by Donovan Hohn
Even before the China entered Puget Sound, the speculating and finger-pointing had begun. To limit its liability, APL had to prove that the accident had been a so-called act of God. They appeared to have a strong case. Weather reports pointed to a prime superhuman suspect: Super Typhoon Babs. In late October 1998, when the China was at port in Taiwan, Babs was laying waste to villages in the Philippines. Early news reports assumed that Babs had laid waste to the China too. But as weather records reveal, the China and Babs had not crossed paths. Reports to the contrary were mistaken. The ship had departed Taiwan on October 21, six days before the remnants of Babs hit.
When lawyers questioned the officers in Seattle, what they heard strained credulity. The scuttlebutt at the longshoremen’s union hall was that the ship had lost power and gotten caught in the trough between waves. But the officers claimed that the engines had failed after they watched the container stacks fall. Before it ever lost power, the ship had rolled wildly, inexplicably, they said, despite attempts to take evasive action, and at the worst of it, they’d seen, at bridge level, “green water”—nautical-speak for a wave tall enough to wash over the main deck. In calm seas, the main deck would be about four stories above waterline, and the bridge eight stories above that. Most of the lawyers listening to this tale took it to be a tall one, literally. After all, sailors always exaggerate, especially when trying to exonerate themselves, and such giant waves have long been the stuff of sailors’ lore.
Wrote Melville, “In maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.”
NAUFRAGIA. 38°14’N, 134°41’E.
Steaming east through the snowy Sea of Japan, birthplace of storms. Last night sometime after four, trying to remain awake for our departure, I nodded off with my shoes on reading Typhoon, Conrad’s novella about the ill-fated steamship Nan-Shan, commanded by the unlucky yet miraculously competent Captain MacWhirr, of whom, when the barometer suddenly plummets, Conrad writes, “Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door.”
When I woke up this morning, I sensed from the motion of the ship and the throb of the engine that we were already under way. I rushed outside and up three flights of stairs to the bridge deck, where I was hit by a cold blast of headwind. It wasn’t all that windy; mostly it was the ship’s speed—twenty-four knots—that knocked me back. Ahead, the Pacific was lost in fog. Behind us, Pusan was vanishing into it. I could hardly feel the roll of the ship, which didn’t seem to be steaming through the waves so much as steamrolling over them.
On the bridge, sleep deprived but nattily attired in a navy sweater with black-and-gold epaulets, the captain was doing his paperwork. Jakubowski has been a merchant mariner for forty-four years, since the age of eighteen, when, against his parents’ wishes, he shipped out on a Baltic Sea break-bulk freighter. I asked whether he’d ever lost containers overboard. “Never,” he said, but he’d come close. Once, near the Azores, the ship he was commanding was struck by a wave sixty-six feet tall; and on this very trip, westbound from Seattle, the Ottawa had rolled 20 degrees to starboard, 26 to port. “Here, you can still see.” He pointed above the helm, to the clinometer, which had yet to be reset.
Like Europe-bound flights that arc north over Greenland, a container ship from Asia usually describes an arc—the Great Circle route—toward the Aleutians, passing through the Graveyard of the Pacific. Because of the stormy forecast, the weather-routing service recommends we take a northerly detour, straying from the Great Circle route and into the Bering Sea, seeking shelter in the lee of the Aleutians. “Will we see any ice?” I asked, hopefully.
“We want to get close to it,” the captain said, “but not that close.”
