Part 4
The Ambiguous Asian Fishing Boat
I
The illusion of sailing north persisted through the night. But I must have slept, because the pirates had to wake us up in the morning under a bright sun. They said an American warship was standing two or three miles off. “Aeroplane!” they added mysteriously, and ordered us down to the lower deck.
The ship tilted back and forth on gentle swells. I moved gingerly for the staircase. But I wasn’t fast enough for Abdinuur, who shoved my shoulder, causing the pain in my spine to flare.
Abdinuur carried a machine gun with a heavy band of .30-caliber rounds,* and we stood near a railing. I snapped, “Abdinuur, if you do that again, I’ll throw you over the side of this fucking ship,” and I meant it with all my heart. Lucky for both of us Abdinuur spoke no English.
Downstairs, the pirates tossed our mattresses under a workbench-size conveyor belt installed along the forward edge of the deck. Stuffed under this metal-and-rubber contraption, we would be harder for a drone to find.
The Asian crew sat around the deck, watching us with young, gentle, curious faces. Some looked Southeast Asian, not Chinese. They seemed pleasant enough, but the back injury put me in a snappish and fatalistic mood. I squinted around the deck for the best place to jump. I did not want to be on the ship.
White and aquamarine paint seemed to flake off the walls of the bridge tower, across from us. The whole steel vessel thrummed with noise from a generator. My vision blurred the faces of the sailors, the sunlit rubber deck, and the rail of the ship, so escape was hard to assess. But I thought the cutaway section of the gunwale might work just fine. Maybe not now, not in front of everyone. Right now my spine throbbed. I understood why back pain had driven my father to pills.
A Filipino said, “Would you like some coffee?”
“What? Oh, sure,” I said.
We received tin mugs of milky Nescafé. The Filipinos also handed around wads of fried dough, which had been sizzling in an electric wok.
“Coffee and doughnuts,” I muttered with approval.
“Is good!” Rolly said.
The more I squinted, the more the ship impressed me. It had no flies. It had working electrical outlets and trickling water pumps. An old Honda motor loomed next to our conveyor belt, with curved metallic-green surfaces like an antique fridge. Behind us, under a steel ceiling, in what English sailors would call the forecastle, many more hostages were crammed. Caged lightbulbs burned on the steel ceiling inside; clotheslines had been laced between the metal cages. I saw T-shirts, flowered surf shorts, peaked straw hats dangling by their strings. Everything swayed with the listing ship. The Pacific tone of the crew’s belongings salved my homesick brain.
The ship was a tuna vessel called the Naham 3, and it had sailed from Mauritius, an African island nation south of the Seychelles. The owners were Taiwanese. The crew came from China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam. The captain had been Taiwanese, but the captain was gone. Pirates had shot him.
One Filipino, Ferdinand, had a calm face with pooling brown eyes. He seemed quiet and circumspect. His friend Arnel was lean and tall, with a brilliant smile. When he told us his name, he rolled the r—Arrrnel—so I could tell he was used to people from various parts of the world misunderstanding him. The Filipinos introduced us to a wiry Chinese man called Li Bo Hai—severe-looking, lean, with white flecks in his hair—who seemed to be in charge. Through Ferdinand’s translation, he gave us a few basic facts. We were anchored near Hobyo, he said, in eighteen meters of water, a little over a mile from shore—
“Oh,” I said. “Didn’t we sail all night?”
“What do you mean?” said Ferdinand.
“Where are we now?”
“Yes, near Hobyo. We have been here since the end of March.”
Ferdinand pointed, and in the distance I could just make out dirt-colored buildings clustered on the sand, spangled with bright reflections from the hot zinc roofs. In time, I learned to see the spindly shape of a cell-phone tower and the stranded fishing boat Hamid had pointed out from the beach, the Shiuh Fu 1, with the Chinese hostage who had committed suicide. It was a gray, distant, tilted wreck.
