Moby-Duck (38 page)

At least that's how it was supposed to work. Sometimes to reach the corner castings, a stevedore would have to climb out of the man basket onto a tipped container. Sometimes when a crane lifted one container, those leaning against it would topple. Sometimes when the hooks rose, the container would sunder, spilling cargo onto the decks and docks. There was melting seafood everywhere, and after a couple of days the smell was so bad that Austin started swiping spilled air fresheners and rubbing the fragrance onto his mustache. “Other guys put earplugs in their nostrils,” he recalls. Dan McKisson remembers that as one container rose into the air, its contents suddenly shifted. There was a crash. Then the steel wall of the container gave way at one end, opening like a hatch. Down came “a rain shower” of cardboard boxes, some of which tore open when they hit the decks. Inside? Bicycles. The people at Schwinn could stop wondering.

Austin and McKisson had seen cargo losses before. Almost every winter at least one container ship turns up in Seattle with containers damaged or missing. But they'd never seen devastation like this. Neither had their foreman, Don Minnekan, and Minnekan was nearing retirement. Neither had any other longshoreman, ever. What the longshoremen bore witness to that November morning was, in monetary terms, the worst shipping disaster in maritime history. Of the 1,300 containers the
China
had been carrying when it departed Taiwan for Seattle eleven days before, 407 had been lost at sea. Of those remaining onboard, another few hundred had been damaged or destroyed.

“I've been out at sea on tugboats and fishing boats. When it's snotty out, it's no fun,” Austin told me. “But I can't imagine what it would be like to be in something that would do that much damage to a ship like that.”

 

 

By the time I made my pilgrimage to the toy factory in Dongguan, I'd gone to sea several times—on the
Malaspina
, the
Opus
, the
Alguita
. And yet I could no more imagine what it would be like to ride a container ship through snotty weather than Rich Austin could. Nor could I imagine what it would take to make containers tumble overboard. The accident that had set the toys adrift remained to me mysterious. By process of elimination, after contacting the Port of Tacoma and consulting old shipping schedules in the
Journal of Commerce
, I managed to identify the ship—the Evergreen
Ever Laurel
—from which the toys I was chasing had fallen. But there was no mention of the accident anywhere in the public record, not in
Lloyd's List,
not in the
Journal of Commerce
, not in the Port of Tacoma's archives. The Coast Guard's records did contain an inspection report, which I acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, but all it said was that the
Ever Laurel
, on January 16, 1992, while in Tacoma, had been subjected to a Coast Guard inspection, which it had passed.

Except under extraordinary circumstances—if a law has been broken in American waters, for instance, or a hazardous substance has spilled—the U.S. Coast Guard does not investigate shipping accidents. Most of the time, it's left to lawyers and insurance adjusters to reconstruct the sequence of events and assign blame. If small sums of money are involved, the ship's owners and underwriters will dispense with the investigation, accept liability, and settle the claims. The case of the
China
was different. The damages were too costly for APL to absorb; 361 claimants represented by twenty-five lawyers would eventually file for damages exceeding $100 million, more than the ship itself was worth, and because APL decided to contest their claims, the details of the
China
disaster are part of the public record. If you visit the federal courthouse in the Southern District of Manhattan and give the file clerk the correct docket number, she will emerge from the archives wheeling a cartload of legal files in which you will find bills of lading, invoices, faxes, memos, claims for damages, motions and counter-motions, thousands of documents—the sort of archival mother lode for which, in the case of the
Ever Laurel
, I'd searched in vain.