Mariners of the age of sail avoided the Great Circle route in winter. It’s easy to understand why: Back then the only way to forecast the weather was to watch the barometer, study the portents, and heed the wisdom of the almanacs. Every year sailing ships nevertheless sank by the dozens, in bad years by the hundreds, which is why both underwriters and classification societies had to be invented. British shipowners of the age of sail lost 10 to 20 percent of their revenues to shipwrecks, and accounts written by the survivors were so numerous and so popular they constituted a veritable literary genre—naufragia, it was called, after the French, naufrage, for shipwreck. The authors of these accounts, perhaps appealing to the sensibilities of their landlubber readers, tended to interpret their harrowing experiences as religious allegories, and their publishers tended to favor subtitles the length of paragraphs, as in, God’s Wonders in the Great Deep, or A narrative of the shipwreck of the brigantine Alida and Catharine, Joseph Bailey, master, on the 27th of December 1749. Bound from New-York for Antigua. Wherein the wonderful mercy of the divine Providence is displayed in the preservation of the said master, with all his men, from the time of the said vessel’s over-setting to the time of their being taken up by a vessel bound from Boston to Surranam, on the 3d of January following; all which time, being seven nights, they were in the most imminent danger & distress.
CABIN FEVER. 43°74’N, 149°16’E.
It’s snowing. At sea you can see a snowstorm from a long ways off, a white disturbance in the air. Now it’s swirling all around us, accumulating on the bridge wings, dusting the corrugated tops of the stacked containers with white triangles from which you can tell the direction of the wind. Way out beyond the stacked containers, the water looks like a tarnished mirror, shiny in some patches, leaden in others. Up on the bridge, there are little icicles on the windshield wipers.
Two days out and I’m already experiencing symptoms of cabin fever. I take half-mile laps around the cargo decks, read Conrad in bed, dine with Bob and Claire at the passengers’ table, visit the bridge, chat with the officer on watch, admire the 360-degree view. So far there has been little to see, other than changes of weather and light—few other vessels, no wildlife besides gulls. There is almost never more than one officer on the bridge, and most of the officers do not greet my questions as amiably as the captain.
This morning, second mate Fredrik Nystrom was at the helm, paging through the Nautical Institute’s newsletter, reading the accident reports sent in by seafarers. I asked Nystrom if he had any idea what was inside all those colorful boxes out there. “We have a manifest somewhere,” he said, “but in the end it’s not that interesting.”
Then he resumed his reading until, a few moments later, the VHF crackled and over the airwaves came a man’s voice singing—in a language neither Nystrom nor I recognized, Japanese, presumably, or Korean—a joyous, possibly intoxicated chantey. “Not quite what you’re supposed to do,” Nystrom said, smirking. Then we stopped talking and listened and gazed out into the swirling snow.
Tonight when I entered the bridge, Chief Officer Hermann Josef Bollig was standing watch, as he always does between 8 P.M. and midnight. A bearded German giant, Bollig scares me a little. He seemed to scowl when he saw who it was. At night, to maximize visibility, the bridge is kept dark. As the ship goes autopiloting along, Bollig sits there, his face lit by the lunar glow of computer screens, surveying the seas for fishing boats. If a small one should stray into our path, the Ottawa would plow right over it, leaving behind little but a trail of flotsam and sticks. Fully loaded, the Ottawa weighs more than 140 million pounds. At twenty-four knots, the forward momentum of that much weight through water is almost planetary, and difficult to stop, even with the engine in reverse.
If I’ve read the charts right, in three days, near the international date line, we’ll come close to the site of the China disaster and even closer to those coordinates—44.7°N, 178.1°E—that three years ago, late one night while my pregnant wife slept in the other room, I marked in my Atlas of the World.
Six years after the China dropped its cargo into the sea, the European Space Agency spent three weeks studying winter waves via satellite. Wave
s of more than one hundred feet are altogether real, the research confirmed. There’s evidence, in fact, that as the planet warms their numbers may be rising, and ESA scientists believe that their data may help solve unsolved maritime mysteries.
