Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse

Note: Peak fish happened in 1996 at 130 million tonnes a year. Pauly D, Zeller D (2016) Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining. Nature communications.

Preface. This is a book review of Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier”. A bit depressing to find out many fishermen are enslaved on disgusting boats for many years. But a good prod towards buying local fish, even at a higher price.

I don’t see this ending until ships run out of fuel to journey to the end of the Earth to get the last fish.  World peak oil production probably happened in 2018, and that will dramatically reduce climate change, warming oceans, acidification, declining oxygenation, and toxins which harm fish so much that jellyfish may someday take over the oceans.  Globally, so many fish have been caught that fishing boats have to venture farther  to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago.

This book is about much more than overfishing. It’s also about the hard life and culture of the poor men on fishing boats, the corruption and bribery at ports, stolen ships and those who try to find and take them back, the many ways cruise lines pollute oceans, and massive amounts of nuclear and other toxic wastes are secretly dumped.  How whales are now outsmarting fishing boats and taking fish off of their long-lines, while ships take so much krill it is decimating their populations and the food whales eat.  And much more.  

Some material I found interesting:

• Ocean boundaries are not clear, which is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing.
• Scientists estimate that more than ninety million sharks are killed every year for their fins. By 2017, roughly a third of all shark species were nearing extinction. Sharks are keystone species: a reduction in their population can collapse an entire food web all the way down to reef habitats. Without the apex predator, too many smaller fish survive and eat too many of the microorganisms that sustain the reefs. Enforcing rules against shark poaching doesn’t just protect the sharks; it gives the reefs a fighting chance at survival.  
• Finding a single ship in the millions of square miles of open sea was hard enough. Scofflaw ships like the Thunder deftly used the tangled skein of confusing, conflicting maritime laws, difficult-to-enforce treaties, and deliberately lax national regulations to evade the law and shed their identities. With a couple of phone calls, payoffs of a few thousand dollars, and a can of paint, the ship could, as it had in the past, take a new name and register with a new flag as it steamed to its next fishing grounds.  The 2,200-horsepower trawler changed names more than a dozen times in its 45-year career. During that time, it flew nearly as many flags, including the colors of the U.K., Mongolia, the Seychelles, Belize, and Togo.  The Thunder’s name and port registry were not painted on its hull. Instead, they were painted on a metal sign hung from its stern, to be swapped out quickly if needed. Sailors called these signs “James Bond license plates. By keeping its locational transponder, or AIS, turned off, the Thunder could avoid being tracked. It was a simple drill. Time and again, it slipped into port, off-loaded its catch to complicit or unwitting buyers, refueled, and was on its way before anyone noticed.
• Over the past century, however, technology has transformed fishing from a type of hunting into something more akin to farming. With highly mechanized ships that operate more like floating factories, the industry became brutally efficient at stripping the seas of virtually everything in them. By 2015, about 94 million tons of fish were caught each year, more than the weight of the entire human population.
• Submarine combat propelled innovation in sonar, helping illuminate the dark fathoms. Finding fish became more a science of spreadsheets than an art of dead reckoning. Subzero onboard freezers freed fishermen from their race against melting refrigerator ice. Innovations in plastics and monofilaments lengthened fishing lines from feet to miles. Lightweight polymer-based nets enabled super-trawlers to rake the ocean with a mesh of steel cables strung between them.
• As the size and strength of nets increased, so too did the amount of bycatch that was inadvertently killed and thrown back. More than half the global catch is now tossed overboard dead, or it is ground up and pelletized to feed pigs, poultry, and farmed fish. These technological advances, as well as the industrialization of fishing, are a big reason why catches from the high seas rose 700 percent in the last half a century. They also partly explain why many of the world’s fish stocks are at the brink of collapse.
• Crews only get paid if they catch enough. This means tensions run high on the boats, and captains fear their crews as intensely as they drive them. Language and cultural barriers add further divisions; most boats have three Thai officers (the captain, the engineer, and the first mate), while the rest are foreign migrants. When shorthanded, captains sometimes took desperate measures and drug or kidnap men.  
• The karaoke bars in Ranong used one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, and the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children.  
• In Kota Kinabalu, I met a 38-year-old Cambodian deckhand who said that during his year of captivity on a fishing boat he had been temporarily dropped off for several weeks on a “prison island,”, one of thousands of mostly uninhabited atolls in the South China Sea, where fishing captains routinely disembarked captive workers, sometimes for weeks, while their vessels were taken to port for repair. Typically, the captain would leave the crew with a guard who was equipped with water, canned goods, and means to fish. The guard ensured that the men were fed and that none of them tried to leave with another boat.
• What will happen to offshore oil platforms and wind turbines?  The metal on these structures corrodes and leaches dangerous pollution over time.   Renewable-energy firms have started planning wind farms, wave-energy converters, and floating solar panels in international waters. Who will be responsible for cleaning up the contraptions if they do not work, if their companies go bankrupt, or when they become obsolete?

