In Ocean Titans author Daniel Sekulich takes us on a fascinating journey as he delves into the world of merchant shipping. We travel to massive shipyards in Korea, across the North Atlantic in a ferocious gale and into the boardroom of a wealthy ship owner in Monaco. Along the way, we learn how a captain masters his craft, why a deckhand spends nine months at sea and how a ship is broken up on the shores of India. Through it all, Ocean Titans seeks to understand the ageless appeal of ships and the sea, and attempts to answer the question, Does a ship have a soul?
Prologue: Ghosts
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.
—Kate Chopin, The Awakening
There is a stiff breeze coming in off the bay, tugging at me as I stand on the deck of a ship. The wind carries with it the aroma of salty brine and the essence of freedom and isolation, hallmarks familiar to anyone who’s spent any time near the sea. Yet the ship I’m on is not coursing through the waves or navigating any waterway; she is motionless, lifeless and without sea-going purpose. She harbours only ghosts.
The vessel is the SS Sag River, an immense tanker currently beached on the sandy shores of the Bay of Khambhat at a place called Alang. This ten-kilometre stretch of northwestern India is the site of the biggest shipbreaking operation on the planet, where ocean-going vessels come to be deconstructed and turned into scrap metal. If you want to see a cross-section of the world’s shipping fleets and ponder the existence of these leviathans and those whose lives revolved around them, Alang is the place to be. Up and down the beach are scattered other tankers, container ships, bulk carriers, passenger liners, car carriers, cattle carriers, cable layers and pretty much anything else you can imagine.
The oceans, seas, lakes and rivers of the Earth are teeming with over forty-six thousand merchant vessels not unlike the hulks that are beached around me here in Alang, and as many as two million people make their livelihood from seafaring. Merchant shipping is a multi-billion-dollar, multinational endeavour that carries over 90 percent of global trade: crude oil, cooking oil, beer, wine, vodka, wheat, fresh fruit, vegetables, livestock, medicine, computers, televisions, cell phones, camcorders, running shoes, blue jeans, tuxedos, perfume, iron ore, coal, gold, lumber, newsprint, furniture, automobiles and even expensive French water. It is the tie that truly binds us together, more so than religion or sporting events or the internet.
In the last thirty years, commercial shipping has seen dramatic and sweeping changes. Technology, international regulations, global economics, environmental laws, ship owners, officers and crews—everything is different. But perhaps the biggest change is the fate of the ships themselves. Throughout the 1970s, the commercial shipping industry was in the midst of a boom period and expanded in response to the growth of global economies, with more and larger vessels being launched weekly at yards throughout the world.
However nothing lives forever and ocean-going vessels are no exception. Their lifespan will rarely exceed forty years; often it is even further shortened by the extreme physical stress of marching headlong into the pounding seas day after day, year after year. Eventually the metal fatigues, the engines break down, the costs of maintenance exceed profitability, and these aging vessels must leave the sea and return to the land whence they were born.
What fascinates me is that each vessel being scrapped here in Alang—indeed, every ship that has ever sailed—was once the home to a tightly knit group of people both metaphorically and literally. The frames of these vessels once contained individuals who ate, slept, worked, argued, cried, prayed and sometimes died within their steel embrace. They were shipwrights, architects, owners, engineers, able-bodied seamen, ordinary sailors, bosuns, mates, captains, cooks, motormen, electricians, stewards and passengers. They spent days, months or years constrained by wood and steel, engulfed by a vast sea that was variously placid or demonic. I believe humans have souls; is it possible that ships have them as well? And if you believe that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, merely transferred from one source to another, then perhaps it’s possible that some of the energy of those whose lives revolved around these ships has seeped into the vessels.
To glimpse the ghosts who once inhabited these ocean titans, all you have to do is follow that offshore breeze as it swirls around, over and into the ship, gliding through empty corridors and darkened cabins. The winds moan and murmur as they explore the vessel, at times pausing until the air becomes heavy with the smell of sweat, steel and heat. Then they resume their airborne journey through the leviathan until the gusts grow bored and exit into the brilliant sunshine of northwestern India.