I'd heard about the
China
from a number of sources. A maritime lawyer named Geoff Gill had told me about it. Charlie Moore had told me about it. Mariners I'd met had told me about it. The
China
disaster had become as legendary as the rubber ducks lost at sea. Perversely perhaps, listening to the legend, I wanted more than ever, if only briefly, to join the merchant marine, but joining the merchant marine turns out to be far harder than it used to be. You can't just show up at a port and offer your services as a cabin boy—at least not as a cabin boy on a container ship; on a tramp steamer, maybe. To join the crew of a container ship you have to go to school and secure a license, and even then, in America, whose merchant fleet has dwindled, atrophied by globalization, licensed mariners have trouble finding work. I asked a few different shipping lines—including Evergreen—if they'd let me hitch a ride. Those that returned my calls said no. I offered to pay. Still, the answer was no. Taking on passengers is more trouble than it's worth, I was informed, especially with all the security restrictions put in place after 9/11. Then someone told me about a German shipping line called Reederei NSB, NSB for short, one of the last shipping lines that still does a side business in tourism. So long as I was willing to attain a doctor's note attesting to my good health, sign a legal waiver six pages long, and fork over a couple grand, I could learn “first hand what it means to ‘sail the seven seas' aboard an ocean-going giant,” the NSB website promised. I would return from my voyage “able to tell no end of sailor's yarns.”

That sounded pretty good to me. I've always been a sucker for sailor's yarns. And ever since I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, I've wondered what it would be like to ship out on one of those oceangoing giants, which, on clear days, I could see from my childhood bedroom, out on San Francisco Bay, going to and from the docks in Alameda, transacting their mysterious business with the faraway. In mid-January, when I'd be returning from China, there were no NSB ships departing from Hong Kong for Seattle, but there was one ship—the Hanjin
Ottawa
—departing from Pusan, South Korea, for Seattle, following roughly the same route the
Ever Laurel
had taken sixteen years before, and roughly the same route the
China
had taken in 1998. Along this route, the toys had broken free, changing from containerized cargo into legendary characters. Along this route, some oceanic force had beaten a post-Panamax ship to ribbons. Now, from Pusan, I'd travel this route.

I also had other, vaguer, more philosophical reasons for shipping out
,
reasons that the actuarial phrase “act of God” helps explain. I didn't expect an ocean crossing to restore my faith in God, exactly—at least not in a biblical God; I lost that irretrievably long ago. But I did hope that it might refresh my capacity for awe. Rich Austin thought the sight of the devastated
China
was ominous. I agreed. The toy spill was ominous, too. What these omens seemed to portend was this: that the high seas may yet be the wildest wilderness in the world after all; that despite the cargo industry's best, most technologically advanced efforts to turn shipping lanes into watery highways, there remain on this diminishing, warming, terraqueous globe of ours tropics of mystery, seasons of astonishment, zones of the sublime, which not even vast expenditures of capital and ingenuity may ever fully tame. After exploring the Pearl River Delta, I set out to test this augury of mine, this wish.

It seems that my ship, the Hanjin
Ottawa
—a 5,618-TEU post-Panamax box boat built right here, in the South Korean shipyards—has been delayed by dirty weather in Shanghai. I've called Mr. Shin every day for the past three days, and every day he tells me the same thing: call back tomorrow. Mr. Shin is a freight forwarder, whose name and number my travel agent, a woman with a Slavic accent and a mailing address in upstate New York, sent me along with my ticket and my six-page legal waiver. I was to contact Mr. Shin upon my arrival in Pusan.

Flying from Hong Kong to Pusan was like flying from summer into winter. While waiting, I've been living at the Hotel Phoenix, down in the city's Cinema District, where pedestrians in down coats, breath steaming, gather around pushcarts to eat fried pancakes full of bean paste from little folded circles of paper. My first day here, I bought one for five won, a pittance, and watched the woman turn it three times in the hot oil with her tongs, before dropping it into its little paper pocket. The first bite burned my mouth, but I didn't mind because I was cold and short on cash and it was so sweet and greasy and cheap that when I finished it, I bought another. That's all I ate my first day in South Korea, waiting for my ship to come in: bean paste pancakes.

In the top floor of the building across the street from the Hotel Phoenix is a grooming parlor for poodles. From my room, you can catch glimpses of the poodles through the parlor's windows, poodles almost epileptic with fear, claws skittering on the stainless steel tables, while disembodied hands tease their forelocks into poofs. Beyond the grooming parlor is the Jagalchi fish market, the largest fish market I have ever seen. Yesterday, I walked through it, biding time.