“Interesting,” I said.
“That ship is just like this one,” Ferdinand told us.
“Really? Run by the same company?”
“No. But also from Taiwan.”
“I see.”
A cry went up from the men behind us in the forecastle—“Suban, suban!”* is what I heard—and everyone sprang up to grab a bowl and chopsticks. Two crewmen came down the steps with fresh-cooked pots of rice, and a Chinese man handed us each a green plastic bowl and a pair of chopsticks. Another took our bowls away again but returned with breakfast, which involved Szechuan-spiced goat, soy-cooked vegetables, and green spinach noodles on a hot pile of rice.
This meal pulled me out of my funk. My spine still throbbed, but I hadn’t seen such a wealth of food in almost three months. I dug in with my chopsticks.
Rolly said, “Michael, how you do this?”
“You never used chopsticks at home? I thought you were part Chinese.”
“My mother!” he said. “Me, only one-quarter.”
The Naham 3 had no silverware. I stopped to give him a chopsticks lesson.
“This is good food,” I said.
We ate squatting like peasants on the deck. Mixed with the spinach noodles was a twisted, chewy mushroom, or maybe a meat, which tasted delicious compared with the slop we’d been fed on land. When Rolly got the hang of the chopsticks, he cried out in recognition.
“Ah, I know this!” he said. “We call it pans ton.”*
“What does that mean?”
“You no speak French?” he said.
“Only a little.”
“Is the stomach from the tuna.”
“Oh.”
It was my turn to stop eating.
“Is good!” Rolly said.
II
After breakfast, a cherubic young Filipino cook named Tony Libres introduced himself, using good English, and we spent the next hour dispelling false impressions.
“When you came on board last night,” he said, “I thought you were a boss of the pirates.”
“Why?”
He was bashful. “Because you are white.”
Tony had briefly entertained the idea that Somali pirates took orders from white overlords. A few Chinese crewmen plied him with other questions. They wanted to know if Rolly and I were related. Americans, they understood, could be black or white. They also hadn’t understood our names, so Tony found a glossy magazine, turned it to a color foldout of Michael Jackson, and held it up for everyone to see.
“You are Michael?” he prompted me, pointing at the picture.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ahhh,” said most of the crew.
We faced backward on the ship, toward the tall white bridge tower, which loomed out of sight. A few Somalis sat in front of it with Kalashnikovs in their languid hands, gazing down from an upper deck. A row of lozenge windows over their heads made up the ship’s forward eyes, and two panes had been spiderwebbed by gunfire. Rolly pointed them out.
“Look like a bullet go in,” he said.
The crew’s astonishing story came together in fragments and shards, like a mosaic, throughout the rest of the morning. The Naham 3 had left Mauritius in late 2011 to range off the African coast, chasing schools of tuna for several months, until the captain steered too close to Somalia in March. One night after twelve, two skiffloads of pirates fired sudden, scattered shots at the bridge. Three Chinese men scrambled from their cabins to find a flare gun. Flares and bullets flew on the high port side of the vessel until the pirates clambered up, using hooked ladders. The Chinese men ran out of flares and retreated. Chen Lui Te, the sixty-three-year-old captain, had picked up a stool to defend the ship’s controls, but pirates appeared at the bridge’s entrance, firing wildly. Chen Lui Te took two bullets in th
e neck and another in the chest. The panicked Somalis ran off, but blood spurted from the captain’s neck.
“He didn’t even sway a bit,” one of the Chinese flare gunners said later. “He simply put down the stool and walked to the back of the ship.”
He survived long enough to reach the engine room, where he sat down and died.
Arnel and the other men who slept in the cabins behind the bridge tried to lock their hollow doors. But pirates charging through the corridor shot out the knobs. Eventually the gunmen rounded up the twenty-eight crew and forced them to kneel in the bridge, blindfolded, hands behind their backs. For three days they sat like prisoners of war. Twice a day they went free to eat rice at the small captain’s table.
