by Donovan Hohn
Would any of these waves have qualified as genuine Monsterwellen? Probably not. The wave the officers described was monstrously large (taller than France’s brownstone) but, computerized hindcasts showed, not statistically improbable. The ship was rolling so heavily, dipping its bridge wings so close to the water as it pitched into the troughs, that even a fifty-foot wave could have splashed them. Officers reported rolls as steep as 40 degrees—steeper and more violent than the steel lashings had been designed to endure. At 40 degrees, the stacks of containers would have been almost as horizontal as vertical, and a mariner standing on a bridge wing would have been staring into the abyss. The experiment proved that, under such conditions, if Parvez Guard had done everything he’d been trained to do, if he’d hove to and decelerated and the engines had not yet failed, the accident still would have occurred. And ironically, if Guard had not done what he’d been trained to do—if he’d maintained his speed, for instance—disaster might never have struck.
No judge ever decided whether France’s explanation solved the mystery. APL settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. But France’s discoveries did help limit APL’s liability. “We got a very favorable settlement,” France told me. Not all of France’s colleagues understood her fascination with the China disaster any better than they understood her poetry, or the mysticism of Buber, or, later, her metamorphosis, but in 2003, after the legal proceedings had all been settled, France published her findings in the journal of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. A few months later, under the headline “Parametric Rolling Will Rock Insurers,” Lloyd’s List warned the marine-insurance industry of this “alarming new danger,” which appears to be an unintended consequence of the oversize, U-shaped, post-Panamax hull. France’s findings not only helped explain the mystery of the China; they would later help explain what had happened to the Maersk Carolina, the P&O Nedlloyd Genoa, the CMA CGM Otello, and an unknown number of other maritime mysteries. In July of 2008 the American Bureau of Shipping and the Polish Registry of Shipping announced that they were embarking on a “multi-year, joint research and development program” to find technology that would help prevent parametric rolling in “extreme wave conditions,” hoping to exorcise once and for all the devil that possessed the China.
LANDFALL. SUNSET. 48°28’N, 124°60’W.
Yesterday we saw the first blue daytime sky in almost a week—just a portal of it, like a window atop a dome. Now we’re close to the fictitious Strait of Juan de Fuca, so close that gulls have begun visiting us and cell phones have reactivated. Late last night in the crew’s lounge, there was a party. Bob and Claire, who appear to be teetotalers, did not attend, but Chief Officer Bollig and I did. Ronaldo Cuevas, the bosun—chief of the deckhands, Bacchus of the lounge, a big, round-faced dude wearing a muscle tee and a Fu Manchu—seemed intent on getting me drunk. He refilled my tumbler of wine even when I told him not to. At least I managed to get Joe the Messman to play “The Boxer” on his guitar.
I don’t remember much of last night’s party, but there is one night from this long, uneventful voyage that I think I will never forget, the one when I took my forbidden nocturnal walk. As I made my way along a catwalk glazed with sea spray and snow, I had to take cover behind a bulkhead every few yards to warm my ears and hands. Above me the containers creaked and moaned and clanged, straining at their lashings with every roll. I had intended to walk all the way to the stern, where cataracts of water rain down from the container lids overhead and the roar of the propeller makes the whole place thunder like a cavern in an old myth. But then I thought better of it. The winds were at Beaufort force 7, near gale, and just as Sir Beaufort promised, the sea had heaped up and foam was streaking off the crests of breakers thirteen to twenty feet tall. You could see only the waves that came heaving and hissing along the hull, blue and foamy and luminous in the house light, but you could sense the rest of the Pacific, and if you looked hard, you could vaguely distinguish the greater darkness of the ocean from the lesser darkness of the starless sky. Standing at the starboard rail—facing south toward the spot five hundred miles away where, on a night far stormier than this one, containers full of clothes and toys and phones and fish and tables had gone crashing overboard—I gazed a long while into both varieties of darkness, the watery and the ethereal one, as if into the tenebrous seas and mists of time. Then, ears aching, hands numb, I turned around, leaned into the wind, and staggered to the crew’s lounge for a little human company, a little Filipino television, and a tumbler of cheap red.
