The Scrimshaw Project

The start of something new

2007-09-05T07:54:00.000-04:00

Since Ocean Titans was released in the United States in May, I’ve been immersed in a new book that will be coming out next year, in both the U.S. and Canada, hopefully by Spring. It’s a look at modern-day piracy on the high seas, a serious global problem that is most acute off the coasts of Africa and in the Bay of Bengal. I’m currently abroad working on this new book, traveling through Southeast Asia, East Africa and the UK. For those interested in some of my thoughts on what I’m encountering, please visit http://piratebook.blogspot.com (or click on the link in the list to the right).

The smell of war

2007-05-15T20:25:00.000-04:00

I am lucky to live within sight of the largest green space in urban Toronto, the lush expanse of trees, trails, streams and rolling hills known as High Park. For years, a morning routine has been to walk the park, getting some exercise while enjoying the changing moods of the place. Different seasons trigger different memories, and this morning was no different. Tramping through a trail beneath a cover of blossoming hard wood trees, the earth wet from an overnight shower, I came upon a small clearing of green grass. It was one of those areas families will soon use for picnics, and the groundskeepers had just finished cutting the grass when I smelled it again: the smell of war.

I hadn’t suffered any sort of traumatic flashback to some personal experience in a battle, nor was I even thinking about a conflict that had recently occurred. But I was reminded of war and death, and the smell most definitely stopped me dead in my tracks. For there, in a peaceful park in Canada’s largest city, the smell of the First World War came back to me. Our sense of smell is supposed to be leave the strongest impression, and the freshly cut grass certainly brought a lot back to me this morning.

Bois des Fosses, northeast of Verdun, France

A few years ago, I spent some time in northeastern France with members of the government’s Département du Déminage. These Interior Ministry personnel are tasked with the ongoing clearance of France’s battlefields from two world wars, hauling unexploded shells, grenades, mortars and other ordnance from the very soil where millions of men fought.

On an early summer morning, I followed a six-member team into the forests near the village of Bezonvaux, just north of Verdun. The village itself was destroyed during the Great War and never rebuilt. We passed it without even slowing down, the unit’s trucks veering off the paved road onto a small dirt track that snaked its way from Bezonvaux into the Bois des Fosses. The trucks stopped at some pre-determined point and the men quickly split into three teams and headed off into the woods, with yours truly tagging along. I had no idea what the demineurs were searching for, but as I followed them I could clearly see signs of the horrific 1916 Battle of Verdun everywhere: the ground was pitted and scarred from all the artillery shells that had exploded, small hillocks on all sides. There was no such thing as old growth forest here, for there had been no forest left after the initial artillery barrages between the French and Germans over ninety years ago. And though the trees had eventually begun to grow again – many years after the Armistice of 1918 – the Bois des Fosses harboured a far deadlier harvest for the demineurs.

Deminuers with unexploded German shell

It didn’t take long for the men to begin their work. Quite simply, their job entails working their way through selected portions of the forest battlefield and picking up the various unexploded munitions that the earth heaves up from time to time. In some places, I was told, over two tonnes of munitions fell on a square metre of soil and the French government has predicted it will take something like 800 years to clear the entire country. Yes, 800 years. And, given the way governments tend to be conservative with many of their statistics, one wonders if the real figure isn’t much higher. For the demineurs, though, there is a cost to all this clearance, as dozens have been killed over the years protecting France from her past.

As the men continued to haul away ordnance, the sky began to resound with the rolling thunder of an impending storm. It made me think of what the soldiers who had fought and died here must have heard, when the guns opened up and the German 77mm and French 75mm field artillery began hurling their deadly charges skyward.

The variety of ordnance and equipment employed during the battle for Verdun was atypical of the entire First World War: there were shrapnel shells, high explosive shells, gas shells, howitzers, siege guns, mortars, even immense railroad guns. And since not everything that was fired exploded on impact – duds, so to speak – there is an awful lot for the demineurs to reap.

High explosive shell

After a couple of hours, the impending thunderstorm finally exploded from above and the team’s supervisor put a halt to the day’s work. The various munitions collected were placed in the waiting trucks – into sandboxes, so they shells wouldn’t roll around as we returned to their base. And back at the old German fortress they called home, near the ancient city of Metz, the shells from the War To End All Wars were laid to rest in secure vaults. In a few weeks’ time, the shells would be trucked to a military base and piled into heaps, wired up with explosive charges and detonated, finally putting an end to their long and dangerous lives.

Ah, but the smell I was reminded of? Well, after the teams had unloaded the ordnance, one of them took me aside to show me a special shell they’d found. It wasn’t much larger than a section of a baseball bat, a brown, rusting relic that he held very gingerly in his gloved hands. He gently rocked it from side to side and told me to listen to the shell, to put my ear close to it. As he moved it from side to side, I could hear the faint sound of a liquid sloshing within it. This, he told me, was gas. By the ring on its nosecone, it was a phosgene shell, a German chemical weapon from the First World War.

Phosgene gas shell

The demineur told me to follow him into the vault as he placed it upon a pile of other chemical shells, and then pointed to a collection of white, plastic jerry cans in one corner. These contained liquid phosegene that had been removed from shells too rusty to trust. The demineurs drilled a hole in the decrepit shells, emptied the contents and stored them here until they could figure out to properly dispose of the chemicals.

He took one of the containers, and unscrewed the cap. “Here, have a smell,” he said, “But not too close, okay?” And so I took a whiff of the weapon that had inspired so much fear and caused so many injuries and deaths, taking in the scent of 1916.

That scent remains with me to this day, for it smelled like a fresh cut lawn.

U.S. release of my last book

2007-05-07T18:26:00.000-04:00

For those of you living in the United States, I’d like to announce that you can now purchase my book “Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of a Ship”. Lyons Press released the book last Tuesday, May 1, and it is available through various online sellers as well as select stores. Check you favorite sources for availability.

“Ocean Titans” is a chronicle of two and a half years of journeys around the world to meet those who design, own, build, captain, crew and scrap ocean-going vessels, It is a tale of the birth, life and death of modern ships – and the individuals whose lives revolve around these leviathans. I ventured to meet designers in the Bahamas, shipowners in Monaco, shipwrights in Korea and shipbreakers in India. I traveled aboard a container ship across the North Atlantic in severe gales, sailed with the crew of a bulk carrier tramping up and down the eastern seaboard of America and spent hours in the engine room of a tanker in the Pacific. From masters to deckhands to engineers to cooks, I sought to find out what those who make their livelihoods from the sea really think about their transient homes, asking them if they really think a ship can have a soul.

I invite you to check it out if you're so inclined. Meanwhile, I have begun work on my second book, a look at modern-day piracy and terrorism on the high seas that will be released in both the U.S. and Canada in 2008. More on that as things develop.

Washing up on a buccaneer island

2007-05-01T17:42:00.000-04:00

Three hundred years ago, the Ile de la Tortue (called Tortuga by the English) would have been a place to avoid if you were a seafarer. This little island off the north coast of Haiti was known as a base for buccaneers who preyed on shipping passing through the West Indies. By all account, the mostly French buccaneers were a wild band with a ruthless streak; a sailor would have done whatever he could to avoid encountering them. But this past Saturday (April 28), Tortuga was exactly where a shipwrecked captain wanted to be.

According to the US Coast Guard, Captain Ramon Pichardo washed up on a beach on Tortuga after spending four days adrift in the Caribbean. He’d been clinging to a wooden box, without food or water, when he spotted the island as dawn broke and decided to swim for shore. Though he was suffering from mild exposure, Capt. Pichardo was able to find a telephone and contact the authorities, who continue to hunt for survivors. So far, 19 people have been rescued; another 20 remain missing.

Tourists who have visited Puerto Plata may be familiar with the destination of the fishing boat: the Silver Bank, about 100 km north of the Dominican Republic resort town. Fishing and whale watching are popular on the bank, and Capt. Pichardo’s passengers were no exception. His vessel, the 52-foot Abra Cadabra set out from Puerto Plata on Monday, April 23 around 5:00pm, with 39 passengers and crew. But sometime after midnight, sea conditions worsened and the vessel capsized, throwing passengers and crew into the waters. They were over 30 kilometers from shore.

The 38 year-old Pichardo told rescuers that he and six other survivors managed to use a wooden box as a makeshift raft. They drifted west with the current, covering 120 kilometers in four days. Pichardo does not mention if they encountered sharks, but he must have remembered events like the infamous 1987 Death’s Head Beach incident. At that time, dozens of Dominicans, mostly women, were trying to make it to Puerto Rico in the hope of finding work. Smugglers agreed to take them in a fishing boat about the same size as the Abra Cadabra and it, too, capsized. The survivors were soon set upon by dozens of sharks who, according to witnesses, turned the waters red off what is really called Death’s Head Beach.

Currently, vessels and aircraft from the United States, the Dominican Republic and Haiti are running search patrols along the north coast of Hispaniola.

USCG map showing search area off north coast of Haiti

Memorable Meals – Prt 1: India

2007-04-12T20:09:00.000-04:00

At a dinner party recently, the topic of conversation shifted to memories of fine dining experiences. Guests recounted exquisitely prepared meals, five star restaurants, top chefs, vintage wines and the like. While I listened to these experiences, I began thinking of my own memories of memorable meals and found that not a single one involved great restaurants. In many cases I’d be hard pressed to remember the name of whoever hosted or prepared these culinary impressions, but that didn’t really matter. For me, the memories of good food and drink remain centered on the social aspect involved, not the ingredients, per se. And Lord knows I’ve tried to replicate some of these repasts by carefully gathering the elements and meticulously preparing the meal, only to have it end in mediocrity. It just isn’t the same; the experience of great meal is an immediate thing that can never quite be duplicated, and probably should remain so. Too much of anything isn’t supposed to be good for us, so these fleeting moments should be remembered, not replicated. With that in mind, I’ll be recounting some of my more memorable meals from my various travels around the globe, for as George Bernard Shaw once said, “There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

India

On the dirty shores of the northwestern Indian state of Gujurat can be found the largest shipbreaking site on the planet: Alang. It’s a grimy, dirty expanse of industrial hell where ocean-going vessels come to be cut apart by thousands of migrant workers so that the steel and other artifacts can be recycled. I was visiting Alang to do research on the life cycle of a ship and had been invited to wander through one shipbreaking yard by its genial owner. As the sun began to set behind Alang, the man invited my translator and me to join him for dinner in the ramshackle building he worked from at the far end of his yard.

To decline the invitation would have been considered impolite, but I was a little nervous about things: this was my first trip to India and I’d heard numerous tales of people getting sick while eating local food. And one look around the shipbreaking yard did little to help, as the place was covered in a perpetual haze from the welding torches cutting through steel and the air was thick with metal particles and God knows what else. Making our way to the owner’s hut, we wandered past workers heading for the nearby hovels they called home, men and boys who were caked in grime but still managed to smile my way as they finished up for the day. The clang of a steel plate echoed somewhere close and the wind coming in off the bay carried with it the stench of human excrement and smell of burning steel.

At the back of the shipbreaking yard, we were led to a backdoor into the hut, which revealed a small kitchen and a couple of men cooking on a large stove. The room was small, with a dirt floor. We continued inside, past the shy chefs, and into the dining room, which was fashioned completely from bits and pieces of some long-gone ship. By the looks of things, it had once been the mess hall on a Yugoslavian freighter, with a long table in the middle and several lounge chairs nestled by the mock-wood paneling. The owner had even kept the photos from the mess hall bulkheads, fading black and white images of Rijeka and Pula, two important shipbuilding ports in what is now Croatia. I did note that there was no framed photo of Tito hanging, though I’m sure one had hung somewhere in prominence on the ocean-going vessel.

