The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The paradox is that despite the wild proliferation of ship types for niche markets, the gigantic size of many ships, and the growth in the sheer numbers of the world fleet—45,000 ships of more than a thousand tons in 2010, half again as many as a century ago—the shipping industry as a whole has largely faded from view. Not only has the supporting infrastructure been moved away from population centers, but the number of people employed at sea and alongshore has actually shrunk. The dockworkers who feared that tankers like the Glückauf would lead to a decline in the number of people needed to handle the ship at sea or wharfside were proven correct almost immediately, and break-bulk cargo handlers faced the same fate with containerization. An English study showed that by 1970 productivity per man-hour had risen eighteenfold, from 1.67 tons to 30 tons. Global figures are not available, but despite huge increases in the volume of goods handled, the story was the same everywhere: waterfront employment crashed—on the East Coast of the United States from 51,000 in 1952 to 15,000 twenty years later; from 60,000 in England in the 1960s to 15,000 in 1972; from 30,000 in the 1950s to around 2,000 at the turn of the millennium in Australia. Since the nineteenth century, maritime labor unions had been among the most active, radical, and successful in the call for workers’ rights. The rise of containerization coincided with the peak of their power, which all but guaranteed that efforts to resist downsizing the workforce would be fierce. Yet the change was not without positive consequences for dockworkers able to keep their jobs, as wages tended to rise owing to the more technically sophisticated nature of the work, and what had been a largely casual workforce gave rise to one with more permanent employment.

  If the Glückauf’s dockworkers could have even envisioned a ship the size of the Seawise Giant, with a capacity more than two hundred times that of its forerunner, they would never have believed that it could be sailed by a crew of forty—only ten more men than the Glückauf itself. Comparable reductions in manning requirements can be found across the board. As automation has taken hold in engine rooms, on deck, in galleys, and on the bridge, the size of crews has fallen sharply. No more than seventeen people are needed for the average modern ship employed in blue-water trades, and some naval architects have been working to develop fully automated vessels requiring no crew at all. At the same time, unions, governments, and other organizations concerned about lost jobs, environmental protection, crew morale, and safety have fought to keep manning requirements at what some shipbuilders and accountants consider artificially high levels. The container ship President Truman of 61,875 gross tons was designed to sail with a crew of only eleven, but under United States regulations the ship is required to carry a crew of twenty-one. Such efficiencies have implications for working conditions aboard ship, safety from piracy, and the relationship between seafarers and the shoreside communities they ultimately serve but to whom they are all but invisible and unknown.

  Flags of Convenience

  The working conditions and wages of shoreside laborers are subject to the law of the land, and so are those of sailors. However, thanks to shipowners’ growing reliance on flags of convenience and the emergence of a global labor market for merchant mariners, sailors increasingly work on ships of a different nationality from their own or that of their employers. The national flag has long afforded a ship the protection of the country it represents, and the custom of flying another nation’s flag to benefit from diplomatic privileges it offers is an old one. The French allowed foreign vessels to fly the tricolor to trade to Ottoman ports in the Black Sea in the sixteenth century, and by the twentieth it was widely accepted that any country had the right to grant nationality, including its laws and the protection of its flag, to ships. The practice of registering ships began in Britain, where the first registry was published as a way to determine where a vessel was owned to ensure that it was in conformity with the Navigation Acts stipulating which ships could legally land goods in English ports. Other countries followed suit, and in the nineteenth century the intent of registration came to focus on ships’ technical details for reasons of safety. Information published in registers now includes when and where a ship was built, particulars about its hull material, dimensions, propulsion, alterations, and inspections. But authorities’ interest in such matters varies from country to country, a fact that shippers have eagerly exploited.