THE LAST CHASE, PART ONE
To see! To see!—this is the craving of the sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
—Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
THROUGH THE BERING STRAIT
Picture a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, a yellow duck—one set of toys hatched from the same plastic shell. It is February 1992, a month after the spill. The cardboard backs of the packages inscribed with colorful copy have long since dissolved. Carried east by a current known as the North Pacific Drift, the four castaway toys have traveled over two hundred nautical miles along the northern edge of the 45th parallel, the northern edge of the subarctic front, the boundary between the Subpolar and the Subtropical gyres.
The four animals have remained close together, and relatively close to the other 28,796 castaway toys, traveling the current in a diffuse flock, smiling refugees on a possibly interminable road, prisoners in the labyrinth of drift, a labyrinth that is the collaborative work of invisible architects—the spinning of the planet and the heat of the sun, the saltness of the sea and the influence of the winds. When the seas are calm, the zooplanktonic spawn of flying fish try to raft on the toys, as do the spawn of gooseneck barnacles. On the hunt for nutrients, albatrosses, riding the same winds that generate the waves, swoop down. For now the four toys are probably too big for an albatross to swallow.
Squalls come and go. Snow falls in swirling flurries, melting on contact with the ocean’s surface, which out here in the Graveyard of the Pacific is cold but not freezing, 5 degrees Celsius, 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Overboard in these waters, a strong swimmer might last a half hour. Though stormy, the North Pacific is in February 1992 calmer than it usually is in winter. The moon is growing full, and on those nights when the skies clear, it paints on the wave crests a triangle of white lines that diminish toward a vanishing point on the horizon. Viewed from the deck of a nearby container ship, the lines of moonshine on the black water seem to climb into the black sky like the rungs of Jacob’s ladder.
It is the incongruity of the toys that above all things enchants me. They are incongruously small compared with the deep; incongruously colorful in that gray-green seascape, the red beaver and the yellow duck especially since they have only just begun to fade; incongruously cheerful under circumstances that would drive mad a castaway both sentient and mortal; incongruously human, and childish, and domestic, and pastoral.
Months pass. Winter turns to spring. The days lengthen, the nights shorten, the weather moderates. Storms still roll through, but less often now and with less violence. Passing cargo ships have grown rarer, too; this is the slow season for trade with the Far East. Up and down goes the price of oil, up and down go the profits of toymakers and shipping lines, up and down go the four toys on the Ferris wheel of waves, aspin in space and time.
In June, 690 miles southwest of Sitka, for the first time since the spill, dramatic complications occur. As it collides with the continental shelf and then with the freshwater gushing out of the rainforests of the coastal mountains, and then with the coast, the North Pacific Drift loses its coherence, crazies, sends out fractal meanders and eddies and tendrils that tease the four voyagers apart. We don’t know for certain what happens next, but statistical models suggest that at least one of the four voyagers I’m imagining—the frog, let’s pretend—will turn south, carried by an
eddy or a meander into the California Current, which will likely deliver it, after many months, into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
You may now forget about the frog. We already know its story—how, as it disintegrates, it will contribute a few tablespoons of plastic to the Garbage Patch, or to Hawaii’s Plastic Beach, or to the dinner of an albatross, or to a sample collected in the codpiece of Charlie Moore’s manta trawl. Bon voyage, petite grenouille! May the fatal threads of the ocean currents spare you from a plundering albatross and spare an albatross chick from you!
The other three toys turn north. In November 1992, the Alaska Coastal Current carries one of them—the turtle, let’s pretend—onto Kruzof Island, where it will remain, caught in the jackstraw, until Tyler Orbison comes sloshing ashore the following summer. You may now forget about the turtle.
Hundreds of other toys make landfall on the Alaska Peninsula that November, as Eben Punderson will later report in the Weekend section of the Daily Sitka Sentinel. But thousands, including the duck and the beaver I have asked you to imagine, keep bobbing along on a northerly bearing. At Kayak Island, north of Juneau, the currents make a sharp, westerly left. By January 10, the first anniversary of the spill, the beaver and duck have reached the entrance to Prince William Sound, passing Bligh Reef, named for the notorious sea captain, made famous by the notorious tanker that, running aground, spilled its oil there just three years before the Evergreen Ever Laurel spilled its toys.