Unsure of what was to happen next, my translator and I sat ourselves at the table and waited. Within a few moments, one of the cooks entered bearing the first of the meal. Pradip, my trusted translator, quickly explained that we were being served a traditional Gujarati meal, which meant a vegetarian dinner served without utensils. As the stainless steel trays were placed on the table, I quickly wiped my hands on my pants and, following Pradip’s lead, began to delve in into the thali meal.

What happened next remains fixed in my memory: A delicious mouthful of great subtlety. I’d already sampled Gujarati food while staying in nearby Ahmedabad, but it had been prepared for foreigners and was bland. The region is not noted for rich or spicy foods, as some other areas of India are, but some people in Toronto had told me it could be fantastic. But until this moment I had not experienced it.

Potatoes, green beans, rotis, yogurt, dal, papd, chutneys – the meal kept growing, and I kept eating. Like savouring a fine wine, this was a meal in which you had to pay attention to the small things, the flavours and aromas that gently came at you. Unlike richer, cream-based meals, this dinner did not fill you up quickly; it was lighter and graceful.

By the time we’d eaten our fill the owner arrived for tea, served in the Indian style. He invited the cooks to join us for glasses of spicy chai, giving me the chance to thank them for the meal. So in the midst of a ramshackle dining room pieced together from a dead ship, stuck in a grungy scrap yard, two men whom I would never meet again smiled meekly as I stammered my gratitude for the best meal I had ever had in India.

As the chefs left, I asked the shipbreaking yard owner where they learned their craft, and where they lived. He took a sip of chai and told me, “They learned from their mothers. They are Gujaratis. And they live here – in Alang. They are also shipbreakers.”

A Grim Anniversary

2007-02-15T21:04:00.000-05:00

Twenty-five years ago, on February 14, 1982, a fierce storm was heading for the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, preparing to alter the lives of thousands of individuals within a few hours. The storm, with winds in excess of 70mph and waves topping 100 feet in height, was bearing down on a group of offshore oil rigs and merchant vessels that would soon be faced with a mariner’s worst nightmare.

Sometime around 7pm that Sunday evening, the world’s largest semi-submersible oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, was moored over a drill site in the Grand Banks when her Master reported an immense wave crashing over her. The Ocean Ranger was considered unsinkable to many, possibly including many among her crew of 84, 67 of whom were Canadians. As reported to the rig’s shore base in St. John’s, Newfoundland, 180 miles to the west, the wave had smashed portholes in the Ocean Ranger’s ballast control room, leading to some flooding and electrical shorts. In theory, this should have been a minor incident quickly dealt with by the crew; no one could imagine that this would lead to one of the worst maritime disasters in recent Canadian history.

The Ocean Ranger

A little after midnight, in the early hours of a storm-ravaged Monday morning, the Ocean Ranger’s situation had become perilous. The flooding in the ballast control room had led to a list in the rig, caused by short circuits in the equipment that opened sea valves in the hulls. By 1:56am on February 15, the Ocean Ranger’s list had reached the point that the crew radioed for help. The Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, heard the call: "Request assistance a.s.a.p....We are an offshore drilling platform...Winds at this time are approx....75 knots. Rig is of semisubmersible build...is listing severely 12° to 14°portside."

This would be the last transmission heard from the Ocean Ranger. With the storm still raging over the area, neither fixed wing aircraft nor helicopters could be effectively deployed to assist the crew of the rig, and any other vessels in the area were dealing with their own serious conditions. About 65 miles east of the Ocean Ranger was a Soviet freighter that might have been able to help, but the MV Mikhanik Tarasov was fighting its own life and death battle with the seas.

By 3:30am, the Ocean Ranger’s list had reached the point of no return: she was going under. Whether anyone made it to the lifeboats of not before she sank is still unknown. But at 3:38am, the gigantic platform disappeared off radar screens. Once dawn broke on that Monday morning and rescuers were finally able to arrive on the scene, the Ocean Ranger was gone, swallowed up by the North Atlantic. All that remained was some debris and overturned lifeboats.

There were no survivors.

In a sad coda to the Ocean Ranger’s demise, the Soviet freighter Mikhanik Tarasov soon radioed her own Mayday, stating she was taking on water and listing badly. Within twenty-four hours of the loss of Ocean Ranger, the freighter also succumbed to the storm, leaving only five survivors out of a crew of 37. In all, 116 men lost their lives on the North Atlantic during those terrifying days a quarter century ago.

MSC Napoli update

2007-02-02T12:02:00.000-05:00

Concerns that the grounding of the MSC Napoli had driven up the price of nickel on global markets have now been proven false. The container vessel was in danger of sinking two weeks ago after her hull was damaged in a storm while sailing through the English Channel. Her captain then ordered the ship deliberately grounded on a reef in Lyme Bay, off the coast of Devon, where the crew was eventually rescued and where the stricken vessel still remains.

Among the Napoli’s 2,200 containers was said to be over a thousand tonnes of nickel, an amount that initial reports stated was over twenty percent of the available world inventory. This news, coupled with the threat of a looming strike at a major Canadian mining operation, helped drive the price of nickel sharply up on the London Metals Exchange, to $38,300 US a tonne.

However it has now been reported that the Napoli only carries about 150 tonnes of nickel (owned by Columbus Stainless Steel of South Africa, where the vessel was bound when she was damaged). The price of nickel fell to close at $33,850 US yesterday.

Meanwhile, the first containers from the Napoli are being offloaded onto barges for transport to shore.

One sinking ship…one concerned commodities market

2007-01-24T22:28:00.000-05:00

The recent grounding of the container vessel MSC Napoli off the southern coast of Devon, England, received some media attention of late. Initially, reports centered on the threat of an oil spill impacting on the coastline. Then came the somewhat amusing tales of scavengers making off with the contents of containers that had washed ashore, a real-life take on the old British film Whisky Galore! (released in 1949 as Tight Little Island in the U.S.).

But notwithstanding the humorous reports of locals finding booty from the sea, the MSC Napoli’s accident has also served as a reminder of the impact just one commercial vessel can have on global economies. When the British-flagged vessel was deliberately grounded by her captain on a reef after being damaged in a storm – run onto the rocks to prevent her sinking – she also set in motion a series of evens among commodity traders.

The 900-foot long MSC Napoli was bound for Durban, South Africa, from Antwerp when she was holed in her starboard side during a storm late last week. The ship had, among her 2400 containers, more than 1000 tonnes of nickel. This vital metal is a key ingredient in the production of stainless steel, and the amount aboard the MSC Napoli represents almost 20 percent of the worldwide nickel inventories monitored by the London Metal Exchange. Those inventories add up to a little more than 5000 tonnes of nickel, or less than two days of worldwide consumption of the metal.

As a direct result of the grounding of MSC Napoli, the price of nickel on the London Metal Exchange hit $38,300 USD on Tuesday (January 23), A few days earlier, nickel had been trading at $36,100 USD a tonne. (The price increase was also influenced by the threat of a strike by nickel miners in Canada.)

All crew members of the vessel were safely rescued from the stricken vessel and, to date, the environmental impact has been limited.

New Year Perspectives

2007-01-06T22:36:00.000-05:00

After a lengthy intermission caused by research on new projects and other work - and the holidays - I am back and will again be posting new entries to the site. The recent delay was partially caused by my involvement in a new book which will see me busy for much of this year. It looks at modern-day piracy on the high seas and I hope to keep you updated as things progress.

Meanwhile, I would like to comment on two recent events, one of which garnered frontpage attention while the other was, for the most part, a secondary new item.

The Saturday before New Year's revealed that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been executed in Baghdad. The degree to which the media addressed his death was somewhat surprising, though his being sent to the gallows on a Friday made for good copy for weekend newspapers, to say nothing of television or internet outlets. Since his death had been pre-ordained by an Iraqi court weeks earlier, there was ample time to prepare obituaries, in-depth looks at his life and commentaries from journalists and pundits.

There can be little arguement that Hussein was a wicked individual who tormented the lives of millions in the Mideast. Questions do arise as to the morality of killing him in a state-sponsored execution: I, for one, am against the death penalty and would rather have seen Hussein spend the rest of his living days in prison, just as Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess did following the Nuremburg trials after World War Two (Hess committed suicide in 1987, at the age of 93, in Berlin's Spandau Prison). Nevertheless, the former Iraqi leader's death was not a complete surprise; only the actual time of his execution was.

A few hours after Saddam Hussein died, an Indonesian ferry encountered high seas and heavy rains as it sailed from Borneo to Central Java, began to list and eventually sank. According to published reports, the manifest listed 628 people aboard the ferry Senopati Nusantara, with only 177 survivors accounted for by New Year's Eve.

This piece of news, coupled with the deadly crash of an Indonesian airliner at about the same time was heavily overshadowed by Hussein's death, and that's what troubles me. The Iraqi dictator did not - in my opinion - deserve the news it received. If that sounds odd, let me explain: Even if it's considered objective reportage, the coverage of Saddam Hussein's death provides a measure of exposure that can, to some, continue to illuminate his life. If one truly wanted to destroy the myth of Hussein, then he should have disappeared into a prison cell and been forgotten. In an area where martydom can affect politics, publicizing his death offers the potential for glorification.

Meanwhile, the lives of several hundred people who, I would hope, were as honest, hard-working and normal as most of us, ended in watery graves. They join the over 50,000 who die on our planet's waters every year. They will be mourned by a few, remembered by some more and forgotten by most.

And they all deserve more attention than Saddam Hussein got.

Maritime Terrorism, US Style

2006-11-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

The issue of seaborne attacks on the United States by terrorists has received little play in the media. Which seems a little odd for a nation seemingly so attuned to the threats terrorist might pose to their homeland, especially the idea that a passenger airliner could, once more, be hijacked and used as a weapon of destruction. Yet the security apparatus in place to prevent such an event has, if nothing, been increased since 9/11, as has public awareness of the potential for such a disaster.

But the threat that terrorists could shift their focus of attention to any of the thousands of commercial vessels that visit the U.S. each year continues to receive only muted publicity. Recently, though, former American government counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke voiced some public concerns about the issue.

(Clarke, you may remember, was the guy who supposedly told the White House that he found no link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, later quitting his position to write a book, “Against All Enemies”.)

A week ago he was speaking in New England about the potential for liquid natural gas carrier ships (known in shipping circles as LNGs) to be used a weapons. The kind that could be hijacked by maritime criminals, pointed at a major centre like Boston and then ignited to cause the greatest damage possible.

Clarke’s scenario is not without possibility. But he was speaking, unfortunately, as a paid consultant for a firm seeking to build an offshore gas terminal. His description of the potential of an attack on Boston was aimed less at raising awareness of the issue than at scaring officials into considering to favour a facility in a “safer” locale.

Nevertheless, the threat that Richard Clarke evokes is not to be trivialized. Seven million shipping containers enter the U.S. every year – any one of which could contain a weapon. Dozens of vessels are hijacked by pirates every year and hundreds of mariners are taken hostage. Pirates already harass shipping worldwide on a daily basis, and the time when they collude more openly with terrorist groups may be at hand.

Something to consider.

Pirate Tales, the conclusion

2006-10-16T22:59:00.000-04:00

When it comes to pirate abductions, what are the most dangerous waters for kidnapping? Those off Somalia, where 241 civilians were grabbed last year by what the International Maritime Bureau’s Pottengal Mukundan describes as four distinct gangs based in that strife-riddled nation. The group believed to have been behind the attack on the Seabourn Spirit also has been linked to the hijacking of several United Nations-chartered vessels last year.