Aboard the Sag River, I caress the teak-covered railing on the portside wing of the wheelhouse as I wonder how many seafarers once stood here while staring out to sea. Inside the bridge the ship’s wheel is warm to the touch, the plastic having absorbed the intense heat of the subtropics or the firm hands of many a helmsman. Close by is the engine telegraph, still in the Full Ahead position set when the great ship crashed her bow onto dry land. Bits of paper litter the deck in here, sometimes catching a whiff of the breeze and swirling into the corners. There’s a compass deviation form, dutifully stamped and signed by the Sag River’s former master, while some other paperwork reveals she was built at the Sparrow’s Point Shipyard near Baltimore back in 1972, for ARCO Marine. As long as the Titanic, the 70,000-tonne vessel apparently plied the West Coast between Alaska and the Lower Forty-Eight as she carried North Slope crude oil to the insatiable energy markets of America.
Down a linoleum-lined staircase, I arrive at B-Deck, where some of the crew’s quarters are located. The wind whistles through open portholes, a banshee-like wail of remorse. As I peer through various doorways, the cabins seem desolate and sad, revealing only soiled mattresses and garbage strewn about the floors. Another flight of stairs leads to the galley, where the crews’ meals were once prepared. Here I find cutlery and dishes lining the cupboards, and the smell of rotting food is rank and ubiquitous. Cockroaches, the only animate inhabitants to greet me on my exploration, skitter about the stainless steel surfaces. Through a nearby door marked “Engine Compartment” I call out a weak “Hello,” though the only reply is the echo of my own voice. It’s quieter in here and also much hotter, the wind having deigned to ignore these nether regions. The Sag River’s power plant towers above and below, rising as high as a small office building, but not a sound emanates from its once-powerful engines. There’s an open vent near the ceiling through which a shaft of light streams into the compartment, guiding me down a narrow ladder to a catwalk that stretches the width of the tanker. I cautiously make my way past vertical pipes and electrical tubing, clutching at the greasy railing that was once a lifeline to an engineer in a storm, until I arrive at a wide platform. Along one bulkhead are open storage lockers containing firefighting suits, the safety garments hanging like corpses from their hooks.
Down and to the right is the engineering station, where the distinct smell of fuel oil permeates, like that in the basement of an old home. The metal deck below is strewn with empty cans of Coca-Cola, packets of artificial sweetener, half-eaten bags of Orville Redenbacker microwave popcorn and crushed boxes of Marlboro cigarettes—the diet of someone striving to stay awake.
On the corkboard above the engineer’s desk is pinned a note from one of the ghosts, a first assistant engineer, to someone named Paul, listing instructions for shutting down the ship’s water evaporators and stating, “You should hear something on your watch whether or not we are going in tomorrow morning.”
Below that is a large nautical chart protected by Plexiglas; I pull out my flashlight, brush aside the dust and see that the chart is the approach to Port Valdez, Alaska, through the Valdez Arm and the Narrows. A cryptic note has been taped to the map: “What an extra five inches feels like.” I realize that this is a reference to the shallow waters and narrow shipping channels that make up the area near Prince William Sound where the tanker Exxon Valdez was famously grounded in 1978, spilling 250,000 barrels of oil into the pristine Alaskan waters. It makes me stop for a moment, for I realize the Sag River had been there, too, that her ghosts had traversed those shipping routes.
By now the heat in the engine room has left me thoroughly drenched in sweat, so I decide to leave the tanker’s bowels and head back topside. A wrong turn somewhere leads to a different door from the one I’d entered, which sticks when I try to open it. Stepping back, I give it a mighty push before the door swings open to reveal a scene of utter devastation. I am standing in a vast open space the size of a basketball court, what was once the main deck level of the ship’s accommodations, but every wall that partitioned the area has been removed, as has every piece of furniture, equipment, wiring and even the ceiling tiles. This renovation job gone awry has left nothing more than the outlines of the rooms and a few toilets scattered about like the stumps of clear-cut trees, each surrounded by a square of ceramic tiles.