A few weeks later, traveling the same route, roughly, as Exxon’s crude—the same route, roughly, that Pallister and I would take aboard the Opus—the toys reach Gore Point’s windward shore. A southeaster blows up and a storm surge lobs the beaver over the driftwood berm. Hurricane-force winds lift it aloft, then send it tumbling across the forest floor, then pluck it up again, drop it again, until finally it comes to rest in the lee of a spruce. For fourteen years, there it sits, atop the pine needles, among fishing floats and water bottles, until on July 16, 2007, along comes an erstwhile schoolteacher turned amateur driftologist. He bends back a leaf of devil’s club with the toe of his rubber boot and, careful not to strain his surgically repaired lumbar region, crouches down, hollering with ridiculous excitement. You may now forget about the beaver. We know how its story will end—as a lab animal, inside a mass spectrometer, contributing a few tablespoons of data to the oceans of information.
You may not forget about the duck, however. At least not if you’re me. If you’re me, prey to nocturnal flights of fancy, you will spend many years thinking about that stupid, sun-bleached, ghostly, hollow, iconic, and altogether hypothetical plaything with a body the size of a bar of soap and a head the size of a Ping-Pong ball.
Out on the Alaskan Current, it has escaped the witch’s finger of Gore Point and is now headed, along with thousands of other toys, west by southwest toward the Aleutians. Most of those toys, those puerile satellites, will remain, the simulations of OSCURS predict, in the Subpolar Gyre’s orbit, completing a lap once every few years, their numbers diminishing with every lap. Some will end up on the rocky shores of the mostly uninhabited Aleutians, others in Siberia. Others, after completing a lap or two, will return to Alaska and join some farrago of wrack in some out-of-the-way cave of ocean. And some—not many, OSCURS tells us, but some—will slip between the Aleutian Islands and into the Bering Sea, where under favorable circumstances an even smaller number—including, let’s pretend, the once yellow, now pale duck I’m imagining—will pass through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic. There OSCURS had lost them. And so had I.
Truth be told, by the time the Hanjin Ottawa passed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I’d had enough of seafaring. At the entrance to Puget Sound a launch motored out, a harbor pilot came aboard. “A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough,” Conrad writes in The Mirror of the Sea. “For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.” Landfall, in Conrad’s time as in ours, is another matter. It cannot be entrusted to the autopilot, nor even to the helmsman or master, which is why the harbor pilot, who knew Puget Sound by heart, appeared on the Ottawa’s bridge carrying a duffel bag of charts. Occasionally consulting the radar screen, mostly studying the scenery ahead, he called out numerical bearings and the helmsmen called the bearings back in confirmation. The rest of us, even Captain Jakubowski, stood by, gazing through the glass in passive silence, faces luminously masked by the glowing screens, waiting for greater Seattle to appear on the dark horizon, and when it finally did appear on the horizon, like some resurrected twenty-first-century Atlantis rising up out of the water into the night sky, which it polluted deliciously with light, an electrical dawn, my spirits rose too.
It was well after midnight by the time we reached pier 5, Hanjin’s container terminal in Seattle. Bob and Claire and much of the crew had gone to sleep, content to disembark the following morning. Not me. As a tugboat nosed the colossal ship toward the dock, I stood at the starboard rail, bags already packed. Ashore, a car and a truck materialized, and longshoremen climbed out. In hard hats and life vests, they took up their positions beside the yellow bollards, waiting for deckhands to throw them the lines. As soon as the ship had tied up, customs agents came aboard, and as soon as they cleared me, I rushed down the gangway onto the deserted sodium-lit pier.30 Among containers stacked six high in rows, I wandered, searching for the exit.