In one notable incident, the freighter MV Semlow was carrying 850 tonnes of food aid for Somali victims of the tsunami disaster when pirates boarded and overpowered the 10-member crew. The attackers diverted the ship to the coastal town of Harardhere and demanded a half million dollars in ransom. At one point, the pirates actually forced the crew to sail their vessel out to sea, so a second freighter could be hijacked. It wasn’t until October, a hundred days after the attack, that the Semlow and her crew were freed. (The food aid was left untouched by the gang and eventually distributed by the UN.)

The Semlow’s location was anything hardly a state secret, so why was there no military rescue operation? Fears for the crew’s safety is an obvious concern, but using armed force to combat piracy raises the issue of national sovereignty, even in a lawless place like Somalia. It may come as a surprise but, statistically, most pirate attacks occur while vessels are anchored in ports or while sailing within someone’s territorial waters — that is, no farther than 12 nautical miles from shore.
Even when sovereignty isn’t an obstacle, might doesn’t always make right. In April, when another gang of Somali pirates hijacked a South Korean trawler in international waters, two naval were in the vicinity and heard the fishermen radio that they were being attacked. The destroyer USS Roosevelt and a Dutch frigate called the Zeven Provincien intercepted the trawler, and fired warning shots in an attempt to stop it from reaching Somali waters. But as soon as the naval vessels saw the pirates threatening the Korean crew with weapons, they were forced to give up the chase.

Luxury liners, humanitarian relief ships, oil tankers, private yachts, fishing boats — no one is immune to the pirate threat. At this very moment, someone somewhere is being attacked on the high seas.

Fighting back is difficult, but the International Maritime Board, along with other groups, such as the UN’s International Maritime Organization, has been working on a long-range plan to cope with the epidemic. They began by establishing a means of tallying incidents, to identify the most dangerous areas for seafarers. As Mr. Mukundan notes, “Piracy takes place in countries where you have economic problems and a weak maritime law-enforcement infrastructure...countries like Somalia, where you have no national government and no law enforcement on a national basis.”

Armed with this information, the IMB is now working to raise awareness of the issue because most insiders feel the best deterrent is not having gunships patrol the oceans but persuading governments to take action within their own borders. And there have been some signs of progress.

Mr. Mukundan points to recent measures taken by Indonesia and China. In the late nineties, he says, both countries were struggling with pirate attacks along their coasts but lacked any effective policy to deal with the problem.0

“The southern coast of China was a well-known haven for people who hijacked ships and sold their cargoes. And then the Chinese acted, after a case where 23 Chinese crew members were murdered brutally on their ship. Overnight, the south coast of China stopped becoming a haven.”

Similarly, the Indonesian navy has taken a much more forceful posture in recent years, especially within the Straits of Malacca. Since the killing of the Cherry 201’s crew, Indonesia has increased it naval resources, bolstering the efforts of neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore to control maritime crime and significantly reducing the number of pirate attacks in the Straits.

Interestingly, the Indonesian forces may have been helped by the effects of the tsunami, which is thought to have sunk a number of pirate vessels in Aceh province. Whether these pirate gangs will return to action remains to be seen.

Few observers expect piracy to fade in the foreseeable future. Some liken it to a maritime Cold War, a low-level conflict that will simmer away, decreasing in one area only to reappear somewhere else. As long as there is poverty and lawlessness in any coastal region, the sight of passing vessels on the horizon will remain a source of temptation. And for those who go to sea today, it has become an unfortunate part of their daily lives and the cost of doing business.

“Many seafarers who survive these attacks, the serious attacks, probably will not go back to sea again,” Mr. Mukundan says. “They’ve given up the life at sea because the experience is very traumatic.

“You must remember that a ship is a person’s home; it is more than a place where you go to work. And when people invade at night and take it over, the crew members know that no one is going to come to their assistance while the pirates are on board.

“I don’t think it should be the cost of doing business.”

The International Maritime Bureau maintains a weekly website with weekly piracy reports that may be viewed here.

Pirate Tales, Part 2

2006-10-15T22:19:00.000-04:00

Piracy, of course, has been with us as long as people have gone to sea. Homer wrote about it in The Odyssey, Alexander the Great tried and failed to eradicate it, and Mediterranean pirates once took a young Julius Caesar prisoner. Over the centuries, buccaneers have preyed on shipping from the seas off China to the waters of the South Atlantic, and from the Barbary Coast to the Spanish Main.

But the period from about 1690 to 1720 is known as piracy’s golden age — the time of Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd and Edward Teach (better known as Blackbeard), who famously pillaged ships in the Caribbean. (Neither Kidd nor Teach lasted very long as true pirates. Blackbeard was gunned down off the coast of North Carolina in 1718, while Kidd was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in 1701, with a proviso that his body hang by the Thames for two years as a warning to those thinking of imitating him.)

Captain Kidd’s body hanging by the River Thames

Many of the original pirates of the Caribbean began as privateers, the quasi-legal buccaneers engaged by England, Spain and other nations to disrupt each other’s trading lanes. The only catch was they had to hand over a portion of their booty to their sponsors; some eventually opted to go independent and keep it all for themselves.

By the mid-18th century, piracy was well in decline because of the combined efforts of international navies, and in 1856 the signing of the Declaration of Paris, effectively banned the practice everywhere. Throughout most of the past century, the biggest risk to shipping stemmed from armed attacks during times of war, such as the U-boat menace during both world wars. Few would have expected the new millennium to usher in a modern era of piracy, one that has the potential to eclipse its predecessor.

And yet, as global trade has increased since the end of the Cold War, so too has piracy. Maritime outlaws know that it’s impossible to police every cove, strait, harbour or sea — and that the rewards outweigh the risks. Now, more than 46,000 merchant ships ply the ocean, carrying more than 90 per cent of world trade, and each one can be a plum target for opportunistic maritime criminals.

The director of the International Maritime Bureau in the U.K., Captain Pottengal Mukundan, divides these modern pirates into two categories: “At the lower end of the scale, you have muggings at sea, where criminals try to get on board a ship and steal whatever they can within a period of about 40 minutes to an hour, and then take off. At the other end of the scale, you have the organized-crime attack, which is really aimed at hijacking a multimillion-dollar ship and its multimillion-dollar cargo. That’s a very well-resourced attack.”

And these better-organized attacks are growing more common, he says, with pirates who brandish automatic weapons and grenade launchers overpowering crews whom they then kill or set adrift. Once in control, they can change a ship’s name and ownership by using fax machines and satellite phones. “Then they take the vessel to a new port under a false name and sell the cargo,” Mr. Mukundan explains. “Once the cargo is discharged, they have control of the empty vessel, which they use as a criminal vessel, a pirate vessel — what we call a phantom ship.”

Thanks to Hollywood, piracy is still largely associated with the Caribbean, when in fact its happiest hunting grounds today are in Asia and Africa, especially the waters off Indonesia, Bangladesh, Somalia, Nigeria and the Red Sea region.

For years, the most dangerous stretch of sea has been the narrow Straits of Malacca between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The 805-kilometre strait is a vital shipping lane; more than 50,000 vessels pass through it every year. At its narrowest, the channel is less than three kilometres wide, forcing ships to reduce their speed as they sail past the many places where pirates lurk, primarily on the Indonesian side.

In early January, 2004, a small oil tanker called Cherry 201 was making a routine run to Belawan in northern Sumatra. It carried a crew of 13 and a thousand tonnes of palm oil as it motored toward Indonesia’s second-busiest harbour and the gateway to war-torn Aceh province, the site of so much carnage when the tsunami hit almost a year later.

Although the crew was aware of the pirate risk, as well as the fighting between the army and the Aceh rebels, they had made the run before without incident. But on Monday, Jan. 5, their luck ran out when a speedboat darted from the shoreline and took up position alongside the tanker. Grappling hooks were thrown and men with automatic weapons climbed aboard, making for the wheelhouse.

The Cherry was defenceless — merchant vessels rarely carry weapons — and the pirates quickly overwhelmed the crew and ordered the captain to go ashore, contact the vessel’s owners and demand a ransom of 400 million Indonesian rupiah (about $50,000). The tanker itself simply disappeared, perhaps hidden in one of the many inlets that riddle the area.

For weeks, the negotiating went on, possibly as the Cherry’s owners tried to buy time so Indonesian forces could find their vessel and her crew. The owners first talked the pirates down to 100 million rupiah and then finally settled on 70 million (less than $9,000). But after five weeks without being paid, the pirates’ frustrations boiled over: They grabbed four of the crew, executed them and dumped the bodies in the sea before fleeing. They have yet to be caught.

Abduction is especially troubling to people like Mr. Mukundan, who points out that the number of seafarers taken in the first three months of this year was double that in the same period last year.

“The taking of hostages is not opportunistic, it is a very well-planned attack,” he says. “Organized crime syndicates are actively involved, and they’ve always been, because it’s a hugely profitable exercise for them.”

To be concluded...

Tales from the sea’s dark side

2006-10-10T21:18:00.000-04:00

After an extended absence hereabouts, caused by some cumbersome travels across various parts of Canada, your intrepid author returns. I’ve been busy the last couple of months working on several projects, including the preparations for the upcoming release of my book Ocean Titans in the U.S. in early 2007.

I also have been heavily into research on what will be my next book, a look at modern-day piracy on the high seas. In August I wrote a feature piece for Canada’s Globe And Mail newspaper on the topic and have since been finalizing details about a more in-depth look at it, about which I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, here’s part one of that article, which the newspaper headlined “Real Pirates Are Nothing Like Johnny Depp”.

If you ask Gord Chaplin about the last time he saw a pirate, he’s apt to start going on about Captain Jack Sparrow, the laughable buccaneer played by Johnny Depp, and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel that’s such a box-office hit at the moment. But if you ask the easygoing retiree from Cambridge, Ont., about the last time he saw a real pirate, you’ll hear a much more chilling tale.

It was almost 6 a.m. last Nov. 5 and Mr. Chaplin was with his wife, Celia, in a stateroom aboard a luxury liner off the coast of East Africa when they heard something rarely associated with a vacation cruise: gunfire.

“We looked out the cabin window and could see a boat about a hundred yards off the starboard side, and they were shooting an AK-47 at the ship,” he recalls. “All of a sudden, Celia noticed that somebody had something bigger than an AK-47, which turned out to be a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“And just as she looked, it went off — and hit about two staterooms down from ours. Fortunately, it didn’t go right in; it exploded off the side, but sent shrapnel into the room, destroying it. The woman in there was sitting down at the time, or else she’d have been killed.”

The Chaplins, along with more than 300 fellow passengers and crew, including 18 Canadians, were aboard the Seabourn Spirit, a 440-foot cruise ship that’s part of the Carnival line. It was about 160 kilometres off the coast of Somalia en route from Egypt to the Kenyan port of Mombasa when pirates arrived in two small speedboats, intent, it seems, on boarding the liner and robbing its passengers.

MV Seabourn Spirit

When the attack began, Vancouver businessman Mike Rogers and his wife were in their port-side cabin. “We could hear this metallic pinging sound, and I wondered what it could be. Then it dawns on me that it’s machine-gun bullets striking the steel hull. Then a bit later, I heard the rocket fire.

“I felt the liner lurch sharply to one side and thought it was from the rocket hitting, until I realized the captain was swerving the ship. He then came on the intercom and told us all to head for the dining room, which was downstairs, where we’d be safer.”

According to Mr. Chaplin, “The captain turned the ship very hard — and tried to run over one of the boats and wash the other. I could hear the rounds pinging, so people were pretty scared. There was a bit of praying, some weeping, but they kept on shooting at us.

“We were down there for a couple of hours, I guess, and the real question became how did they get a hundred miles off the coast of Somalia? I mean these were probably 20-foot fishing boats with outboard motors on them.

“Well, the answer lay in the fact that there was a mother ship — an old beat-up trawler or freighter, sitting on the horizon.”