Over in the corner is an old newspaper, now aged and yellow. It’s the Baltimore Sun, dated Tuesday, February 1, 1972, which must have been left by a shipyard worker, since that’s about the time the Sag River was built. Perhaps he read it over lunch before shoving it behind a wall partition, a time capsule from the tanker’s birth. The paper is open to an article headlined “Westmoreland predicts big enemy offensive,” detailing B-52 bomber missions against North Vietnamese troops near Khe Sanh. The article ends with a prediction from an unnamed American adviser stating that the South Vietnamese “are going to win.”
Finally, I head outside to reach the main deck, where the sea breeze cools my body before drawing me to a pile of garbage: technical binders, old magazines and reams of paperwork billowing ever so slightly from the wind. Atop the heap lies a sheet of lined paper, beckoning me. The handwritten note is smudged and dirty, but as I pick it up I can see it is still legible.
Dearest Juliana,
I don’t think you’re ready to get married; I’m not ready to give you away, and having met him, I know he’s not ready for marriage…
I stop reading and sheepishly look around. Should I continue? Will I be caught red-handed with someone’s private correspondence, this heartfelt missive about marriage and life written to a daughter, a sister, maybe a lover? But the ghost is calling out to me, so I read on.
I see that you mean to leave your parents’ home, travel across country, begin a physical, sexual relationship, set up housekeeping and live together as a couple…pretty much everything but the ceremony.
There is clumsiness to the letter, the crude penmanship reflecting someone who probably does not write very often, definitely a man. But the content of the document is an honest and forthright expression that bears no corrections, no amendments, no alterations. Whoever wrote it was firm in his resolve to deal with something openly, not to shy away from it. And yet here it sits, atop a pile of garbage reeking in the hot tropical sun.
I flip the note over, but there is no signature, no name attached to it. Instead, the black ink fades away as though the thoughts of the writer trailed off into nothingness. I stare in fascination at this moment in someone’s life, thinking of how the note had travelled across oceans, canals, seas and bays before being unceremoniously cast aside. Perhaps the author changed his mind at the last moment, thinking it better not to get involved. Or maybe he revised it. Either way, I picture him sitting here on the deck, staring at the sea while the ship lumbered along, his thoughts of Juliana troubling him.
I know I’ll never find out who the author is; tracking down every former crew member of the Sag River would take more time and money than is worth the effort and, who knows, the man could be dead by now. It doesn’t really matter, though. Unlike nautical charts, empty cigarette packets or yellowing newspapers, this letter is a more personal connection with a seafarer who once called the Sag River home. It’s a glimpse into someone’s life aboard a sea-going vessel, for while standing watches or loading crude oil in Alaska, this mariner was thinking of Juliana. It’s a start, a signal that there are memories calling out to me, waiting to be discovered.
The lives of mariners like the writer to Juliana seem to have fallen off our collective radar, eclipsed by Hollywood movie stars, jumbo jets and missions to Mars. Few of us pay attention to the business of merchant shipping, unless an oil tanker spills its cargo of crude oil on the shore of some far-off beach or we glance at a story buried in the back pages of a newspaper about the sinking of a container ship. When a cargo vessel slips its moorings and steams over the horizon, it vanishes from the memory of most, just as these aging titans lie forlorn and forgotten here in India.
How forgotten is this world? Well, consider the situation in Iraq. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, 1852 American, British and other coalition troops were killed in that nation during the two-year period from March 2003 to April 2005, an average of 71 per month. In that same time frame, the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, as well as several other shipping observers, estimate some 13,000 mariners died at sea. If you factor in fishermen, many of whom use small, unlicensed craft, the figure rises to 52,000 deaths on the Earth’s waters. That’s over 2000 a month. Every year, more than 100 commercial vessels are lost at sea, roughly 2 each week. To be a professional mariner is to engage in the most dangerous profession on the planet, and one of the most invisible.
Looking for romance or symbolism in a business like modern-day commercial shipping may seem a naïve pursuit, unlike that of the chroniclers of tales of old with imagery of sailing ships fighting their way around Cape Horn or battling the North Atlantic’s fierce winter storms. But the memories of those days linger, if only because the reality of modern-day mariners is still quite similar to the experiences of their predecessors. Seafaring is—and always has been—a hard, lonely, dangerous endeavour. There really never was a “golden age of sailing,” for the ships and crews who plied the oceans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived perilously, with little pay for the dangers they endured.