The muddy, bloody streets were lined with fishmongers, all women—the wives and daughters of fishermen, I presumed. Their heads covered in neat little kerchiefs, they crouched beside basins and plastic laundry baskets in which much slithering and crawling and dying was taking place. Other women in kerchiefs pushed wooden carts heaped high with assorted vegetables and crustaceans, shouting like carnival barkers as they went, and down along the water, inside what I at first mistook for a convention center or an opera house—a three-story edifice gleaming with architectural ambition, its silhouette suggestive of billowing spinnakers and silvery waves—were still more fishmongers, selling octopuses puddled atop beds of ice and flayed fish drying on racks like zombie laundry.

This seemed to me an auspicious beginning to my transpacific voyage. In Manhattan, the once vibrant downtown waterfront has been turned into Stamford, Connecticut. They've upholstered one pier in Astroturf, built a playground on another, while of others all that remains is a grid of moldering piles, past which joggers on the meticulously landscaped promenade go bouncing along, listening to their iPods and enjoying the view of condominiums in Hoboken.

The opening chapter of
Moby-Dick
describes what New York's waterfront used to be like. “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf,” Ishmael writes. Promenaders on the Battery could peep “over the bulwarks of ships from China.” Now if an insular Manhatto wants a good look at a ship from China, he has to take the A train to Queens. Gaze out to the horizon from Rockaway Beach, where on summer days the urban masses lounge and frolic among the orange umbrellas of the New York City Parks Department and pigeons fraternize with the gulls, and you will see them there, the great box boats, converging out of the haze on the Port of Newark, their decks loaded with the provender of the world. They process so silently and slowly, they can almost seem stationary, like oil rigs viewed from the Gulf Coast.

It is at first pleasurable to find oneself marooned by happenstance in a foreign city one knows absolutely nothing about. All around you people are going about their daily lives, rushing to catch commuter trains that will spirit them away to neighborhoods you cannot imagine, while you bob among them like flotsam in a current, aimless, borne along. But after three days the novelty begins to wear off and loneliness sets in. Amazement at the varieties of human strangeness gives way to sentimental thoughts of home.

The sun has sunk behind the mountains and on the blackening foothills the million lit windows look like stars. The Hanjin
Ottawa
finally arrived this morning at dawn, and an hour or so later Mr. Shin woke me with a phone call. I was to bring myself and my luggage to the customs house by 10 A.M. so that he could usher me through immigration. A day one of his ships comes in is for Mr. Shin a busy one. He had more important things to worry about, more valuable things, than some American idiot willing to throw away good money to cross the North Pacific aboard a container ship at the height of the winter storm season. But my mysterious travel agent had enlisted Mr. Shin's services, and he'd accepted her payment, and now he was stuck with me.

BEAUTIFUL WONDER KOREA / IMMIGRATION SMART SERVICE, a sign outside the immigration office read. Inside, two uniformed bureaucrats sat behind a long desk under a wall clock. While Mr. Shin glanced frequently at the clock with an air of frantic impatience, the bureaucrat inspecting my passport glanced frequently at me with an air of bemused curiosity. He and Mr. Shin conversed in Korean, and at one point, something Mr. Shin said made them both laugh. Judging from the looks they gave me, I was the joke. At last, with a flurry of rubber stamping, the bureaucrat returned my documents to Mr. Shin, who spun on his heel and out the door to his paneled van, tugging on his leather driving gloves and beckoning me to follow.

Speeding along the docks, through a maze of interchanges and feeder roads, past acres of containers, above which poked the red booms of gantry cranes, we spoke only once, when out of nowhere, Mr. Shin said, “May I ask a question? Why you take the ship? Long time! Ten days!”

It was a good question, to which I had a number of complicated answers, but even if I could have made myself understood, there wasn't enough time to explain to Mr. Shin about the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea, or about turning a map into a world, or about my philosophical interest in the wilderness of water, so instead I told him that I was a writer, as if that explained anything. He shrugged and shook his head, as he did again upon delivering me to the
Ottawa
's gangway, where a Filipino oiler named Marco Aaron descended the long, clattering flight of metal stairs to relieve me of my suitcase. “Safe voyage!” Mr. Shin exclaimed, still shaking his head. Then he sprang into his van and sped away.