As the passengers huddled below, the pirates kept up their attempts to force the liner to stop, eventually coming alongside and preparing to board. It was then that the Seabourn Spirit’s captain deployed the only real weapon he had to defend his ship: a long-range acoustic device.

This parabolic sonic blaster emits an ear-splitting sound meant to repel boarders, and it seemed to work. The pirates finally gave up the chase and returned to the mother ship empty-handed, while the Seabourn Spirit made haste for the Seychelles Islands, leaving passengers and crew shaken but unhurt.

“We were very lucky,” Mr. Rogers says. “If they’d stopped us, the pirates could have done anything they wanted to us. And you know, more than worrying about getting injured or even killed, my greatest fear was being taken hostage.”

Adds Mr. Chaplin, “The worst thing, for me, was that the bastards were smiling. You could look out the window and see like three of the five guys who thought it was quite funny. We certainly didn’t.”

Somali pirates off the Seabourn Spirit

The idea that armed criminals would attack a massive cruise ship may seem as audacious as the notion that swashbucklers like Captain Jack Sparrow still haunt the high seas. But ask any professional mariner, and you will quickly discover that modern pirates not only exist — they ply their trade almost daily. In fact, after more than a century of decline, piracy has been on the rise for more than a decade, making the waters of our planet once again a very dangerous place to be.

The attack on the Seabourn Spirit was one of 276 acts of piracy reported last year, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a British-based organization that monitors maritime crime. IMB’s statistics show that in each of the past 10 years there have been no fewer than 200 attacks reported, with 2003’s tally especially notable: 445.

As a result, commercial losses are estimated at $16-billion a year, and there has been a marked increase in vessel hijackings and hostage-takings — 23 and 440, respectively, last year.

“Pirates in the old days were...criminals of the lowest kind who preyed on the weak and showed no mercy at all,” says Pottengal Mukundan, the IMB’s London-based director, adding that “pirates today are exactly the same.” The only difference is that “the types of attacks have become more dangerous.”

Every week, the IMB’s Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur posts the latest news of incidents around the world that demonstrate why Mr. Mukundan is worried:

In late May, six heavily armed pirates boarded the Russian tanker Shkotovo in the Atlantic Ocean off Guinea, West Africa, forcing her captain to empty the ship’s safe of money.

In early May, 10 men armed with long knives climbed aboard a bulk carrier anchored near Chittagong, Bangladesh, robbing three crew of their belongings.

In April, pirates commandeered the cargo ship MV Al-Taj as it sailed off East Africa, killing one crewman, seriously wounding two others, and holding the vessel hostage for a week until they received $25,000 in ransom.

Also that month, in the year’s deadliest attack thus far, pirates in the South China Sea swarmed aboard a fishing vessel, opened fire with automatic weapons, killing four Chinese crewmen and injuring three others.

But it’s not just professional mariners who are at risk. The waters of the Lesser Antilles — where Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed — have seen several brutal attacks on recreational sailors.

One unfortunate couple from Canada endured not one, but two run-ins with Venezuelan thieves last year, while British Columbia doctor Steve McVicar saw a November cruise turn into a nightmare when five pirates boarded his yacht off the South American coast. Mr. McVicar and two friends were assaulted and stripped of more than $30,000 in cash and equipment.

But they were lucky. Last June, pirates attacked a European couple anchored in St. Lucia’s Rodney Bay; the man was beaten unconscious and his wife raped. Local police later arrested three suspects, but the incident has so shaken the yachting community that many now avoid the region.

To be continued...

Ships versus Cars

2006-08-23T00:08:00.000-04:00

After a bit of a delay, your humble scribe is back from the hell that comes from moving one’s abode in the midst of a Toronto heat wave, just in time to ponder a couple of recent business announcements.

General Motors this week decided to prep their Oshawa, Ontario, facilities for the production of the new Chevrolet Camaro, slated to begin rolling off the line in 2008 and assuring some 2700 jobs. To do so, GM is planning to invest $740 million (Canadian), a hefty sum of money that comes just a year after the company announced a $2.5 billion reinvestment in their Canadian operations, the largest such expenditure in this country’s automotive history.

Pretty impressive, eh? (I mean the money involved, not the Camaro’s lines.)

Well, not compared to what’s going in shipbuilding circles. As most North Americans enjoyed their summer holidays, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) quietly announced a record set of newbuilding orders for vessels at their Korean shipyards. HHI is one of three Hyundai operations based in Ulsan, on the southeast coast of the Korean peninsula, and the recipient of $2.3 billion (US) in orders in just one month. That’s for 22 vessels. Things are so hectic at the Ulsan yards that they've run out of dry docks to construct ships in and are crafting some of them on the quays, to be later side-launched into the harbour.

What should be of interest here is that GM’s massive investments are for vehicles that have no pre-determined buyers – they’re betting there will be a market for the Camaros once production commences. Hyundai, on the other hand, is merely responding to the continuing – almost insatiable - demand for new vessels by eager buyers.

The auto industry is considered a key market indicator in North America, but are muscle cars really the panacea needed for our economy? Canada – and the U.S. and Britain – long ago wrote off shipbuilding as a viable industry worthy of the support it needed. Too bad, because a couple of billion dollars worth of orders in a single month is nothing to sneeze at.

Never fading away

2006-07-29T17:51:00.000-04:00

One of my oldest friends sent me an email today congratulating me on a review that appeared in the Globe & Mail for my book, Ocean Titans. The Globe - for those of you outside Canada - is our national newspaper and getting a review in it is great, even if it won't pay the rent.

Dave, who is now a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa for CTV News, went on to post a nice piece about me on his blog, but I have a beef with my friend's thoughts about our past. He talks of our love for the music of The Jam, XTC, The Buzzcocks and the teenaged affectations of the mod lifestyle. And lord knows we thought we were pretty cool: while others were listening to Hall & Oates or Rick Springfield, Dave and I and countless others were discovering soul, r & b, Motown, even ska and reggae. It was a much more comprehensive musical education than most of our schoolmates.

But in the midst of this was the unmistakenably raw sound of The Clash, The Pistols and other great bands. And at the apex of that raw sound was the one band that Dave forgot to mention in his posting: The Ramones.

In the thirty years since they broke on the scene in their native New York, The Ramones have been lionized as progentiors of a new form of music, a group who laid the framework for The Sex Pistols, Clash and whatnot.

But what gets forgotten when writers remember Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky (let's not get into Tommy and all the others), is that they were first and foremost performers. To see them play live was to experience something unlike any other group; they didn't mince words, play to the local crowd or act like rock stars. They just did it. And they could do it like few others.

Case in point: A teenager in a small Canadian city hears that The Ramones are coming to town, and are going to play in the gymnasium of a local high school. He wants to see them, but doesn't want to go to a concert alone. Yet nobody - nobody - he knows could care less about going to see a bunch of New Yorkers in leather jackets playing two minute songs that all sound alike. But he eventually finds somone to go and they trek down to the high school, sit in the bleachers normally used for basketball games and watch a ninety minute set of the music that changed a generation. The Ramones didn't care that they were playing in a school gym - they just cared about playing. Relentlessly. Joey never once (that I remember) looked up from his mic, nor did Johnny for the matter. Dee Dee may have glanced at us, but it was with a scowl, like the rest of them, asserting that we should be glad to be seeing them. But it wasn't arrogant. It just was. It was The Ramones.

Thank god Dave Akin went with me. And bless you Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee wherever you may be - you changed our lives.

The Lady’s Looming Death

2006-07-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

As someone who’s spent the last half-decade pondering whether ships have a soul, the news of her looming demise caught my attention. She was, for a time, the most magnificent passenger vessel to grace the seas, larger than the Queen Elizabeth 2 and with a refined elegance that has never been recreated. And, for now, she lies anchored in the murky waters of the Bay of Khambhat in northwestern India.

The former SS France riding at anchor off Alang
Photo by Amit Dave, Reuters

I speak of the famed passenger liner SS France, later known as the SS Norway, now re-christened the Blue Lady. Thirty-six years after being launched, it appears the ship’s days are numbered as she idles within sight of the vast shipbreaking yards of Alang, India, though not without stirring some controversy about her impending death.

The liner was originally conceived in the waning years of the era when ocean-going passenger liners plied the Atlantic between Europe and America. In the mid-1950’s, the French government was seeking a new symbol of maritime prestige, something to replace the soon-to-be retired SS Ile de France and SS Liberté and counter the dominance of the British liners RMS Queen Mary and RMS Queen Elizabeth, as well as the SS United States. So it was that exactly fifty years ago today, on July 26, 1956, the new vessel was officially ordered.

The keel for what was known as Hull G19 was laid on September 7, 1957 at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire. Less than three years later, the wife of president Charles de Gaulle cracked a bottle of champagne upon the hull after christening her the SS France, and the thousand-foot long vessel slid down the ways to her natural home.

The France was the longest passenger vessel in the world when she departed Le Havre on February 3, 1962 for her maiden voyage to New York. For the next twelve years she plied the trans-Atlantic route and also did winter cruises, carrying movie stars, famous musicians, politicians and even the da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In 1967 she berthed in Montréal for two weeks, acting as a temporary second French pavilion at Expo 67. With the distinctive wings on her two funnels, she was the last word in sea-going elegance, the finest way one could cross the Atlantic. But the SS France had arrived at the end of an era, at a time when air travel was replacing sea voyages.

First class lounge

First class patio

By 1974, the French government could no longer afford to subsidize the liner and she was withdrawn from service. A French maritime union protested the decision by effectively hijacking the ship and refusing to dock her, but she eventually was berthed in Le Havre and decommissioned.

Five years after being mothballed by the French, the liner was sold to Norwegian Cruise Lines who towed the SS France to Bremerhaven, West Germany, for re-fitting. On April 14, 1980 the liner was re-christened the SS Norway and began a second life as a luxury cruise ship. The Norway helped to revolutionize the cruise industry as other firms ordered new and large vessels to compete with her.

By 2001, though, even the vessel’s cruising days were numbered and when the SS Norway departed Manhattan on September 9, few expect her to return. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks two days later, the SS Norway managed to survive as a cruise ship for a short time more. On May 25, 2003, the Norway had just docked in Miami when there was a boiler explosion near the crew quarters. Seven crewmembers died and seventeen were injured. The Norway’s owners took her out of service, towed her to Bremerhaven and mothballed the ship for a second time.

Bremerhaven, Germany, February 2004

Last year the SS Norway left Europe for the last time, being towed halfway around the world to Malaysia. She sat in Port Klang for some time until being sold to shipbreakers who renamed her the Blue Lady. She was unceremoniously dragged around from port to port, first to Bangladesh, then to the United Arab Emirates until finally reaching Indian waters in June of this year. Environmentalists and labour activists are concerned about the variety of toxic pollutants encased within her, including asbestos used when she was built in France fifty years ago. Some are still hoping she’ll not be beached at Alang and cut apart for scrap, with one idea being to use her as a floating hotel in Dubai.

But, for the time being, the Grand Dame is quiet, her cabins home to a skeleton crew whose only job is to prepare her for death. Whether she will receive a last minute reprieve is doubtful, but perhaps there is still some life in the Lady.

New Canadian naval expenditures

2006-07-15T00:11:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, on June 26th, the Canadian government announced the first of a series of upcoming defence expenditures, the sum total of which will be in the neighbourhood of $15 billion (Canadian dollars). The initial announcement by defence minister Gordon O’Connor was in Halifax, headquarters of Maritime Forces Atlantic, and concerned the need to replace the fleet’s two aging supply vessels, HMCS Protecteur and HMCS Preserver. These ships help to maintain the Canadian navy’s vessels with fuel, food and other supplies while at sea, a logistical element that is paramount to the operation of on-going fleet exercises. They also help supply allied forces from time to time.