Nevertheless, the sea and those who sail upon it have always been surrounded by a certain aura, highlighted by the omnipresent threats that can still seize a vessel and wrestle her to her doom in the depths below. Scan any bookstore shelves and you will find a lengthy list of titles about that golden age of sailing or the memoirs of individuals who have single-handedly circumnavigated the globe in a small boat, but fewer works about the daily lives of those whose profession is seafaring.
I believe there is an innate bond between those who leave dry land for the perils of the sea today and those who went before them. This unspoken thread splices the experiences of American, European, African and Asian mariners with those of the great Polynesian, Viking, Hanseatic and Phoenician cultures. This is the heart and soul of seafaring.
I also believe we all have a primordial connection with the sea, one that goes back to the infancy of our planet and a time when there was no such thing as terra firma, merely a molten ocean from which all life would eventually emanate. Even as we crawled from our watery birthplace, though, we still remained close to Poseidon’s embrace: Most of the planet’s population continues to live on or near water—oceans, seas, lakes and rivers—and this is where you will invariably find the world’s greatest cities.
The slow and pedantic pace of ocean-going vessels seems at odds with today’s world, in which speed is everything. The lengthy periods of isolation one needs to endure crossing the seas mean that even passenger cruises are now designed so that travellers need not miss dry land and duty free shopping for more than a few days. The idea of spending months—or years—at sea makes merchant sailors a distinctly unique breed of individuals and so, too, their ships.
To paraphrase a cliché, ships can mean many things to many people. And though I will likely never know the full story of any single ship’s life, I hope I can piece together enough parts from various sources to give me a broader picture of mariners, ships and the sea. The breaking yards here offer one the chance to glimpse some of that in the moments before a vessel is torn asunder and obliterated from existence, especially in the few short days these marine entities lie in state awaiting the arrival of the undertakers.
As I look at the shipbreaking yards that engulf me here in India, I marvel at the modern technology and ponder those who built and sailed the leviathans, torchbearers of a tradition that goes back at least five thousand years in recorded history. Perhaps by seeking out the designers, shipyard workers, owners, officers, ordinary sailors and anyone else I can find whose life revolves around commercial vessels, I can figure out if a ship has a soul.
At this moment I decide to focus my quest on “working ships,” since humans ventured out to explore, trade and harvest the seas well before they decided to make war or pamper vacationers there. For the time being, I’ll leave the study of battleships and passenger liners to others.
And so I turn away from the Hades vista that surrounds me, intent on beginning my quest into the world of ships and mariners who are eternally bound to the sea. I want to find out who these ghosts really are.
Daniel Sekulich – author of Ocean Titans
April 17, 2006
My name is Daniel Sekulich and I’m the author of Ocean Titans: Journeys in Search of the Soul of a Ship .
Could you tell me a little bit about your freelance writing and filmmaking background?
I’ve spent the last decade to fifteen years working as a writer and documentary filmmaker, and the bulk of my work deals with global and international issues—social, political, war-related, but always from a perspective that can be looked at by anyone. By that I mean this applies to Ocean Titans—it’s a book about all kinds of different people from all parts of the globe, and I think any Canadian can relate to it.
Can you briefly describe the book for people who haven’t read it?
Yes. Ocean Titans is, on one level, a book about commercial shipping today, but on another much more important level, it’s about the experiences of those whose lives revolve around these man-made leviathans, from those who envision ships to those who finance them; those who are the captains, engineers, deckhands; those who scrap them in India; and the wives, the priests, the children.
So it’s basically the whole microcosm?
It’s a look into a community that very few people see.
This is your first book and you spent about two years researching it. What are your thoughts on the research and writing of a book compared to filmmaking?
