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MIDDLE PASSAGE

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GHOST SHIP

Le Corps d’un Américain découvert à bord d’un voilier à la dérive

FALMOUTH. – Le corps d’un Américain de 63 ans mort dans des circonstances mystérieuses a été retrouvé samedi à bord d’un voilier dérivant à plus de 1.000 kilomètres au sud-ouest des côtes britanniques, tandis que sa femme ne se trouvait plus à bord. Les gardes-côtes ont précisé que le “Happy End” était enregistré dans l’Alabama et qu’il avait quitté les côtes américaines le 1^er novembre à destination de l’Irlande avec à son bord le propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty et son épouse Carol, âgée de 60 ans. Un membre d’équipage d’un porte-tontainer américain, le “Sealand Quality”, a pu monter sur le voilier repéré à la dérive vendredi par un cargo norvégien et voir le corps du propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty, mort selon lui depuis deux ou trois jours.

Enlarged photocopy of clipping from unidentified Cherbourg newspaper brought aboard by the North Sea pilot and posted by the captain without translation in the officers’ and crew’s mess rooms, Sea-Land Quality.

As the crew filed back into the house from the main deck after the memorial service for the two Americans, the usually taciturn captain announced to no one in particular and everyone in general: “Well, that should put an end to all the ghost stories that have been going around.”

FIRE AND EMERGENCY

Muster at boat station

ABANDON SHIP

Muster at station

NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL WARFARE

Remain in stateroom

Notice engraved on steel plate bolted to stateroom bulkhead, Sea-Land Quality.

THE BO’SUN’S STORY

“Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That’s why insurance companies use them.”

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WORKERS' MUSEUM

Question?

De-flagging.

Is it true

Sea-Land will

use Russian officers

with Vietnamese crew?

They are digging

up Jack Kennedy

to see if he’s rolled

in his grave.

They couldn’t beat us

so they’ll unemploy us!

God bless corporate America.

Handwritten message on yellow legal pad, engine-room bulletin board, Sea-Land Quality.

Launched in 1984, the Sea-Land Quality was one of the first ships built at the Daewoo shipyard on the island of Keoje off the southeast coast of South Korea, and one of a series of “econships” commissioned by the now-defunct United States Lines of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated containerized cargo movement in 1956. These were the biggest container ships built to date, deliberately slow: exercises in economies of scale, cheap construction, and conservative fuel use.

When an American crew picked up the first of these ships from the Daewoo dockyard, completed the sea trials, and began the voyage back across the Pacific, they discovered in the nooks and crannies of the new ship a curious inventory of discarded tools used in the building of the vessel: crude hammers made by welding a heavy bolt onto the end of a length of pipe, wrenches cut roughly by torch from scraps of deck plate. Awed by this evidence of an improvisatory iron-age approach to ship building, which corresponded to their earlier impressions of the often-lethal brutality of Korean industrial methods, they gathered the tools into a small display in the crew’s lounge, christening it “The Korean Workers’ Museum.”

American elites have cultivated a fantastic fear of superior Asian intelligence; in doing so they obscure their own continued cleverness. For their part, American workers fear the mythic Asian brain and something else: an imagined capacity for limitless overwork under miserable conditions. The first assistant engineer, once a Navy commando in Vietnam, fears being replaced by former enemies. Veering abruptly from the right-wing paranoia of the politician Ross Perot to the left-wing paranoia of filmmaker Oliver Stone, his diatribe is less farfetched than it seems. Shipping companies increasingly turn to flag-of-convenience registry, a legal loophole that allows for the hiring of cheaper, usually Asian, crews. American shipowners have long favored Liberia and Panama, two notoriously independent nations, for these registry services, services which require an infrastructure roughly equivalent to that needed for commemorative stamp issues. Now Sea-Land threatens to turn to the newest bastion of paper sovereignty, the Marshall Islands, otherwise renowned as a cluster of irradiated coral atolls devastated by American thermonuclear testing in the 1950s.

And thus the general spirit of the ship was one of mournful and weary anticipation of unemployment, heightened by a pervasive insomnia caused by the vibration of the low-speed Hyundai-Sulzer diesel running at 100 RPM, the speed of an amphetamine-driven human heart.