HMCS Preserver

The government has decided to replace these supply vessels with three new ships, each of which will be in the range of 28,000 tonnes, with the first to be delivered in 2012. The announced cost of the new buildings is $2.1 billion, a somewhat staggering amount for what will be support vessels, not fighting ships.

The need to replace Protecteur and Preserver goes without saying: they are both almost forty years old, having been launched in 1968 and 1969 respectively, an awfully long time to be plying the waters of our planet. The stresses placed upon any vessel working the high seas is considerable and only increases with the years; corrosion, structural integrity and aging machinery can create a hazardous environment for those who ship out aboard older vessels.

But the cost of the replacements for these two ships does make me wonder: Is $700 million for a single supply vessel not a tad high? On the world market, one can pick up a similar merchant ship for a lot less money – say $50-60 million. That’s off-the-shelf from a builder like Hyundai or Daewoo in South Korea (albeit with a waiting period for delivery of up to five years, owing to the huge backlog created in the commercial shipping industry).

Now there are a variety of reasons why a Korean vessel costs about $50 million and these new Canadian-built ones will be about $700 million. On the one hand, the Canadian shipyards will have to re-tool, hire and train new staff and essentially start from square one (they’re more attuned to refitting and repairing vessels than new construction). As well, military procurements normally require the work to be done at home, whether for national prestige, security requirements or job-creation scenarios. And, of course, there are the peculiar requirements of a naval vessel versus a commercial one, one meant to not only battle the sea but also a belligerent enemy. On the other hand, Korean shipyards are mass-production facilities geared to the requirements of the private sector that pay their workers less than their Canadian counterparts – base economics.

Still, I have to posit that perhaps Canada could have ordered some vessels from a reputable foreign yard, brought them to Canada and refitted them to our naval standards. It might have saved hundreds of million dollars, money that could have been used elsewhere in our cash-strapped armed forces.

Will it be worth it? Well if past experience has shown anything, just keep an eye on the cost overruns and delivery delays.

Fuel for thought

2006-06-27T23:32:00.000-04:00

In a survey released today by the Canadian American Business Council in Washington (www.canambusco.org), a surprisingly few percentage of American voters polled understood the importance of Canada to their energy needs.

How few?

Four percent.

That is, only 4% of the respondents were able to correctly identify Canada as the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the United States. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Iraq provides as much oil and natural gas as our nation does; according to U.S. government figures (rpc.senate.gov/_files/May2306OilDependencePG.pdf), Canada supplies 10.5% of America’s oil, versus 7.4% from Saudi Arabia.

Now the CABC survey also showed that 88% of respondents held a “favourable impression” of Canada and that 41% “expressed support for replacing oil from unstable regions with oil from Canada, even if doing so resulted in higher prices for U.S. consumers”.

Canadians like these sort of polls, because they give us a chance to say we’re not appreciated on the one hand, while being liked on the other. But smugness aside, the relationships between our two countries are the envy of much of the world.

Is Canada subservient to the United States? On many things – absolutely. Being next door to anyone ten times the size in terms of economics and population can only create a sense of caution on our part. It often seems like we’re the younger brother in a small family, the quiet, dutiful one who puts up with the largesse of the eldest, outgoing sibling. But we actually like our brother, and worry about him a lot. Because we’re family and have far more in common than is recognized.

I will warn our American cousins of one thing, though: Everyone south of the border is going to be paying more for fuel soon, whether you like it or not. Not because of any greedy Canadian policies but because of the value of the American dollar. The decision by the current administration in Washington to let the greenback slide in value on the international markets – in the hope that it would spur American exports – was misguided and harmful. Instead it means that our oil will cost more to buy. But maybe that’ll help increase energy conservation.

In the meantime, as we go into the first holiday of the summer – with Canada Day on Saturday and Independence Day on Tuesday – let’s not forget the ties that bind.

The keepers of the nether regions

2006-06-26T23:20:00.000-04:00

In the chain of command of maritime order, the role of the captain has always been more or less paramount. A captain has the undeniably final word on all matters aboard a vessel, the ultimate responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of the ship, its cargo and those individuals sailing with her. But just slightly below the captain one finds the chief engineer, the master of the mechanical bestiary that propels a vessel through the seas.

Known universally as “The Chief”, the head engineer and the captain are technically equivalent in the hierarchy of a vessel, though there is a benign rivalry between the Old Man (as captains are known) and the Chief as to who is really more important for the operation of a ship at sea. A hundred years ago, the role of the engineer was just emerging as mechanical power came to supplant wind power. Lost in the dark bowels of a ship, the engineer lived a world apart from the traditions of the sea, more concerned with fuel intake and engine output than the ability to use a sextant. The captain was the eyes and ears and the brains; the engineer the brawn. This has changed as automation has increased aboard vessels and the day when the two roles are combined into one may not be far off.

Seafaring remains very much a man’s world; the overwhelming majority of mariners remain guys, though women are slowly making inroads into the profession. (This is not a criticism of how things should be, merely an observation of how things are. There are more women serving in Western militaries today than in the merchant marine.) At any rate, engineers often seem like “guy’s guys”, more comfortable with their machinery than with anything else.

Motorman checking auxiliary engines, MV Emerald Star

On the various vessels I’ve had the opportunity to sail aboard, the engineers could always be relied upon for a healthy dose of testosterone. More than one deckhand or deck officer warned me about engineers and their penchant for discussing anything mechanical. As one officer told me with amusement, “Don’t ask them about automobiles.” (Many of the engineers I’ve met can reel off endless statistics about torque, engine performance and the fuel capacity of various cars without the aid of any manuals. They seem to have this data seared into their brains.)

But it must be said that engineers inhabit an odd world, one without windows, horizon lines or even a sense of direction. Within the confines of the engine room, they monitor caged beasts that are the embodiment of power, energy and the means to propel a vessel through the sea, man-made maelstroms tamed within steel prisons. Where a ship is going, what the present course setting is and who else is in the waters nearby are meaningless to engineers. They’re only concern is caring for their industrial charges.

Surprisingly, I’ve always found engineers the most accessible mariners I’ve met – so long as you take an interest in their machinery. They are the guardians of pistons, fuel injectors, propeller shafts, desalinators, generators, bunker fuel, and so much more, and they take their jobs very seriously.

In many respects, engineers know a ship better than most others, save the senior officers. They inhabit the heart of the beast, a place filled with heat, noise and a just bit of chaos. More than just mechanics, they perform a type of doctoring that comes from being attuned to the equipment, understanding nuances of technical performance that most of the rest of us will never comprehend.

So the next time you happen upon an engineer in a bar, ask him – or her – about the merits of a Sulzer or a B&W engine and watch the glow on their face as they reply. Everyone has a story to tell, you just need to find an entrée.

Control room, MV Emerald Star

The Hermit Kingdom's search for hard currency

2006-06-21T22:42:00.000-04:00

Here's one that slipped under the radar screens of the media...

In March of this year, the U.S. Congressional Research Service prepared a background paper (see www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33324.pdf) detailing American claims that North Korea is involved in a major counterfeiting operation.

Essentially, they believe that Kim Jong Il's government is printing bogus US$100 bills, which the North Koreans can then launder in foreign nations. It's a brilliantly simple scheme for a country that needs to raise something like a billion dollars a year to fund its trade deficit while facing a near global pariah status.

According to the researchers, at least $45 million in fake American banknotes have been detected so far and the belief is that Pyongyang earns somewhere between 15 and 25 million dollars a year through their counterfeiting operations. The DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) denies the allegations.

For anyone who travels extensively - such as mariners - there are only two currencies worth carrying: the U.S. dollar and the Euro. And as hated America may be in some parts of the globe, their money remains revered, far more than the European version. In the remotest parts of Vietnam, Russia or Cuba, a U.S. C-note goes a long way for a lost soul. But if this situation continues, it could change the relative worth of the Franklin banknote worldwide.

The U.S. Treasury plans to revamp the hundred dollar bill next year, to make it more difficult to counterfeit. In the meantime, check your greenbacks, especially if in Asia.

The chaos theory in action

2006-05-24T11:13:00.000-04:00

Wandering through a shipbuilding yard one is immediately struck by the sheer complexity of human endeavour that goes into creating ocean-going leviathans. The craft of building a ship must surely rank as one of Mankind’s finest achievements, for it marshals the resources of vast industrial operations and the efforts of thousands of individuals. For months on end, those shipwrights will toil to assemble the myriad of pieces that eventually come together as a vessel, an artifact that will then leave its birthplace and venture to the farthest corners of the globe.

In industrial terms, Ulsan, in southeastern Korea, is the Detroit of shipbuilding, home to the Hyundai Corporation’s yards (the same family-run enterprise that produces cars and trucks nearby). Sprawling over several kilometres of shoreline by the East Sea, Hyundai has three separate facilities encompassing dozens of dry docks and hundreds of fabrication sheds. Their shipwrights craft everything from supertankers and container ships to offshore oilrigs, building the vessels in a piecemeal fashion that appears chaotic when viewed up close.

Of course there is a master plan afoot here in the Ulsan yards, the evolution of thousands of years of shipbuilding. Koreans themselves have a long history of crafting ocean-going ship – over four centuries ago they built the first ironclad vessels – but they have taken a page from Western mass production and perfected the system. They pre-fabricate the sections of a vessel and then move them to dry docks for final assembly, something easier said than done.

To move the sections, the yards utilize huge multi-wheeled platforms called transporters, each the size of a tennis court. These transporters meander around with blocks of hull sitting on their backs, the steel sections visually seeming to float about the ground. Cranes known as “Goliaths” then heft the blocks into the dry docks where they’re welded into place and becoming the hull. As a vessel nears completion, it is floated out to a wharf and the final elements are added, the result of perhaps a year of labour and anywhere from $50-150 million (US) of financial investment.

But beyond the industrial might presented at Ulsan’s yards, what I found most fascinating was the human involvement in shipbuilding. Though hardly evocative in their aesthetic characters, the vessels crafted here are a point of undeniable pride among the shipwrights whom I met. One told me of how he looked upon each vessel like a family member, an entity he would never forget. Another ran his hand across the burnished side of a propeller blade with all the care of an artist caressing a new piece of sculpture.

Yet for all the effort these individuals put into crafting their creations, there is one key difference from other workers building other things. While a steelworker can point to skyscraper and tell his or her grandchildren that “I helped build that”, a shipwright is left with nothing but memories once the job is done. Rarely, if ever, do vessels return to Ulsan, meaning that after months of hard labour, each Korean worker must say a private farewell to their handiwork before it heads over the horizon to begin its Sisyphean journeys coursing through the oceans and seas of our planet.

An upcoming reading from Ocean Titans

2006-05-23T12:51:00.000-04:00

For anyone in the Toronto area this coming weekend, I invite you to join me as I read excerpts from my recent book, Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of a Ship. It all takes place as part of Doors Open Toronto, an annual event in which various buildings of architectural, historical and cultural note around the city welcome visitors to explore the sites.

I'll be reading at Metropolitan United Church, one of the largest and grandest cathedrals in the country. The event begins at 1:00pm this Saturday, May 27, after which I'll take questions from the audience. Copies of the book will also be available for purchase. Metropolitan United Church is located at 56 Queen Street East in downtown Toronto, at the northwest corner of Queen and Church streets. The nearest subway stop is Queen, on the Yonge line.

I look forward to seeing everyone this weekend and, as always, hearing your comments.

A true mariner's scribblings

2006-05-13T01:31:00.000-04:00

In the course of my work, I'm endlessly trolling through the web in search of ideas, information and impetus to continue my work. Recently I came across the website and blog of a British mariner, Ieuan Dolby, an engineer working out of Taiwan. Dolby writes with all the piss and vinegar of one who has experienced far more than most of us ever will and I heartily recommend anyone interested in seafaring to check his sites out. Wander on over to http://seamania.blogspot.com/ and check it out.