In fact, it’s very similar to documentary filmmaking, to the type of documentary filmmaking that I’ve done. And by that I mean you research, you work, and write—you research, you direct, and edit at the same time—it’s an ongoing, very organic process. As opposed to some people who do all the research, for instance, and then when it’s done, they edit and film or they write the book. Mine is an ongoing thing; I like to be able to write—I have numerable drafts—and I’m always carrying a journal with me for whatever ideas I’m working on. So, it is an ongoing process. Having said that, it’s a lengthy process, but documentary filmmaking and writing non-fiction narrative are very, very similar. They’re not apples and oranges—they’re more like oranges and mandarins.
Did you draw on any of your film connections to write this book?
Yes. In fact, the book began initially as a concept to do a film about ship-breaking in India. I was involved with a team that went on to do it, but I stepped away from that project because I became interested in doing something broader, which could not be done as a film but could be done as a book. And part of that comes from a saying that a lot of documentary filmmakers have that is “It’s really easy to write a book, because all you have to do is lift a pencil, but to make a film you have to lift a camera ”—some people call it a seventy-pound pencil [laughs].
Were there any well-known people whom you got in touch with to do this?
No one who would be known outside the shipping world. There were some very, very influential people—multimillionaires and in one case a billionaire. But nobody would know who they are in the broader world. I did do research through various organizations though, like National Geographic, with Robert Ballard’s office at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI)—the guy who found the Titanic—but beyond that, they’re the great unsung heroes.
You’re really well-travelled because of your documentary experience, but before that, before you wrote the book, did you have any shipping experience?
No, I didn’t, but I have quite a number of colleagues and friends who work within the Canadian navy or Canadian Coast Guard or the U.S. shipping industry. I just never got that close to them or as close as I got in the book.
What sparked this huge interest to write about shipping and the past lives of ships?
Or, as I said, more importantly, about the people whose lives are involved in it. It’s because when I began to speak to individuals—seafarers, their families, people who build ships, people who scrap them—I found these phenomenally appealing and interesting stories that were very, very compelling, and I realized that very, very few people outside of this community of a million—maybe two million if you add in all the people who load ships and all that—have these amazing experiences that we just don’t hear about anymore. And I’m attracted fundamentally to human stories and to hearing about the degradations, the dangers, the loneliness, the loss, the love—to me, it was a very universal human drama. And I just thought that there was something in there. As well, a little bit of research quickly showed that very few people look at the world of commercial shipping and those whose lives revolve around it. It happens once every decade or so.
I was actually really surprised to find that it could be so personal. I didn’t expect to find that much emotion in the world of shipping.
Yeah, and that’s because seafarers’ lives have been dangerous for tens of thousands of years, and they’ve tried to explain that to us again and again, and we just think of it as a broken record. We’ve gotten bored listening to them, so they’ve stopped talking to us. They will be polite and they might say a few things, but when you meet seafarers, they place a wall between us and them. And it did take some time. One of the things about spending two years working on the book was that it took time to break down those barriers and get them to open up, to trust me.
Yes, I see what you’re talking about—for example, two of my uncles are mariners, and I never hear them talk about it, ever.
Yeah, I say in the book that the only other community that I can make an analogy to is the military. The community of mariners is a closed community where you have to rely on the people you work with—where there is danger all the time, possibly death, and a lot of boredom. If you hear somebody bragging in a bar about his military career or seafaring career, chances are he’s either lying or was kicked out after six months or so, and he’s telling the same beer-laden jokes.
When you were writing this book, can you think of any particularly interesting anecdotes that you might not have included in the book? Any that really stand out in your mind?
Hmm... There were a lot that were not included in the book for a variety of reasons. There is an anecdote that I didn’t put in the book—it came from mariners frustrated with explaining their lives to us. You remember a couple of years ago, there was a fire in a Canadian submarine coming back to Canada, and a Canadian submariner died. His body was flown back to Canada, and members of Parliament stood up in the House of Commons and they praised his work and his dedication to the country. I talked to a number of Canadian merchant mariners—and they may even have served in the navy—and they were really pissed off at that, because, they say, “That guy died not in the line of fire, not in a war zone, but just doing his job. It was a fire at sea.”