One of the most famous such mysteries is the sinking of the MS München, in 1978. The München, at the time a year-old state-of-the-art barge carrier, vanished while crossing the North Atlantic. Its disappearance has never been explained, but many nautical detectives suspect that it and its crew of twenty-seven fell victim to a Monsterwelle. A true Monsterwelle is defined not by size but by its mathematical improbability, an example of chaos theory in action. The seafarer’s handbook Heavy Weather Sailing notes that “whilst one wave in twenty-three is over twice the height of the average wave, and one in 1,175 is over three times the average height, only one in over 300,000 exceeds four times the average height.” If the average waves in a particular sea are only three feet tall, and a twelve-foot breaker were to suddenly rear up in their midst, it would be a little monster. What really makes the fearsome Monsterwellen fearsome isn’t size; it’s the element of surprise. They can come out of nowhere, even in calm seas, overwhelming a ship before the helmsman has time to escape it.
Scientists are still trying to explain monster waves. One leading theory is that they arise when a strong current—like the Gulf Stream, or the Kuroshio, or the Alguhas, down at the Horn of Africa—collides with a countervailing storm swell, or when a deep-ocean swell collides with a shallow shelf. Another theory, called “constructive interference” or “random superposition,” holds that in chaotic seas two wave trains with identical wave periods and crest heights can ever so rarely combine into a kind of super train, producing monsters. Which might explain why such waves often seem to come in sets of three, a phenomenon known to sailors as “the three sisters.” Three sisters forty or fifty feet tall can be more dangerous than a single one-hundred-foot giant. The first monstrous sister rocks the boat mightily before plunging it into a trough so deep, one eyewitness account compares it to a “hole in the ocean.” Then the second or third wave sinks it.
Nonetheless, sailors are often mistaken when they identify monstrously large waves as freaks or rogues. The tsunamis that struck land all around the Indian Ocean in 2004 were well over a hundred feet, but they were the result of an enormous undersea earthquake, not chaotic hydrodynamics. Typhoons and hurricanes regularly whip up waves over seventy feet high, but evidence suggests that you’re more likely to encounter a Monsterwelle in lower sea states than in tall ones.
The peril of the sea that modern merchant mariners are most likely to face, navigational wisdom holds, isn’t a Monsterwelle but something known as “synchronous rolling,” so called because the natural roll period of the ship falls in sync with that of the waves. I first learned about synchronous rolling from Beau Gouig, an oiler I met on a research vessel . Gouig explained it to me this way: “Basically what happens is when the wave crests get far enough apart, the ship starts rolling, and with each roll it takes longer to recover, so you’re going farther to starboard, and then farther to port.”
Small container spills happen all the time, Gouig told me. “Nobody really cares—except the environmentalists,” he said. The usual cause, according to him: synchronous rolling, a phenomenon he’d experienced firsthand. “I’ve been through two typhoons,” he said. “The last one, we almost lost the ship.” Gouig and I were in the research vessel’s mess, at a Formica table bolted to the floor beneath a porthole, in swiveling plastic chairs, also bolted to the floor. I fetched a refill of coffee and took out my notebook.
“It was in January,” Gouig began. “January and February are the bad months for typhoons. We were sailing from Japan to L.A. The last port we visited was Yokohama. We were watching the storm on the weather maps, plotting two charts, one for the storm and one for the ship. A typhoon can go in two directions. Either it goes up toward China”—he drew invisible maps on the table with his fingers and pantomimed the storm, his hand cutting a line past the west coast of a coffee mug up into the China Sea—“or it brushes past Japan and spins out across the Pacific.” His fist swept toward the table’s edge.
“All the predictions were saying this typhoon was headed this way, to China. But our first mate knew something was wrong. At Yokohama they stuck us at the dock and made us wait three days. This mate, he said, ‘All hands on deck! Double-lash all the containers, tighten every twistlock, batten down all the hatches.’ We had all the ABs out there”—all the able-bodied seamen.
“We left at around four in the morning. By eight or nine o’clock we were getting hammered. After ten hours we tried to turn back. Eventually you don’t care where it was you were supposed to be going. You’re just trying to get out of the way. We kept sailing south. A little farther and we would have made it to Hawaii. This was an eight-hundred-foot container ship, and that storm blew us four days off course. We keep making the ships bigger, but we’re fooling ourselves if we think they’re safe from the sea. Big ships still sink.” He took a sip of coffee, then continued.