I’d had enough of seafaring. I was ready to fly—not sail, carbon footprint be damned—to the insular city of the Manhattoes and stay there a good long while. Ready to pend myself up in lath and plaster, tie myself to a counter, nail myself to a bench or clinch myself to a desk, so long as said pending, tying, nailing, or clinching came with decent health benefits and a retirement plan. Ready to circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon in the company of my long-suffering wife and my paternally neglected son.
To my paternally neglected son, when I got home, I’d read the opening chapters of The Wind and the Willows, and then, some Sabbath afternoon, I’d take him rowboating not on the life-threatening waters of Resurrection Bay but on the pond in Central Park, just as, in the very first chapter of The Wind and the Willows, River Rat takes landlocked Mole rowboating on the downstream backwaters of the river Thames. I, the oarsman, would play the part of River Rat. Young Bruno would be landlocked Mole. As he leaned back in his seat and felt the boat sway lightly under him, I would recite to him, dreamily, in character, the famous line: “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
In short, I was ready to come home. But I couldn’t. Not yet. What I’d gone searching for had yet to be found. I had one last riddle to puzzle out, one last journey to take—or rather to finish. It had begun one September morning, before I went sailing with Charlie Moore or visited the Po Sing plastics works or crossed the Pacific on the Hanjin Ottawa at the height of the winter storm season. It would end, months later, after a long hiatus and numerous detours, deep in the interior of the Canadian Arctic on the icy shores of the Northwest Passage.
THE BLIND OCEANOGRAPHER
At the main dock behind Smith Laboratory on Water Street in downtown Woods Hole, the research vessel Knorr was preparing to depart. Forklifts zipped around, beeping. Stevedores and deckhands walked the aluminum gangway, busy as leafcutter ants, loading and stowing cargo—provisions, instruments, a big cardboard box containing a new Nordic-Track treadmill for the Knorr’s onboard gym. Through the main dock’s chain link security gates, a silver minivan arrived, and a woman descended from the passenger seat. Forty-six years old, she was on this mid-September morning girlishly attired—as if for an afternoon of yachting on Vineyard Sound—in a rose-and-white waterproof jacket, white shorts, white sneakers. She had a pair of sunglasses pushed up into her coppery, shoulder-length hair and clutched a black leather pouch in her left hand. This was Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the Department of Ph
ysical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the chief scientist on the first leg of the voyage that was about to begin—voyage 192 it was officially and forgettably called. A photographer asked Bower to pose for a few publicity shots, dockside, against the picturesque backdrop of the Knorr.
Since its maiden voyage, in 1968, the Knorr had carried scientists to every corner of the ocean, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, the Gulf of Alaska to the Gulf of Maine, the Bay of Bengal to the Bay of Fundy. Aboard the Knorr scientists had collected the first images of the wrecked Titanic. They’d revealed the secrets of plate tectonics at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In February 1977, above the Galápagos Rift, they’d sent a camera 8,250 feet down and discovered bizarre organisms improbably well adapted to the infernally hot, infernally sulfurous environs of volcanic sea vents—giant albino clams, giant albino mussels, giant albino crabs, giant albino tube worms growing in thickets, like Martian bamboo, red obscene tulips of flesh blossoming from their tall white stalks. Some scientists speculate that it was not at the stormy surface of the ocean, or in Darwin’s lightning-struck pond, but out of such volcanic vents—black smokers, they’re called—that life first arose.
In the previous two years alone, the Knorr’s itinerary had included stops in San Diego; the Galápagos Islands; Valparaíso, Chile; Buenos Aires; Reykjavík; the Caribbean (Bermuda, Martinique, St. John’s); and Nuuk, capital of Greenland, which is where the first leg of voyage 192 would officially end. Tourist maps from these ports decorated the hallway outside the ship’s mess—“Feel the warmth and softness of the Icelandic wool,” enticed an ad for Helga’s Wool Market on the map of Reykjavík. Now nearing retirement, the Knorr was nevertheless a beautiful ship, high-prowed like a navy cutter. Its hull, 279 feet long, was the deep blue of the ocean on a world map, its upper decks, white as a wedding cake. A light-blue stripe beribboned its single white stack, and the white faceted sphere of a satellite antenna rose amidships.