And by way of example, a few weeks before that Canadian naval officer died accidentally, a fishing boat went down off of the east coast of Newfoundland in a storm. Of the crew of six, the captain and his brother, who was the first mate, died. Nobody remembered who they were, nobody stood up to eulogize them in the House of Commons; they died doing their jobs. That’s the kind of danger that mariners face every day, and like I say in the book, it’s the most dangerous profession in the world.
I find it amazing that you usually never hear about the bulk of this.
We had a ferry that sank in Canada just a month ago—briefly front-page news, and then it faded away. Mariners strongly resent that their deaths are second class. And the reason is usually very clear—if you die at sea, your body’s not seen; if the ship goes down, it’s not seen anymore. It’s sort of like taking an expensive trip down to the Titanic. There’s no way of seeing the leftovers. If somebody dies in a plane crash, you can go see the remains out at the airport or drive by weeks later, but that rarely happens on a ship.
What were your initial reactions to the emotional reactions that all of these shipyard workers had to the ships?
Well, I was a bit surprised at the attachment that shipwrights and seafarers in general have—and, even to a lesser degree, ship breakers, at the tail end of their lives—with vessels. For so many, it is just a job. There is one thing in taking pride in your job, but there is another thing in taking pride in something you’ve built. It was a pleasant surprise.
Throughout the book, you mention this little phrase, “A ship a day, a death a day.” In your experience, what makes the shipyard workers so passionate and committed to their work despite this? And, like you mentioned in your book, they always use this phrase as well.
The reason you have to have a pride in what you do, even if your job is dangerous, is because it validates it. If all you’re doing is a dirty, dangerous job that might kill you and it’s not worth anything, then you’re nothing more than a slave. By taking a degree of pride in what you’re doing, you’re at least allowing yourself, internally, to feel like you’re worth something, and your self-esteem places you a little bit higher.
From your book, I gathered that the world of shipping is a mostly male society—you referred to it as a fraternity. How do you think this affects the bonds and relationships between the crew members?
This is going to sound terribly archaic, but it’s easier. I’m not justifying it, or criticizing it; I’m just an observer. There are women mariners, women captains—I simply never ran across them. But for so many people, it’s the traditions and bonds that have come down over the years—it’s because they’re fairly straightforward; it makes it fairly easy for everyone to identify who you are. They have adapted. Like I said, there are women mariners and also women who I travelled with at sea (wives of mariners). The only thing that may change is the definition—it may not be considered in a few years as “masculine”—they may find a new adjective to describe it. But, like the military, which has a lot of women in it, the rules are right upfront.
I didn’t mean it in a feminist way, but I found it interesting that it was so strongly male.
Well, another anecdote that I didn’t put in because I couldn’t make it fit was the second woman to get her captain’s ticket—her master mariner’s ticket—was a Canadian woman, from New Brunswick. She got that back in 1939. She was working for her father’s company in the Bay of Fundy; they’d haul logs, lumber, back and forth. Her dad was getting old, and she’d been working the boat—she was a bit of a tomboy. But she did the test and got her paper. The first woman was a Soviet woman somewhere, whose name has been lost to history.
Molly Kool was the name of the woman in New Brunswick, and she retired, she went ashore, married an American and lives in Maine—she’s eighty-nine. I wanted to work her in, but it didn’t work because she was only a captain for about five years or so—it wasn’t like she spent her whole life as a captain. But when I spoke to her, there wasn’t a dismissiveness, there were no gender issues. She was like one of the guys; they were just seafarers. And that’s what I mean—we would’ve, in the past, said that she described herself as one of the guys, but she strongly disagrees with that. She’s a woman, and she’s a very strong character. She told me that she was a seafarer—she’s just a mariner.
I’ve been on ships with Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and a guy I’m positive was a Jew, but I couldn’t be certain, working on one ship together. I’ve been on vessels where you’ve had people from India and Pakistan working together, you’ve had Greeks and Turks work together, you’ve had Croatians and Serbians work together, Russians and Ukrainians, who have not always been getting along in recent times. You can work at sea and your background, where you’re from, who you are, what your gender is, what your religion is, and even, I would dare say, what your sexual orientation is, is not an issue. So long as you do the job and watch out for people you work with, anybody can do it.
We’ve all heard stories about ghost ships or even ghosts on ships—do you believe in any of this, and do you think it might be related to what you talked about—the “soul of a ship”?