  Faced with a glut of merchant shipping after World War I, the United States government sought to sell surplus tonnage without disadvantaging American companies in a saturated market. In 1922, six American freighters were transferred to the Panamanian flag. As one of the Americans involved in the transaction explained, “The chief advantage of Panamanian registry is that the owner is relieved of the continual but irregular boiler and hull inspections and the regulations as to crew’s quarters and subsistence. We are under absolutely no restrictions. So long as we pay the $1 a net ton registry fee and 10 cents yearly a net ton tax” to the government of Panama. Because the freighters were entering the transpacific trade where the primary competition was from Japanese ships, the American owners crewed their Panamanian-flagged ships with Japanese and Chinese seamen whom they could pay much less than the going rate for American mariners. With “German stewards, Cuban firemen, and West Indian sailors, or crews of any nationality the management may wish,” the operating expenses of the passenger ships Reliance and Resolute under Panamanian registry were lower than what they would have been with American crews protected by union agreements. (A subsidiary incentive for the transfer of passenger ships was that during Prohibition, U.S. courts ruled that American ships could not serve alcohol even when in international waters.) Although these two ships were soon sold to German owners, this was effectively the start of the adoption of flags of convenience for the explicit purpose of avoiding onerous safety regulations, domestic tax obligations, and labor laws.

  More ships transferred to Panamanian registry throughout the 1930s, and especially after the start of World War II, when shipowners sought to circumvent restrictions of the Neutrality Act, which barred American ships from entering a war zone and so idled much of the fleet. By war’s end, a combination of political instability in Panama, grievances by American labor unions, and opposition from Europe’s traditional maritime states began to sour owners on Panamanian registry. To capitalize on this disaffection as well as to promote economic development in Liberia, Edward R. Stettinius, a secretary of state under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, proposed the creation of a Liberian ship registry to compete with Panama’s. Drafted by members of Stettinus’s staff with the approval and input by maritime lawyers from Esso, the forerunner of Exxon and operator of one of the world’s premier tanker fleets, the new registry was up and running by 1949. Among the other advantages to the foreign “beneficial” owners of Liberian-flagged ships were that they did not need to incorporate in Liberia or hire Liberian seamen, and there was no provision for Liberian inspection or control of any ships registered there. The government also contracted with a U.S. company established by Stettinus and Associates to collect the $1.20 per ton registry fee, of which it retained 27 percent. By 1968 Liberia’s was the biggest registry in the world.

  The growth of the flag of convenience registries continues to provoke opposition from labor unions and traditional shipowning nations, who argue that ships should be subject to the “legal restraints of the nations of the owners, of the crews, or of the ports at which they [call].” Maintaining that “flag of convenience” is a misnomer, shipowners insist that these registries are really “flags of necessity” and that the law of the country where the ship is registered should prevail. An uneasy compromise has evolved. Flags of convenience provide corporations with tax shelters and allow them to hire crews from an ever-expanding global labor market dominated by sailors from developing nations. As of 2000, Filipinos (230,000 officers and ratings) and Indonesians (83,500) comprised about a quarter of all the seafarers employed worldwide. However, their conditions are often substandard, with poor pay, inadequate traini
ng or qualifications, limited time off, and social isolation. Many of the worst problems have been addressed by international treaties, while labor unions, notably the International Transport Workers’ Federation, are vigilant in rooting out abuses and advocating for better conditions.

  Flags of convenience received little public scrutiny until a series of shipwrecks with devastating commercial and environmental consequences brought them to world attention. In 1967, the supertanker Torrey Canyon ran aground and split in two off Cornwall, England, spilling 123,000 tons of oil that spread across 120 miles of the English coast and 55 miles of Brittany. Assigning liability for the disaster was complicated by the fact that the Italian-crewed ship had been chartered to British Petroleum by a Liberian subsidiary of an American company, while the plaintiffs hailed from Great Britain and France. Subsequent accidents also aroused public ire, but the environmental and economic impact of the Torrey Canyon was not exceeded until 1978, when the VLCC Amoco Cadiz grounded a mile off the coast of Brittany about a hundred miles south of where the Torrey Canyon came to grief. The wreck devastated one of the most diverse and abundant fisheries in Europe and underscored problems in supertanker design and operations. In the course of twelve hours, three unrelated pieces of equipment critical for steering, towing, and anchoring failed utterly and official inquiries showed that structural and safety standards were inappropriate for the huge vessels then being launched.

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

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

  The Fisheries and the Global Commons

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

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

  Up to the time [World War II] started, fishing was still prosecuted in the old style.… There was some evolution, but the thing had not greatly altered from the days of Galilee, really, because the drift net was more a primitive method of fishing. You shot your nets and you waited until the herring caught you.… The result was of course we did not catch all the herring. We only caught some of them, and that was quite a good idea because there was always some left for another year.… From the end of the war, that’s when the depredation took place. That’s when the final killing took place.

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

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

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