More posts shortly...

Requiem for merchant mariner warriors

2006-05-08T23:31:00.000-04:00

Their tests are tempests and the sea that drowns.
They are my country’s line, her great art done
By strong brains laboring on the thought unwon.
- John Masefield, “Ships”

This past weekend saw the annual celebration known as Battle of the Atlantic Sunday, a day reserved to commemorate those men and women who fought, and were lost at sea, during the Second World War. It is an event heavily overshadowed by November’s Remembrance Day, but an important one nonetheless. Though we often think of uniform-clad sailors, soldiers and airmen as being on the knife’s edge of war, the Battle of the Atlantic inflicted a great toll on civilians: merchant mariners struggling to feed the war effort.

HMCS Sackville, Canada's naval memorial

The price paid by merchant mariners of all nations in the last two World Wars was atrocious. There really is no other way to describe what these mostly unarmed men endured feeding the war effort. To be a merchant mariner in either war meant you were far more likely to die than if you were serving in uniform on a naval vessel. To give you an idea of the dangers, consider that 534 Allied merchant ships were sunk in the Second World War just from enemy mines. That works out to about one in ten ships lost, because over 5000 cargo vessels were sunk in that war. In the Atlantic Ocean alone, 50000 civilian mariners died between 1939 and 1945; they died of horrible burns caused by explosions, gunned to death as they clung to flotsam or drowned alone in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

However, for their heroic service in helping to defeat the enemy many merchant mariners found that once the war had ended they were treated as second-class veterans, denied pensions and other benefits accorded to their naval brethren. In Canada, it took until 1998 before these men received official government recognition and compensation. And little has changed. When it comes to war, the role of mariners remains as invaluable to governments today as it has throughout history, but their contributions continue to be overshadowed by others. Rarely has a conflict been waged without the support of sailors manning cargo vessels, whether it be the Trojan Wars, Napoleon’s conquests, the Korean Conflict or the struggle to remove Saddam Hussein.

I’ve had the pleasure – if that’s the proper word – to cross the North Atlantic during some of it’s most vile of moods, firsthand encounters with a tempestuous entity that always left me shaken. But that was on some of the most modern of vessels to be found, in peacetime. I can barely fathom the ordeal it must have been to cross that ocean in primitive tin cans, while also facing the prospects of an enemy intent on killing you.

In a Greenwich dry dock beside the Thames River lies the majestic ship Cutty Sark, a memorial to the age of sail and the toils of ordinary seafarers. And at one end of the dry dock lies a small tablet bearing the words of the English poet laureate John Mansfield. They are the last two lines from his epic poem “Ships”, an apt honorific to anyone who endured the Battle of the Atlantic in whatever vessel flying whatever flag.

Chiseled into the wall, it simply reads: “They mark our passage as a race of men – Earth will not see such ships as those again.”

A Springtime view

2006-05-04T23:22:00.000-04:00

Well, for anyone who's been wandering through this site, I must apologize for my recent absence. As often happens, I've been stuck with my head down doing research on some new projects, all of which have kept me from posting anything of late. I do promise to rectify this shortly and give you some more material to ponder. The craft of writing is not an easy endeavour, though many blogs (most?) are full of rambling thoughts and ill-conceived posts. I'm trying to give this site some more energy, so when I'm busy I often feel it's better to keep my mouth shut rather than blather.

In the meantime, you can check out a recent interview with me online at the Penguin Books Canada site. Click on the Penguin link below my profile (on the top right) and you can either read it or, if you have a media player installed on your computer, listen to it.

Soon I'll be taking you into the shipbuilding yards of South Korea, and down into the bowels of a vessel to meet the engineers who toil unseen.

cheers,
Daniel

Anonymous death

2006-04-17T19:31:00.000-04:00

Sunset in the Gulf of St. Lawrence

The recent passing of a friend’s father had me mulling mortality again and, coming near the weekend that Christians celebrate death and resurrection, it also had me considering the way we deal with the end of life. Volumes have been written about the topic by far more knowledgeable individuals than myself, but few concern themselves with the deaths of mariners.

As I’ve said before, seafaring is the most dangerous job a human being can take on: thousands and thousands of people set out upon on the oceans, seas, lakes and rivers of our planet never to return home. That’s not hyperbole, that’s just a fact of their lives. To travel at sea is to constantly journey over the wrecks of ships and the bones of their inhabitants. They’re overwhelmingly forgotten and anonymous, submerged beneath fathoms of water in the darkest and coldest of places.

Bridge officers on MV Canmar Spirit, off the coast of Newfoundland

The anonymity of these deaths at sea irks many merchant mariners. To be forgotten in life is one thing; to be forgotten in death is quite another. Several seafarers spoke to me about the aftermath of a recent accident aboard a Canadian Navy submarine. The HMCS Chicoutimi was on her maiden voyage from Scotland to Halifax in October of 2004 when a fire broke out as she was traveling on the surface of the Irish Sea. Acrid smoke filled the boat’s compartments and left her without power, wallowing in rough waters. A number of the crew were seriously injured and one, Lieutenant Chris Saunders, died in an Irish hospital a few days later. His death became front-page news in Canada, his dedication and service to his country lauded by politicians in Parliament. When this submariner’s body arrived home in Canada it was met by dignitaries including our prime minister and Lt. Saunders was accorded a funeral with full military honours.

And yet Lt. Saunders died not in battle, nor even in a war zone. He died doing his job. A few weeks before his tragic death, a couple of fishermen from Newfoundland drowned when their vessel took on water in the middle of a storm. No one stood in Ottawa to commemorate them; no government leader appeared at their funerals; and no one remembers their names, except the villagers of St. Brendan’s Newfoundland, where the seafarers left wives and children behind.

For the record, those fishermen who perished were two brothers, David and Joseph Ryan.

I mean no slight to members of the Canadian navy and military here, merely to recount what commercial seafarers told me. Six and half thousand professional mariners will die on the job this year. And few will be celebrated, though many will be mourned in private.

September morning somewhere over the mid-Atlantic Ridge

Keeping Time

2006-04-05T23:43:00.000-04:00

This is a two-fold post, one to update what’s going on with my book, the other to recount more nautical tales. Muted apologies for no recent postings, but time's been a problem of late...

My book, Ocean Titans, has been out here in Canada for a couple of weeks. So far, it’s been a quiet release, but the hope is that word of mouth – and some good reviews – will help to get things moving. As well, I received the news recently that the book will be released in hardcover form in the United States beginning this fall, thanks to Lyons Press down there. And that it will available in a number of library systems shortly (including the Toronto Public Library and the St. Catherines, Ontario, libraries.)

I encourage anyone interested in the sea, merchant shipping and those whose lives revolve around these man-made leviathans to check out my book and pass the word to all and sundry.

Meanwhile, I was again thinking of my time at sea working on the book as I changed the clocks around my home this past weekend. Going between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time seems so much of a fuss to many of us, that we forget those whose jobs require constantly shifting between one time zone and another. Like mariners.

The Prime Meridian, Greenwich, England

I was in London about a year and a half ago, about to cross the North Atlantic with a container ship and her crew, when I made a trek to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. I wanted to see the Prime Meridian, that demarcation line from which all the world’s time zones have been standardized. Established some 250 years ago, this imaginary frontier between east and west can still be seen painted through the windows of the Observatory and highlighted in the adjacent cobble stoned courtyard. At 1:00pm (1300 hours) each day, an aluminum ball still drops from the spire of a nearby tower so that any vessels moored within sight upon the Thames River can set their chronometer accordingly.

Second Officer Jakub Rosicki plotting course on MV Antwerpen

Of course mariners today rely far more on computers and the global positioning system of satellites to determine their longitudinal positions, but each and every commercial vessel out there still maintains a ship’s clock that is set to Greenwich Time (also known as Universal Time or Zulu Time). But any good officer can still plot a position using the chronometer, a calculator and a set of Admiralty charts – just in case the computers go down.

Another surprising item stored somewhere in a ship’s wheelhouse is a sextant, that unique device required to shoot the sun or stars. Aboard the MV Antwerpen they carried two brass models crafted in what was once the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and holding one in my hands was a delight. Like the chronometer, it’s there in case all the high tech equipment fails. And along with a library of nautical charts, mathematical indexes and operational manuals, these are the tools that make a vessel self-sufficient in navigation.

Third Officer and Cadet at chart table of MV Canmar Spirit

The skill and precision that merchant mariners use everyday makes me wish I'd paid more attention to my high school math classes. But, then again, I never did become a true seafarer. Only an observer. More thoughts soon.

The Old Man & the sea

2006-03-19T14:31:00.000-05:00

Captain Jacek Wisniewski on the bridge (with binoculars)

In what I consider a good omen for the recent release of my book “Ocean Titans” here in Canada, I received an email from “the Old Man” this past week. It was sent from somewhere off the east coast of Nova Scotia, from a merchant ship plodding its way south towards Jacksonville, Florida. Sounded like the trip could be a little rough: as he wrote, “The weather isn’t too good, but the vessel is okay. We say ‘brave’.”

The “Old Man” in question is Captain Jacek Wisniewski, a Polish mariner I first encountered aboard the bulk carrier MV Antwerpen about a year and a half ago, when I joined him and his crew for my first extended trip to sea with a commercial vessel. Captain Wisniewski is now in charge of the MV Gdynia, a new vessel that he will call home for the next four months.

Though his official title is Master Mariner, most of us know him as “the Captain”. Except, that is, his crew, who have another term to describe the individual legally in charge of a vessel, its cargo and anyone who sets foot on its decks. To those who work on commercial vessels, the person who safeguards their lives at sea is universally known as “the Old Man”. This is not a slight at their age nor a reflection on any curmudgeonly aspect of their character, but an honorific steeped in tradition, something whispered behind his back. (Captain Wisniewski is himself in his early forties and an intelligent and cultured man with a wry sense of humour.)

There are perhaps 50,000 individuals worldwide who bear the credentials necessary to command a merchant ship. The vast majority are, in fact, men, though a few women continue to make inroads into this somewhat exclusive fraternity. And even they may be referred to as the Old Man by their crews.

To be a Master Mariner is to reach the pinnacle of professional seafaring. It takes decades to become one and entails taking on responsibilities well beyond the scope of what most of us bear. In an era in which accepting responsibility for one’s own actions seems out of vogue, the captain of a sea-going vessel shoulders ultimate and direct responsibility for everything that occurs on his watch. And, yes, they can still perform marriages at sea.

I again thought about the responsibilities captains take on when I read Wisniewski’s email, heading into rough seas with a multi-million dollar ship, a crew of about thirty and a heavily insured cargo. Would most of us do what he does? Not likely.

Consider this scenario: You are driving down the road in your car, a vehicle that has been certified as safe; you have years of experience driving and you haven’t been drinking. The weather’s clear, but suddenly you spy another car veering into your lane, straight at you. You steer out of the way to avoid a head-on collision, but managed to scratch a rusty trailer parked nearby. As a result, you are charged with negligence and must accept at least part of the responsibility for other driver’s incompetence. Would you accept that? Not damn likely.

Yet that is the fate of master mariners. An abiding principle of seafaring is to avoid a collision – with another vessel or dry land – at all costs. The safety of the ship and its neighbours is a priority.

This, of course, also extends to aiding those in need, so long as it doesn’t endanger one’s own crew. I think about another Old Man I sailed with, Captain A.S. Grewal of the container ship MV Canmar Spirit. I spent a couple of weeks with Captain Grewal and his crew crossing the North Atlantic, not long after first meeting Captain Wisniewski.