Okay, I never encountered any ghosts, but I did hear about things. And in several cases, I heard tales of what were called “man-killers,” which were ships which for whatever reason were just bad. They get reputations—they might have mechanical breakdowns all the time, they might be prone to having injuries among people working on them, or sometimes people die on them. It might be accidental, but they do develop a reputation, and seafarers know about these.
And in one case, an Indian captain on a container ship I was on talked about a ship he’d worked on as a younger sailor. He said it was just a man-killer. There would be fires on it all the time—of course, they’d be put out—but someone would get injured, the ship was always having mechanical problems, and there was something about that ship. What was interesting was that he never referred to it as a “she” or a “her.” He always referred to it as “it” because, you’ll remember, there’s a feminine possessiveness used in vessels—he refused to allow himself to familiarize himself with that. And in another case, the vessel in the second-last chapter in India, on which there was a horrible fire that killed a number of ship breakers—on its last voyage, coming from around South Africa, making its way up to Gujarat state, it was fraught with problems. It almost beached itself twice in South Africa, and they had to repair the engines. It was almost like a horse being taken kicking and screaming to the knackers. It was almost like the vessel knew that it was going to be scrapped, and it was putting up a fight somehow. There’s probably a logical explanation for that, but there’s another thing I say in the book. I don’t think we need to have rational and scientific explanations for everything. Sometimes, I think the wonder and the mystery of what is there that you can’t solve is one of the things that makes life a really interesting experience.
What do you hope that your readers get out of this book?
There are a number of things. On one level, I really would like people—women and men—to learn that something globally, macro-economically, ties us all together. But it’s also done by people with interesting stories to tell. On another level, I’d hope that people might find a renewed interest in the sea, because I really think it’s a strong bond—time doesn’t exist between ourselves and the sea, or in water. All the world’s great cities are located on or near the sea, ocean, lakes, or rivers. And in another way, I think it also works on a couple of other levels. I mean, it’s a bit of escapist travel writing that I hope someone can pick up and take to the cottage—as soon as they start opening them up shortly [laughs]—and just read over a beer on the dock one night. Vicarious armchair travelling! And I also hope that people might find their curiosity piqued in something they might know nothing about. I’m not out to educate anyone; fundamentally, I’m, to a degree, trying to entertain people. I hope that it opens up a door that if someone wants to learn more about other things, they can.
What would you suggest to people who want to learn more about merchant shipping or maybe want to get into that as a career?
[Laughs] How old are they?! That’s a tough one, because in Canada we have such a small merchant marine. It’s not easy. The one thing I would say about it is that it’s a young person’s game. It is a very, very hard job; it is lonely. It’s not as physically taxing as working in a coal mine or a steel mill, but it takes far more of a toll. It’s a profession that I think is very honourable, whether you are a lowly deckhand or a cook or a captain. They all take a certain pride in what they do because they’re carrying on a tradition that goes on from the dawn of civilization. It’s an awful lonely endeavour. One of the other reasons why I think people—landlubbers—have trouble understanding this is because we are social animals and we’re used to congregating in cities and used to congregating in bars or at barbeques, and I think we find it hard to imagine that a couple of dozen people can go off for nine months, cramped in a place smaller than these offices. Granted, they are living and working together in a social environment, but it’s all about solitude.
I’m just about wrapping up here now—I wanted to ask if you have any books planned for the future or any projects coming up?
Currently I’m working on the early stages of research about frontiers and demilitarized zones around the world, looking at them over the last hundred years. And I’ve got to move in a couple of months, so I’ve got to find a place to rent! [Laughs] That’s pretty much all I can say at this stage.
Do you have a website or a blog that readers can look at?
Yes, I do, it’s http://oceantitans.blogspot.com.
Any last words you’d like to add?
For so many people, on the surface, this looks like a dry and mundane and boring subject, but honestly, it’s anything but. It’s full of human drama, compelling stories, unique individuals, drama, and sorrow. I think it also, surprisingly, seems like women find they understand it more than men. They definitely read it on a different level than the men do—they get more out of it.