“I was up on the bridge. We were in autopilot, and we were getting hammered. We did three or four 50-degree rolls, buried the bow three times. Waves swept all the lifeboat ladders off deck. I said to the captain, ‘These wave crests are getting far apart.’ That’s basically why you’re up there, to watch for synchronous rolling. Suddenly everything on the bridge just goes voom.”
The ship’s captain did exactly what all captains are trained to do: he hove to, immediately turning into the oncoming waves and slowing down, letting the ship ride up and over. “All the books say that you’ve got only two minutes to break that cycle. You’ve got to make a hard turn and get the bow up on a wave or down into a trough. Another thirty seconds and I think we would have rolled right over.”
The crew were all amazed, Gouig said, that no containers had been lost. “Spills happen all the time,” he said, again. Then he told me the story of what he believed to be the most famous case of synchronous rolling, the case of the APL China.
GRAVEYARD OF THE PACIFIC. WEST OF THE INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE.
Two days ago, in the Tsugaru Strait, the snow let up, and through the fog could be glimpsed the mountains of Hokkaido to the north, the mountains of mainland Japan to the south, their black ridges striped with snow. Claire and Bob came bustling into the bridge to peep at them through binoculars, she exclaiming breathlessly, “Oh, aren’t they just breathtaking!” The next land we’d see would be American.
The weather service recommended the Great Circle route after all. We’re now way out in the Graveyard of the Pacific, and you can tell, you can feel the giant swell moving under the hull. Not sure exactly how much we’re rolling, but it feels like a lot—enough to make a port glass in my cabinet slip loose from the rack and go tinkling rhythmically around: tink, roll, tink, roll, tink. Last night, it woke me up—it and the wind howling at my portholes.
This evening, I ran into the captain as he was returning from an inspection of the outer decks, dressed in a red jumpsuit, carrying a flashlight and walkie-talkie. “A little snow,” he told me, smiling his courteous, gap-toothed smile, “is nothing to worry about.” Feeling cabin-feverish, I decided to see what it felt like to walk among the containers in a snowstorm. Gave myself something of a scare.
Back inside the Ottawa’s eight-story house, the habitable part of the ship, I learned from an oiler named Joel Nipales that solitary nocturnal circumambulations of the main deck are strictly forbidden. If an officer or deckhand has to go out at night, he alerts the bridge, puts on foul-weather gear, and brings a walkie-talkie. It wouldn’t have taken much to knock me overboard: a stumble, a snowy gust. No one would have discovered my absence until morning. Cast away in dark, cold water four miles deep, deeper even than the deep water I swam in off the coast of Hawaii, I would have watched the Ottawa’s running lights appear and disappear beyond the crests, as if blinking on and off, dwindling and dimming into the swirling snow.
Two days later, on October 26, by noon local time, the storm had drawn to within 120 nautical miles. The China once again changed course, veering farther south. Nine hours later it veered south yet again, onto an almost due-easterly bearing. Weirdly, instead of continuing on its track, the storm veered too, as if in pursuit, and the China suddenly found itself in what meteorologists call the most dangerous quarter of the storm. If the master had ignored the weather service and stayed on his original course, he might have escaped. Instead, in perfect darkness, at 3 A.M. on October 27, disaster struck.
The winds were now Beaufort force 11: “exceptionally high (30-45 ft) waves, foam patches cover sea, visibility more reduced.” Analysis of the historical weather data would eventually reveal that the conditions were even worse than Beaufort had described. The tallest of the normal, unfreakish waves likely attained heights of seventy or eighty feet. Rogue waves are by definition unlikely, but if one had arisen under these conditions, it would have been, wave-height distribution statistics suggest, 105.5 feet tall. It was an hour and a half before the fury of the storm began to subside. The sun rose on a ruin.