We had a very tumultuous crossing that time. This is not merely a writer’s perspective, but a reality: at least one ship sank on the oceans we were transiting that time and a couple of experienced mariners later told me it was one of the worst set of conditions they’d seen in a while.

After disembarking from Captain Grewal’s ship in Montréal, the ship returned across the North Atlantic to England, encountering a vessel in distress southeast of Iceland. To his credit – and that of his crew – Captain Grewal responded to the S.O.S. and successfully rescued the sailor from his wallowing boat, upholding a tradition that goes back thousands of years, the one that promises to do whatever humanly possible to protect a life at peril on the seas.

To Captain Grewal, Captain Wisniewski and all the other mariners who are willing to brave the elements in defence of others, I thank-you.

Captain A. S. Grewal, master of MV Canmar Spirit

Balkan Memories

2006-03-14T20:10:00.000-05:00

Serb villager in Kosovo with graffiti: “No Future For You”

The recent news that Slobodan Milosevic died while in custody in The Hague for war crimes has returned Serbia – and the Balkans – to our front pages, displacing Iraq, Afghanistan and avian flu for a few moments. To some, the death of Milosevic seems an unfortunate reminder of the unfinished business lingering from the wars that wrought the former Yugoslavia throughout the 1990’s, as though it had all been solved years ago. Or, at least, superceded by 9/11 and the “war on terrorism”.

I have an intimate and exhaustive relationship with the countries that once made up Yugoslavia: my father was born on the Adriatic coast to a mixed Serb-Croat family before immigrating to Canada and I have traveled throughout the region since a young child. Cities, towns and villages that are but bylines to most are familiar to me: Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, Pristina, Srebrenica – these and many more are anything but remote to yours truly.

But I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my father’s homeland or, rather, a difficult one since Tito died in 1980. Before that, things were pretty simple. I was half-Yugoslav, a partial product of a multicultural, multi-ethnic nation that was the envy of the Eastern Bloc. My relatives traveled the world with all the confidence of someone like myself, a Canadian.

And then it all unraveled.

Ashkali kids at Pristina railroad station

To be a liberal-minded individual with ties to that part of the Balkans was a test in the last decade of the last millennium. You were tainted by association, a member of a group of people who were carrying out “ancient, tribal, ethnic hatred” to one another. And that, to me, was the singular fault of the rest of the world when it came to the Balkans.

Yugoslavia did not fall apart because of long repressed, simmering animosities. It fell prey to politics, pure and simple. The people who have lived in what we once called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were not always intent on killing one another nor did they merely await a trigger to ignite a conflagration. But politics are more difficult to explain to outsiders; actually, they’re pretty complex to explain to insiders.

A few years back – okay, over a decade ago – I was at a social function populated by what are termed “policy wonks”, civil servants and academics with an abiding interest in international relations. Seated across from me was a well-known Canadian apparatchik, a bored older man with a desire to pick a fight to enliven his evening. For some reason I rose to his challenge and we became engrossed in a discussion about the Balkans.

His take was that “Yugoslavia” was an articulated, compromised entity doomed to failure owing to the ethnic enmity that had resided there for centuries, a common perception at the time. My view was that the region was under the undue influence of politicians keen to gain power and willing to do whatever it took to achieve their goals.

“These people have been at their throats for years, far before we even considered them,” I remember him telling me. “They are not like us. And never will be.” He stared at me hard with that last quip, as he tried to communicate the difference between Canada and Yugoslavia, us good, they bad.

Taken aback, I thought about what ethnic hatred can engender, the means one can ethnically cleanse or kill.

And I asked this man a simple question: “What place am I describing in which two communities are separated by a river? Two ethnic groups that have lived together for hundreds of years but harbour differences? Differences that come to a boil over an issue nearby, resulting in one group stoning the others. Stoning women and children.”

He was stumped for an answer and mumbled “Mostar? Sarajevo?”

No. The answer is Montréal. Canada. During the 1990 Oka Crisis in my homeland. The country that successfully eradicated the Beothuk people of Newfoundland in the 19th century, the world’s first example of ethnic cleansing.

Anyone can be manipulated. We aren’t as different as we think we are.

UN Train in Mitrovica, Kosovo

Book release update

2006-03-03T22:42:00.000-05:00

The release date of my new book has been announced. Beginning March 12, Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of a Ship will be available in bookstores throughout Canada, as well as from various online sellers. You can read an excerpt from it on the Penguin Canada site; just follow the link on the right, then go to New Releases, where you’ll see the cover among the March releases. Click on it and you’ll learn more about the book and can read the prologue.

I’ll keep a posting here of any upcoming events at which I’ll be participating. Meanwhile, I invite you to check out the book, explore this site and look forward to your feedback.

Looking at a Ship

2006-03-02T23:07:00.000-05:00

Off the coast of South Korea

Sea travel has always had a slightly mysterious aura about it, mainly owing to the fact that it entails leaving the safety of dry land behind and setting out upon the great unknown that is our planet’s key defining characteristic. It’s also something that is only experienced – regularly – by a minority of us. There are less than two million professional mariners working today, plying the oceans, seas, rivers and lakes on about 26,000 vessels.

For the rest of us, the chance to savor life aboard a ship are left to brief journeys on cruise ships or even shorter jaunts on ferry boats, and neither can truly provide anything more than a glimpse into the world of seafaring.

To be aboard a working, commercial vessel is a completely different experience. It’s a mixture of factory, dormitory, office space and cafeteria, all shrouded in solitude and privacy. And constantly on the move. Whether it is a bulk carrier, an oil tanker or a container ship, these vessels have purpose, a workaday sensibility that is not benign or relaxing. The cadence and rhythm of life here is structured around the task of shuttling cargos from one port to another, regardless of weather.

Wheelhouse of MV Antwerpen

Merchant ships are utilitarian entities, but they are note without character. They are, I’ll grant you, somewhat bland expression of marine design: Cabins tend toward early IKEA in resplendency, synthetic fibres reign supreme and I never knew that fake wood paneling could still be employed so ominously. But the eyes are not always the best tools to observe what a ship’s like.

For instance, my first impressions while sailing with the crew of the bulker MV Antwerpen centered on the sounds and sensations the ship made. In port the vessel resounded to the crescendo thuds of her gantry cranes scooping up tonnes of coal from the cargo bays, steel careening on steel. While at sea, though, the timbre of the ship rang loudest.

The Antwerpen was always trembling as her engine strove to drive us through the gentle, mid-summer swells off New England. Closets vibrated in my cabin, a glass of water revealed ripples on the liquid and the deck transmitted the cut of the propeller doing battle with the ocean. Taking a shower in the morning, you grasped the handholds emplaced on the bulkheads to deal with the rolls. At night, you could lie in your bunk and feel the rise and fall of the hull, the swaying from side to side, the shudders of waves. All in all, I found it a decidedly pleasant and reassuring experience.

C deck companionway, MV Antwerpen

Mariners develop an acute sense about their marine hosts, something directly related to the reverberations a vessel displays. More than one captain or chief engineer recounted times when they’d suddenly awakened from a deep sleep, sensing something had changed in the resonance they’d been accustomed to. It could have been a slight burp in one of the engine cylinders, maybe a heavy wave brushing against the hull. Either way, these professional seafarers were up in an instant to check on things, because at sea only a novice, or a fool, ignores a change in the rhythms.

Throughout my travels at sea - through gales, hurricanes, tropical downpours and glassy calm, sun-soaked waters - I always found a reassurance in the shimmies and shakes of my temporary homes. I allowed myself to be embraced by the power of the engines, coddled by the marine-grade steel hull and relished the interaction between manmade leviathan and Mother Nature. This, I quickly realized, was the first part of understanding why some consider ships to have a soul.

Sea trials, near Ulsan, South Korea

Looking for a ship

2006-02-27T15:18:00.000-05:00

When it comes to the sea, there are countless books that have preceded me, books by authors both illustrious and unknown. The romance of the sea, the history of vessels, the life stories of mariners, the wonders of exploration – they have been a staple of literature for centuries. And I’ve allowed myself the chance to soak up tomes and tales for decades now, everything from Daniel Defoe to Joseph Conrad, from Alan Villiers to Derek Lundy, from Helen Creighton to Rachel Carson.

But if you really want to write about the sea and those who make their lives from it, you cannot merely read. You must sail. Anything less is an armchair travelogue.

Unfortunately, in the post-911 world, getting on a working, commercial ship is not nearly as easy as it used to be. The time when one could wander down to a wharf, eye a vessel and ask her captain if it’s okay to tag along for a voyage are long gone. Like so much of our world, the barriers and regulations encompassing shipping are more stringent these days: there is a fear, however misplaced, that “rogue elements” could take over a vessel and terrorize some urban centre. This has made an already secretive world even more cloistered.

So where does one start the process of getting inside the world of merchant shipping? Well, you can try making cold calls to shipping firms – as I did – and will encounter a suitably cool response. A better option, though, is to simply send word through friends and colleagues about your intentions and see what happens.

Because commercial shipping is so global in reach, a surprising number of contacts will appear. Keep in mind that merchant vessels carry over 90% of the world’s commerce, everything from iPods to lingerie. The world of seagoing vessels somehow touches us all, whether we realize it or not, most often not. So after a few weeks of passing news of my project around, I was put in touch with someone in the shipping business. Bob Abraham is an ex-pat Canadian living in the United States and he liked the idea of a book about commercial shipping and the experiences of those whose lives revolve these marine leviathans.

Bob said he’d see what he could do to help and within a few more weeks came the news that I could hitch a ride on a bulk carrier he was associated with. The vessel was somewhere in the Caribbean, en route to New England with a load of Venezuelan coal. With about a week’s notice, I packed my bags and grabbed a flight to Boston, where Bob met me.

Driving down to the port of Providence, Rhode Island, he filled me on the ship: She was an older vessel (built in 1979) called the MV Antwerpen, weighing about 40,000 deadweight tonnes and 199 metres in length (652 feet). Antwerpen’s compliment was thirty-two officers and ratings, all hailing from Poland. For the next few weeks I would be joining them as they sailed up and down the eastern seaboard of North America, to Maine, Nova Scotia, Florida and The Bahamas. She’d then head back to South America for more coal, though I was uncertain if I’d be able to stay with her that long. I’d flown down from Toronto on a one-way ticket with no idea when – or how – I’d get home.

Winding our way through the industrial wastelands that line the commercial port area, my first glimpse of the Antwerpen was obscured by small mountains of coal that the vessel was discharging from her holds. Pulling up to the base of her gangway, the Antwerpen’s red and black hull and her white superstructure loomed over me. Her two gantry cranes were swinging to and fro, clawing at the black mineral within her before dumping it on conveyor belts.

My arrival aboard the ship went unnoticed by most of the crew – they were too busy unloading the cargo, rushing to finish up and head back to sea. Bob led me into the ship and up to meet her captain so that I could be formally entered into the Antwerpen’s crew manifest. Captain Jacek Wisniewski was waiting for us in his day room, a somewhat spartan office cum living room located one deck down from the wheelhouse. Clad in a polo shirt and blue jeans, Wisniewski seemed indifferent and reserved about my presence aboard his ship. I assumed – correctly, as it turns out – that he was waiting to gauge me and see how I’d fit into his crew. A piece of advice given to me by a friend who is a professional mariner came to mind: “Whatever you do,” he’d said before I headed off on this journey, “Take it slow and easy. Slow and easy.”

As I unpacked my bags in my cabin, the sounds of the cranes unloading coal reverberated throughout the ship and I could feel the shudders as they banged against the hull. Bob Abraham dropped by to wish me well, grinning as he left me alone. And I was alone. For the next couple of weeks I’d be on my own at sea with a crew of Polish mariners, not sure where I’d end up or what to do next.

