Horrors at Sea

Mary Wallis, a seafaring wife in the nineteenth century, once observed that captains were men who left their souls at home.  As others remarked, there was no God the far side of Cape Horn . . . and these comments were borne out by tragic reality.  It was even almost acceptable -- the most remarkable feature in this drawing of a flogging on board ship is the boredom shown by the victim's shipmates.  It was an everyday occurrence, it seems, and justice for brutal treatment was certainly not expected from any official body on shore.

There were men who did rise up and protest.  At sea, this was futile.  My study of an unusually sadistic captain, In the Wake of Madness, described the rebellion of the entire foremast crew when the young black steward was being tortured.  It ended up with the seamen themselves being hounded and beaten.  All they could do was run away -- the best option, because then they were not forced to watch the eventual murder of that steward.  It was inevitable, perhaps, that the captain would be murdered himself, by terrified Pacific Islanders.  Much more unusual was the trial of the one Islander who survived the fracas that followed.  An intelligent lawyer learned the reason for the assassination, and procured the poor fellow's release.

But, as I said, that was extraordinary.  And such enlightenment could only be found on land.

Conditions on sailing ships became even worse. As steam began to take over from canvas late in the century, expenses had to be cut to the bone to make the squareriggers profitable, and ill treatment of crews became so commonplace that in September 1888 the National Seamen's Union of America began to publish a "Red Record," which reported cases of extreme brutality, along with the names of the captains and mates involved.  Captain "Shotgun" James Murphy was one: he refused to reduce sail to rescue a seaman who had fallen overboard. There were two suicides and a murder on the Gatherer of Bath, Maine, and the first officer, "Black" Charles Watts, was sentenced to prison.

Again, this was unusual, as there was no law at sea.  Order was kept by the captain and officers, who ruled with their fists.  But, has this awful situation lapsed with time?  Unfortunately, not. Though passengers on orderly liners and cruise ships would never guess it, brutal treatment of seamen is still widespread today, on fishing boats in particular.

Correspondent Malcolm Shein very thoughtfully sent me a chapter from a new book by American investigative journalist Ian Urbina,  The Outlaw Ocean, which describes a horrifying situation on Korean fishing boats in New Zealand waters.

And this is how it begins:

On the night of 14 August 2010, the captain of a South Korean trawler, the Oyang 70, left Port Chalmers, New Zealand, for what would be his final journey. The ship was bound for fishing grounds about 400 miles east in the southern Pacific Ocean. When it arrived three days later, the captain, a 42-year-old man named Shin Hyeon-gi, ordered his crew to cast the net over the vessel’s rusty stern. As the men worked furiously on the illuminated deck, the ship soon began hoisting in thousands of pounds of a lithe, slender fish called southern blue whiting, which writhed and flapped across the deck. With each haul, the silvery mound of fish grew. ...

What follows is a terrifying litany of abuse -- of not just the foundering of the Oyang 70 through the shocking seamanship of the captain, but of men literally worked to death, of appalling working conditions, of poor food, sexual predation, and blackmail.  As Urbina describes, the New Zealand government did its best to amend the awful situation -- but the fishing fleet simply moved on.

"In August 2014, the parliament passed a law expelling all foreign fishing vessels from its national waters. Fishing companies had two years to comply, and were given the option of “reflagging” to New Zealand and operating under its full legal jurisdiction.

"The law was meant to better protect the roughly 1,500 foreign nationals working on foreign-chartered vessels in its waters by forcing these ships to comply with New Zealand’s labour standards. It was a bold move, because it would cost New Zealand hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investment as fishing companies moved elsewhere rather than shoulder the added burden and cost of the new regulations. To fish in New Zealand’s waters, all crew had to be provided with access to personalised bank accounts in which to deposit wages, observers would be required on virtually all foreign-owned fishing vessels, and there would be independent audits of wages.

"The existence of forced labour on fishing ships was not a revelation. Stories of sea slavery had been reported for more than a decade on boats from Thailand, Taiwan and elsewhere. But no country had ever acted as aggressively as New Zealand did in response.

"Still, seafarer unions and lawyers for the fishing boat workers questioned whether the government had gone far enough. They argued that the effect of New Zealand’s law would be to push bad behaviour elsewhere as the worst scofflaws simply opted to leave New Zealand’s waters and set up shop in jurisdictions that exert even less control over foreign fishing fleets. The Oyang 75 subsequently travelled to east Africa, near Mauritius, while the Oyang 77 sailed to an area near the Falkland Islands..."

There is a review of The Outlaw Ocean in The Guardian today.  

Compulsive reading.  Don't miss it.