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27Detail. Inclinometer. Mid-Atlantic.

28Panorama. Mid-Atlantic.

29Chief mate checking temperatures of refrigerated containers. Mid-Atlantic.

30Filling lifeboat with water equivalent to weight of crew to test the movement of the boat falls before departure. Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

31Third assistant engineer working on the engine while underway.

32–34Conclusion of search for the disabled and drifting sailboat Happy Ending.

35Model simulating the movement of the sea. Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam.

36Pornographic scrimshaw carving on a whale’s tooth. Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam.

37Engine-room wiper’s ear protection.

38Figurine based on the television series Star Trek mounted on engine-room control console.

39–40Bo’sun driving the forward winch. Mooring at ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Maasvlakte, Port of Rotterdam.

41The Sea-Land Quality dockside at automated ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Port of Rotterdam.

42Ship models in vitrine with linear scale. Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam.

43David Brown telephones his wife in Jacksonville from ECT/Sea-Land Terminal. Port of Rotterdam.

44The Sea-Land Quality departing Rotterdam for Bremerhaven.

Voyage 167 of the container ship M/V Sea-Land Quality from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Rotterdam. November 1993.

WALKING IN CIRCLES

Port Elizabeth–Norfolk–Rotterdam–Bremerhaven–Felixstowe–Le Havre–Boston–Port Elizabeth. While crisscrossing the North Atlantic, David Brown works twelve hours a day for a month at a time, putting in an extra watch of work on deck from 0800 to noon, chipping and painting, standing watch at the wheel from noon to 1600, then back at the wheel from midnight to 0400. The extra watch at overtime pay allows him to earn “just enough to make the trip worthwhile,” considering his family in Jacksonville and the fact that despite his years as a merchant sailor, the scarcity of American-flag ships means that he usually works for only six to nine months out of twelve.

A day before landfall, nearing the end of his watch and restless from standing in one place for four hours, Brown leaves the wheel on autopilot and begins to describe Ethiopian dockworkers unloading a cargo of grain, gaunt and wiry men walking in circles carrying huge sacks on their backs. Brown stoops and begins to pantomime a precise memory of their movement, pacing a repetitious circle in front of the navigation computer, bent over in the ancient stance of the stevedore, assuming the burdened posture found in the monochromatic floor mosaics still visible amid the ruins of the Roman port of Ostia Antica, called into life wherever there were or are no machines to lift the weight of cargo.

Haunted by this image of sheer Sisyphian toil, Brown turns abruptly to the case of a hypothetical worker who loses his job to automation: “First he lose his sanity, then his car, then his house.” The circle narrows and one world falls into the vortex of the other.

“SIBERIA”

For the crew, this crossing is the first to make port at the new robot terminal built on the ever-expanding landfill at the outer reaches of the River Maas. The Dutch engineer responsible for designing the system of automated cranes and trucks that gives the ECT/Sea-Land Terminal an eerie depopulated aspect even in pleasant weather remarked that the new method is “much more comfortable than when you have a lot of individuals under the crane. They say hello to each other, they talk to each other.” He warned me away from the path of the robot trucks: “Watch out, they don’t see you!”

In winter, the outer dike wall does little to shield the ship and the dock from the North Sea wind. A freezing forty-five-minute hike through the container stacks and across the sandy soil leads to the solitary truckers’ bar nestled up against the dike at the foot of a row of roaring windmills. Beyond that, it’s a half-hour van drive to the nearest store, a duty-free shop surrounded by oil tanks in the Botlek, where Russian and Filipino sailors remind Americans what it means to comb the shelves for bargains. But the nickname for this new port of call–barren, cold, and far from everything regarded as interesting and human–had stuck earlier, in the middle of the Atlantic, as someone recalled a farewell visit a month earlier to a familiar neighborhood bar just outside the old terminal twenty-five kilometers upriver toward Rotterdam. It is no longer possible, as it was three centuries ago on the River Maas, to infer the warmth of a still life from a picture of a wooden ship full of whale blubber.