A pair of Chinese engineers, Li Bo Hai and one other man, were excused from rough treatment—they had to steer. The Somalis gave them GPS coordinates. The ship trundled steadily for almost seventy-two hours, at ten knots, to reach Hobyo.
While we listened to these details, I saw a naked crewman take a shower across the work deck. Water burbled from a large hose tied at the height of his shoulders. Right next to him, another crewman opened a steel freezer door set into the wall, without regard for the naked man’s comfort, and vapor from the freezer tumbled around his ankles.
“The captain is in the back,” said Arnel.
“In the freezer?”
“All the way back, in the deep freeze,” he said. “It has different rooms.”
“I see.”
“Most of this ship is a freezer.”
Late in the morning, Ali Tuure, the pirate boss, came to sit next to us under the conveyor belt. He resembled a happy skeleton, haggard and stoop shouldered,* with a rictus of horrible teeth. He spoke in wheezy Somali and pinched his cigarette between his thumb and index finger. Worst of all, he acted happy to see me. He patted my bare leg the way a farmer would pat fine livestock. My back still hurt, and I didn’t like being patted. I explained my injury on the skiff. Tuure summoned Li Bo Hai, who went to fetch a bottle of ginger oil. I still felt snappish, fatalistic, and slightly unhinged. My first experience with Chinese medicine didn’t cure me of suicidal thinking or the sharp anguish I felt over the loss of my notebooks, but it did ease my back pain. The whole Asian crew watched me lie on my belly to let Li Bo Hai pound hand-warmed oil into my spine.
Captain Tuure acted like a sarcastic gentleman: he wanted his new guests to feel at home. He gave us permission to use his private toilet and shower—upstairs in the captain’s cabin. We had a dim notion of the privilege he was offering, since the ordinary crew toilets consisted of two square grilles, which functioned as all-purpose drains, in the corners of the work deck. Saltwater pumping from a hose, like the one by the freezer door, would flow into a cubic space beneath each grille, where it washed everything into the ocean. That was the whole system. A tarp could be pulled across the front of the toilet area for (not much) privacy.
Before he went upstairs, Tuure said, “Whiskey?”
“What?”
Did I want whiskey? What a strange question.
“Sure,” I said, though in this case I didn’t understand the morbid extent of the privilege he was offering. Tuure stood up and disappeared.
The crew on the Naham 3 carved out blocks of time for meals, coffee, TV, and showers. They took most of their showers around dusk, after dinner. They lined up near each corner grille to wait their turn at the hoses of saltwater. For half an hour, Rolly and I watched all twenty-eight men strip naked and wash. They made rude jokes in Cambodian or Chinese and snapped one another with towels. One Cambodian had bowl-cut hair and Buddhist tattoos across his muscled back. Arnel pointed at him.
“When I go free,” he said, “I will marry his sister.”
The Cambodian had a strong, square ass and a brilliant smile. I laughed out loud.
“Have you met his sister?”
“I don’t know if he has one,” Arnel said in a lilting, comical voice. “But I will marry her.”
After showers, the men smoked cigarettes. Bluish-white deck lamps snapped on as the sun set behind Hobyo. In a rush, the crew laid out sleeping mats on the conveyor belt, on deck—on any flat surface of the ship. Meanwhile, Captain Tuure came downstairs and surprised me with a bottle of Taiwanese malted whiskey.
“Whiskey, okay!” he said with a wheezy flourish, and returned upstairs.
I turned the brown bottle in my hand.
“This belonged to the captain,” Tony said.
I wasn’t about to drink a dead man’s whiskey in front of his captive crew. I wasn’t about to hoard it, either. At last I twisted open the cap and passed it around. The efficient Chinese used some empty plastic water bottles to divide up the precious liquid. Western whiskies are clear and sharp, but this tasted closer to thick brown beer, sweet and lightly carbonated. No one got drunk that night. But the weight of thirst behind me, the sheer mass of silent and frustrated desire, was my first lingering impression of the crew.
