What I Am Reading: "The Outlaw Sea" by William Langewiesche

This book is the predecessor, in both theme and title, to The Outlaw Ocean. Like that book, this book was written by a journalist, and expanded from a series of articles on the subject of lawlessness at sea. I discovered this book first; after being alerted to it I found that, not only had I read part of it before in article form, but that the author, William Langewiesche, had written some of my favorite maritime articles.

I've always had an interest in maritime topics, dating from when I was a kid reading about ocean liners and pirates. It is only in the past couple of years, however, that I went from idly reading articles on contemporary maritime articles to actively seeking them out. Some of William Langewiesche's articles were the midwives of that evolution. This book is expanded from three of them: Anarchy at Sea; which does the heavy lifting on the book's theme and floats a couple of ships as case studies; A Sea Story, which covers the absolutely gruesome shipwreck of the ferry Estonia in 1994; and The Shipbreakers, which covers the hazardous shipbreaking industry in India.

Again, it is mainly the first of these that covers the book's thesis, which it shares with Urbina's reporting, about how flag registries and shell companies have turned the sea into a place where laws are not followed and are very difficult to enforce; and where accountability, when deployed at all, only affects those on the lowermost rung of the criminal ladder. The other two articles are included and adapted to delve into this subject as well; the Estonia article especially was expanded with new coverage of the international investigation. The first chapter covers this through the examples of two ships: one which is wrecked in a storm off the coast of Spain, and the other that falls victim to piracy in the Indian Ocean. In the first case, the wrecked ship was cleared for travel by a self-serving system whereby regulations are propagated at the suggestion of the International Maritime Organization, but inspected by private companies, called classification societies, hired by owners and insurers to assure compliance with regulations. The insurers are often found around the marketplace of Lloyds of London, but ship owners can hide themselves behind a network of shell companies, and register the ship under the flag registries of the countries with the weakest maritime laws. These flags of convenience originally sprung up in revenue-eager Panama during World War 2 to facilitate neutral American shipping to the allies, and in the Virginia-based Liberia registry, run for profit. Now, however, so many countries have them only for the purpose of earning a little revenue, without any intention of enforcing regulations. The international regulations themselves, meanwhile, are (in Langewiesche's telling) sabotaged by those countries that are captured by shipping interests, so that larger countries with interested navies (and fears of terrorism, such as the U.S. in the era that he was writing) must eschew internationalism in the name of enacting their own, tougher regulations to monitor ships and prevent environmental damage.

The failures of internationalism on the high seas also come into play in the Estonia sinking, which is recounted in horrific detail. The ship sunk in the Baltic as the result of (officially) faulty design or (unofficially, with motivated reasoning) improper handling, or perhaps (conspiratorially) because of a conspiracy. The ship was owned by an Estonian and Swedish partnership, and an Estonian, Swedish, and Finnish commission was appointed to investigate the sinking. This commission produced a report that was the product of some bureaucratic wrangling, and an effort to salve the national pride of the newly independent post-Soviet Estonia, and decided that the ship's design (with a hinged bow that facilitated car access) was to blame. An alternate commission engaged by the shipbuilder found that the design was sound, and improper maintenance and operation were to blame. Conspiracy theorists believed it had been bombed by the Russians and covered up by the Americans, who had used it to transport some kind of sci-fi weapon. These competing analyses, the official one riven by political interests, showed that even the enclosed Baltic was to some degree a watery no-man's land; the ship's rapid sinking leading to a savage struggle for life that demonstrated another kind of anarchy and lack of civilization on the high seas.

Finally, I had been waiting on the shipbreaking article until I read the book. The shipbreaking industry decamped from Western shipyards in the 70s or so to settle in the developing world in the 80s (with a stop in Korea and other urbanized Asian nations along the way). It is majorly hazardous to the environment, and laborers work under toxic conditions; especially in one of the major centers, Alang, in Gujarat, India. The work is no longer heavy industry (except in the safe and expensive U.S. pilot program for old warships), and is performed by hand or with primitive cutting tools. The book covers a Greenpeace campaign to tackle the problem, but the local Indians are highly resistant to the removal of a source of their industry. Westerners are well-meaning colonialists, Indians say that they should be allowed their own Industrial Revolution, a familiar conflict when it comes to global environmental regulation. From what I can tell, the industry has not declined in the Alang area.

The book is shorter than Urbina's book, and covers only a few highlights instead of a dozen different aspects of the outlaw ocean and/or sea. Some of the same topics appear in both books, of course, though Urbina goes into greater depth on things like manning agents vis a vis management companies. However, I greatly enjoyed Langewiesche's articles, and by extension this book. He has also gone on to write several other maritime pieces: about the El Faro, which sunk in Hurricaine Joaquin in 2015 with all hands; about the career of professional salvor Nick Sloane (kind of the opposite of a shipbreaker, really), which has some good notes about the ship insurance industry and the financial incentives for salvors); or a tick-tock of the seizure of a small French cruise ship by Somali pirates. This book expands on the articles it is built from, but these are long-form already, and a lot of the content can be enjoyed in the original pieces.