But I’d finally found a ship.

Princes and Paupers

2006-02-13T19:32:00.000-05:00

Bhavnagar street scene

At the start of my exploration into the shipping world, I made two trips to India to visit the shipbreaking yards in Alang, located on the Bay of Khambhat in the northwestern part of the country. Each time I stayed in the nearby city of Bhavnagar, an industrial centre of a half million where Mahatma Gandhi went to university. It’s a typically chaotic Indian city, home to diamond cutters and salt merchants, as well as the newer shipbreaking elites. I never quite got a sense of the place, but I really only slept and ate there; it was merely a home base for the six weeks spent doing research.

For most of the time I was in Bhavnagar, I was sequestered in what had once been a Maharajah’s palace, originally built in the 1850’s and replete with peacocks wandering the grounds, an enclosed courtyard and the stuffed heads of various trophy kills presumably bagged by royalty.

As nice as that may sound, the palace cum hotel – “the grandest one in Bhavnagar”, I was assured – offered up crumbling plaster, specious electricity, a kitchen of supremely bland abilities and, in my case, a bathroom invaded by ants. The ants, oddly, didn’t really bother me: they seemed to appear on alternate days, trekking across a corner of the tiled room while migrating between places unseen.

Indeed, after a while I came to look upon the insects and their dogged crossings with a certain glee, their routine something to be favoured. Until, that is, I returned to my hotel room one day to find an older worker within. He spoke no English, but bowed deeply to me as he quietly exited, a can of aerosol spray clutched in one hand. The smell of fumigation permeated the room, so much so that I ignored the air conditioner and opened the windows to air the place. And as I listened to the peacocks squawking in the courtyard outside, I knew my ants would not be returning.

Staying in a former palace, even a rundown one, could sometimes create a sense of guilt on my part. This was because every day I ventured into the shipbreaking yards of Alang, I came face to face with the poverty in which most of the migrant workers lived. There are over 30,000 labourers populating Alang and the vast majority sleeps in modest shacks that are crowded close by the main street – the only street – that services the yards. These hovels, usually about the size of a garden shed, are cobbled together from plywood, sheet metal and anything else scavenged from the ships being desiccated on the beaches. Half dozen or more men will be crammed into the huts, sleeping on hard platforms in dark, sweaty conditions. A single bare bulb may provide some light, the electricity pirated from the local power grid.

For months on end, these shantytowns will be the only place that men from all over India can retire to at the end of a backbreaking day of work. It’s a filthy place – there’s no running water and the men use the adjacent fields as a toilet – but there is a sense of community to be found among the huts. The workers gather at the cookhouses and tea stands to chat and relax; they wander to the phone kiosks to call family; and on Sundays they enjoy their day off just as most others do. Some sleep in, others do laundry and eventually it seems all gather at the impromptu flea market that takes over the main street.

Sunday morning in the shantytown of Alang

Easily the most noticeable thing I discovered in Alang was the desire of individuals to be treated with dignity. Their lives were hard, physically and emotionally, far beyond anything I’d ever seen. They even had a phrase, “A ship a day, a death a day”, to encapsulate life in the shipbreaking yards. But the workers at Alang accepted that this was their lot in life. And, for many, it was a good life: they could make three or four times more money here than in their home villages, even if an entry-level position here makes the equivalent of less than eighteen cents (U.S.) an hour.

But these Indians – teenagers, widows, husbands, and fathers – welcomed me into their homes and into their lives. As we shared cups of masala chai, it was clear that pity was not a part of their vocabulary. None would ever sleep in a maharajah’s palace, but none cared. They would do the work assigned to them, toil in the heat, risk their lives, scar their bodies and take their meager pay and dream of returning home to settle down. In return, all they asked was to be accorded respect for their travails. Nothing more, nothing less.

The shipbreakers of Alang taught me an invaluable lesson, one that would extend to so many others who make their lives from ships and the sea.

Shipbreakers at their homes in Alang

War and Peace in southern Russia

2006-02-07T23:21:00.000-05:00

Petr Vasil’evich Alhutov & Valentina Anufrievna Chumachenko

I stumbled on the photos the other day, while trying to organize my office. Of course this being the digital age, they were on my hard drive. Black and white shots I’d taken a few years back while directing my last documentary.

I was in the southern Russian city of Volgograd at the time, a massive edifice of crumbling Soviet-era industrial glory where a bottle of beer was cheaper to buy than that of water. A place replete with fading glories and forlorn parks more grey than green.

Russia can, at times, overwhelm you with its past, though not necessarily in the physical sense. The architecture of so many of its cities is barely a half century old and without character or merit; those grand historical piles you might visit are often re-creations painstakingly built from rubble; and even the names – of streets, towns or entire regions – change with regimes, rulers and political whims.

But her past still defines Russia, for it is filled with angst, drama, tragedy, intrigue, humour, sorrow, joy and a depth of other emotions that can be glimpsed in so many who live there.

Looking again at the photo of Petr Alhutov and Valentina Chumachenko, this all came back to me. Both were veterans of the Battle of Stalingrad, that horrific struggle for possession of the city now known as Volgograd. Alhutov was a young Red Army infantryman who, on a very cold February morning, escorted German field marshal Freidrich von Paulus into captivity at the end of the six-month long battle. I remember he mumbled to me that the German commander looked forlorn and haggard, with a numb look in his eyes and a nervous tick in his hands. Alhutov saw nothing heroic in what he’d done as a soldier, merely the need to carry out an order and hope to get out of things alive.

Chumachenko, though, was a feisty and vivacious woman with a commanding presence. Even in her late seventies it was obvious she must have been a heartbreaker for the boys when younger. Back then she’d been a nurse assigned to a Red Army tank battalion in the war. “We were all tank drivers,” she told me. “My husband was a tank driver. My brother was a tank driver. It must be in our blood.” As a nineteen year-old woman in the midst of the greatest battle ever fought – around three million fought at Stalingrad and some two million died – Chumachenko knew that the options available at the time were limited.

“Capture? That would never happen,” she told me in a parkette near the Volga River. “Do you know what would have happened to me?” And retreat, I asked? “No. Never.” Her eyes stare off somewhere, possible remembering the edict from Stalin that had retreating Russians shot by their own troops. “We had only one option: to survive.”

A dog began barking somewhere off in a nearby apartment block, interrupting our interview. Without bashing an eyelid, Valentina bellowed loudly in Russian for the owner to shut the beast up and – surprisingly – the dog is silenced.

The pain that the Great Patriotic War created in the former Soviet Union is immeasurable. No other nation has ever felt such a bloodletting and few families are without harsh memories of the time. But Valentina Chumachenko, at least, had found some peace in her life, possibly from the passing of the years.

“You understand, we didn’t invite them here,” she says of the invaders. “I meet the Germans who come here now and they tell me ‘Hitler made us do it.’ But people are responsible for their own actions. But still, it is time. Time for us all to live in peace, to live in kindness, with good hearts and feelings no matter what nationality we are. These constant wars, they cause such trauma to people. How many people must die? Who needs this Chechnya?”

Valentina’s last comment has always stuck with me, the words of a battle-scared warrior musing on a nearly unknown war raging a few hundred kilometers south of where we sitting that late May morning. For as my journal notebook records, the very next day a bomb exploded in Volgograd killing a number of young soldiers near the local army base with the papers speculating it was Chechen rebels. Sadly, it barely merited a national headline. It was the currency of life accepted in Russian society at the time.

Valentina Chumachenko, Volgograd, May 2000

Beginning at the end

2006-02-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

Alang shipbreaking yards, northwestern India

If artistic creativity thrives on chaos, then I had no better source for my book than the sprawling shipbreaking yards of Alang, India. This stretch of sandy beach tucked along the Bay of Khambhat northwest of Mumbai (Bombay) is the site of the largest marine graveyard in the world. It is a place where ships come to die, to be torn asunder by teams of migrant labourers and recycled into construction girders, steel plates and other re-useable items. It is a dirty, dangerous place rarely visited by outsiders, but proved a fascinating starting point for my global journeys in search of hte soul of a ship.

A few years back, I was part of a team of Canadian filmmakers working on a documentary about Alang and was able to spend over a month here. While at work, I met an Indian captain who queried me about what the film was about and, when I related it was to look at shipbreaking, he wondered why no one bothered to look at the entire life of a ship and those who make their living around her.

This was an interesting idea, without a doubt, but I don't have the means to spend thirty or forty year watching a ship's maritime wanderings and hanging out with its various crews. But when I returned to my home in Canada, this captain's words stuck with me and I began to ponder things.

Research quickly showed that there are few books written about men, ships and the sea (and women, too), unless they chronicle disasters it seems. Within a few weeks I'd decided that there might be something there, something about the world of merchant seafaring today. and, fundamentally, it went back to what I'd seen and experienced in India.

Graveyards have always been intriguing to me, not for any macabre aspect but because of the finality of life - the mortality - that is presented for all to see. Each of those vessels I'd seen in India had been carefully crafted at a shipyard somewhere, had sailed the seven seas and been homes to individuals for months or years at a time. Taken as a whole, all those rusting hulks being cut up for scrap metal had once been touchstones for tens of thousands of men and women.

So the idea became clearer: Was it possible that all those individuals could have left an imprint on the cold steel hulls? Could that be a means of exploring the world of seafaring today? Well, I figured there were worse ways to begin my journeys.

Cast up from old ocean

2006-02-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

It was on a cool midwinter's day not unlike today that those words - cast up from old ocean - were pondered by a compatriot of mine, words that still resonate with me. Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scotia-born sea captain, was sitting in his Boston home and struggling with boredom and unemployment. A master mariner of the highest skill - he'd captain sail vessels throughout the seas and oceans of our planet - Slocum was about to embark on a new and exciting endeavour; he was going to attempt to sail around the world. Solo.

Slocum eventually achieved his goal: he left New England on April 24, 1895 in a little sloop called "Spray", returning to America three years later. He wrote about the experience "Sailing Alone Around The World", a book little remembered outside of diehard sailing fans. But the idea of trying something outrageous, something audacious, something dangerous...well, I understand what that Canadian mariner was thinking.

For the past two and a half years, I've been immersed in the world of commercial shipping and those who make their livelihoods from this ancient business. I'm a writer, and sometime documentary filmmaker, based in Toronto, who decided to write a book about seafaring today. It was definitely not an easy task and has consumed far more time - and money - than I'd imagined possible. It took me to Korea, India, Monaco, England, France and the U.S. I ventured across the North Atlantic in September gales, through the edge of a hurricane off Cape Fear and into the tranquil waters of the East Sea off Asia. I met captains, engineers, deckhands, priests, wives, designers, builders, wealthy owners and poor shipbreakers.

It was one of the most amazing things an individual can experience.

Now this may seem a boring topic to consider - people shuffling goods from Point A to point B within frameworks of industrial steel - but I ask you to pause a moment and ponder a few thing: First is why wouldn't individuals who traverse the seas and oceans of our planet in solitude not have something to say, about life, love and existence? Second is to consider that seafaring is the most dangerous job around: somewhere in the region of 6500 mariners die on the job every year; think about that for a moment. Finally, I put to you that the tales of travelers are always imbued with mystery, danger and insight. We must just listen to hear the stories.

My book, "Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of a Ship", will be coming out in mid-March here in Canada. so as I prepare for the launch of the book I've decided to relate some of the stories and events that I've been privy to while working on the book. There are stories to be told, stories not included in the book plus ones not necessarily related to it. But all remind me of the variety of experiences to be encountered when one just opens your eyes and ears to what surrounds us.

The sea may be of infinite width, as Jules Verne wrote, but life is immeasurably larger.