III
The Naham 3 belonged to the vast international fleet of rusted boats that deliver sushi to the developed world. It was an old vessel, commissioned in 1982, registered in Oman but owned by a family in Taiwan. Asian ships like the Naham 3 and the Shiuh Fu 1 were common off Somalia. They caught tons of bigeye and yellowfin tuna near Africa and hauled the meat back to the Seychelles or Mauritius, flash-frozen, to be transferred to large freighters for the final trip to market. The fish could wind up anywhere in the world, depending on quality—from cans in American convenience stores to elegant markets in Europe—but the Naham 3, with its legitimate registration papers, caught fresh tuna for sushi bars in Japan and Taiwan.
Long-lining is factory fishing, but it’s not the same as trawling. A tuna trawler can shred coral reefs. A longline uses baited hooks on an industrial scale. Tony and the other men explained how the Naham 3 worked. The line itself was a kilometer-long rope spun out by the moss-green Honda motor standing next to us. It had three wheels, like bare car rims. While the rope wheeled out, the men had to attach sink lines to it, using stiff clamps. These lines were called snoods. They had weights as well as a number of hooks, and each hook bore a single six-inch mackerel for bait.
In the water, the baited snoods hung from the longline at ten-foot intervals, suspended on the surface by round yellow floats. The ship, in effect, laid a kilometer-long curtain of bait in the water. Then it moved off some distance to do it again. At the end of the day, it made another round to collect each curtain, and then the men’s work started in earnest. The rope wheeling back through the Honda motor would drag the snoods over the gunwale, heavy with fish. It was somebody’s job to cut each tuna free and slide it down a fiberglass tray to let other men carve out the hook, gills, and guts. “See that bench?” Tony said, pointing at a fiberglass bench against the wall where a half-dozen hostages sat. “That is a tuna tray.” Every day they fished, the men had to assemble sections of this tray system, and each massive tuna would slide from the conveyor belt into the fiberglass maze, losing its gills and its insides, acquiring a loop of rope through the tail, until someone dangled it from the hooked fish scale to record its weight. Then it went into the freezer.
Each tuna weighed between 50 and 80 kilograms,* and the ship, at the time of capture, was carrying around 100 metric tons of fish.
It was half-full.
The economics of tuna were brutal, and some business owners could be little more than slave drivers. The Naham 3 had valid labor contracts, but some crewmen still felt hoodwinked by their terms of employment. A Singaporean staffing agency called Step Up Marine Enterprise had recruited the Filipinos. “When I signed up, I didn’t know I would have to fish near Africa,” Tony said. He thought it would be a boat in the South China Sea. His recruiter had offered a good wage and an impressive plane ticket to Singapore to finalize the contract. The Step Up office, though, turned out to be a cramped room in a flashing Chinatown mall known as the People’s Park Centre. The agents there said Tony would have to fly to Mau
ritius, an island off Africa that he had never heard of, to board a long-distance industrial vessel and fish the Indian Ocean. If he wanted the job.
“What if you said no?” I asked.
“Then I could go home.” His eyes rounded. “But pay my own ticket!”
The hourly wage disappointed him. Some days there was nothing to do, of course, and while they sailed from one fishing spot to another, the crew found time to read, watch TV, or weave thick white hammocks. (Two swinging hammocks near the tuna bench were Arnel’s handiwork.) But when they had to fish, which was often, they worked twenty hours a day. They ate fifteen-minute meals. Tony shook his head at the deceit. Four hours of sleep a night! The Step Up people hadn’t mentioned that. “We make two hundred and fifty dollars a month,” said Arnel, still using the present tense, because, even as hostages, the men expected to be paid through the end of their contracts. He added, in a sweet, ironic-dolorous tone, “Small money!”
The Desert and the Sea Page 13
