossil fuels is that it produces heat to create steam through fission rather than fire. Without the need for oxygen, a nuclear-powered submarine can stay submerged almost indefinitely, and in 1960 the
USS
Triton
completed the first underwater circumnavigation of the globe, covering 27,723 miles in less than sixty-one days. Nuclear power held another attraction for the Soviets, who relied on maritime transportation to reach the resource-rich but almost impassable territories of northern
Siberia. Because nuclear fuel can last a decade or more, it obviated the need for regular supplies of fuel to be stockpiled at icebound ports that were nearly as remote by land as they were by sea. Moreover, it allowed for faster, more powerful ships. The first nuclear-powered surface ship, the
icebreaker
Lenin
, was launched two years after the
Nautilus,
and in 1960 it opened the way for merchant ships to service the ports of Dikson and Dudinka on a regular basis. In time the sailing season along the northern sea route lengthened from two to ten months, and the
Arktika
became the first surface ship to reach the geographic
North Pole in 1977, nineteen years after the
Nautilus
had crossed it, submerged. With the recession of sea ice due to climate change,
Russian shippers hope to exploit the shorter
Northeast Passage between Europe and Asia, a distance of about 6,750 miles compared with 11,000 miles via the
Suez Canal.

The public has always been leery of nuclear-powered surface ships, and apart from the Russian icebreaker fleet, only four have been built for nonmilitary service, and two of them were experimental vessels. But navies and secretive governments are less inhibited by public sensibilities. In 1966–67, a nuclear accident resulted in the death of thirty of the
Lenin
’s crew, a fact covered up for decades, which allowed the Soviet Union to continue building nuclear-powered icebreakers with little scrutiny. Over all, in addition to thirty-five nuclear-powered surface ships—including eleven U.S.
aircraft carriers—almost five hundred nuclear-powered
submarines have been built, nearly all of them by the former Soviet Union and the United States. Despite the operational benefits associated with nuclear power, these fleets are better known not for their propulsion plants but for their nuclear weapons, which enable them to project overwhelming force, in some cases over thousands of miles.
Nuclear naval strategy represented an almost complete departure from everything that went before. While the United States and
NATO were concerned with safeguarding world trade, in oil above all, and deterring a Soviet attack on western Europe or the United States, focus soon shifted to the deployment of conventional ballistic missiles, which by the 1990s had ranges of more than six thousand miles. In essence, submarines had become mobile missile bases.

This was not their only function, and “attack submarines” were designed for operations against other submarines and surface units. But there have been very few fleet engagements on the high seas since World War II, the most significant being the 1982 Anglo-Argentine war for the
Falkland Islands, the deadliest encounter of which involved the sinking of the World War II–era light cruiser
General Belgrano
by a conventional torpedo fired from the nuclear-powered submarine
HMS
Conqueror
. For the most part, offensive operations at sea have been undertaken in support of land-based operations, notably in the
Vietnam War, the United States’ invasions of
Iraq in 1990 and 2003, and of
Afghanistan in 2001. In all of these wars, ship- and submarine-based missiles and carrier aircraft were launched against inland targets—Afghanistan is landlocked—in support of ground forces. In essence, this is a vindication of the strategy advocated by
Francisco de Almeida, Portugal’s first viceroy in India that “All your forces should be on the sea, because if we are not strong there … fortresses on land will be of little use to you.”