Fishery destruction in the news:

Podcast: 2022 Daniel Pauly: “Peak Fish and Other Ocean Realities” 

Korten T (2020) The hunt for the modern-day pirates who steal millions of tons of fish from the seas. Smithsonian.

Collyns D (2020) They just pull up everything!’ Chinese fleet raises fears for Galápagos sea life.  A vast fishing armada off Ecuador’s biodiverse Pacific islands has stirred alarm over ‘indiscriminate’ fishing practices. TheGuardian.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

Urbina I (2019) The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier. Vintage.  

The Thunder was among the best at this trade and, in the eyes of conservationists, the worst of the Bandit 6, a reputation earned over decades of poaching the ghastly-looking toothfish, a species found only in the earth’s coldest waters.

The fish is also a favorite entrée in upscale restaurants in the United States and Europe, costing about $30 a fillet. But diners won’t find “toothfish” on menus. There, it is sold under a more palatable name: Chilean sea bass.

The oily fish, rich in omega 3, soon came to be known on docks worldwide as white gold. Most scientists now agree that the toothfish population is dwindling at an unsustainable rate.

In December 2013, Interpol issued an all-points bulletin for police worldwide to arrest the Thunder. This Purple Notice hardly mattered, though, if the Thunder was able to avoid notice. Finding a single ship in the millions of square miles of open sea was hard enough. Scofflaw ships like the Thunder deftly used the tangled skein of confusing, conflicting maritime laws, difficult-to-enforce treaties, and deliberately lax national regulations to evade the law and shed their identities. With a couple of phone calls, payoffs of a few thousand dollars, and a can of paint, the ship could, as it had in the past, take a new name and register with a new flag as it steamed to its next fishing grounds.  The 2,200-horsepower trawler changed names more than a dozen times in its 45-year career. During that time, it flew nearly as many flags, including the colors of the U.K., Mongolia, the Seychelles, Belize, and Togo.

The Thunder’s name and port registry were not painted on its hull. Instead, they were painted on a metal sign hung from its stern, to be swapped out quickly if needed. Sailors called these signs “James Bond license plates.

By keeping its locational transponder, or AIS, turned off, the Thunder could avoid being tracked. It was a simple drill. Time and again, it slipped into port, off-loaded its catch to complicit or unwitting buyers, refueled, and was on its way before anyone noticed. Unless, of course, there was someone like Hammarstedt tailing it, watching its every move, and calling ahead to alert local officials and Interpol.

***

To avoid frostbite while working on deck, the Sea Shepherd crews often wore survival suits. Weighing nearly ten pounds, the suits were made of neoprene, a type of rubber that is completely waterproof and designed to withstand extreme cold. Awkwardly puffy and usually bright orange to attract the attention of passing ships if a person fell overboard, the suits were nicknamed Gumbies, after the famous clay animation character. The suits also caused severe chafing and stank of dried sweat. “Bleed or freeze,” one deckhand said to me as he helped me put mine on at one point. “Those are your options.

Gill nets are banned because they are particularly blunt instruments. The bottom of the nets are weighted to drop to the seafloor. Buoys hold up the tops, creating an imperceptible mesh wall that can stretch seven miles across and twenty feet high. Forming an inescapable maze, the Thunder set up dozens of these walls to zigzag the underwater plateaus where toothfish congregate. The buoys at the tops of the nets helped the fishing boats find them later when they returned to pull the mesh back on board, usually loaded with catch.

Hauling in the net from the frigid water was a dangerous and brutally arduous task. The net was 45 miles long, triple the length of Manhattan, and Antarctica is among the coldest and windiest places on earth. The deck of the Sam Simon was partially frozen and cluttered. The crew’s spit froze before landing. The ship’s railings were low. Tripping was easy. Marbled with slush, the polar water below dipped in some places to ninety degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. Falling overboard would have meant almost certain death within a couple of minutes, most likely from cardiac arrest, unless quickly rescued. When the sway was severe, deckhands wore harnesses and latched themselves to the ship to avoid getting swept away.

For every four sea creatures netted, one was a toothfish; the rest were bycatch that nobody would want even if they were alive. Virtually all of Sea Shepherd’s crew were vegetarian or vegan, many of them motivated by a concern for animal rights. Untangling the dead and dying wildlife from those nets, including rays, giant octopuses, dragonfish, and large crabs, was difficult work, emotionally and physically.

In this famously rough stretch of the Southern Ocean, storms gather force for tens of thousands of miles as they travel east across open water, technically called the fetch, unimpeded by land except for South America’s lower tip. Winds can top two hundred miles per hour. Waves reach ninety feet tall. Polar fronts and trade winds generate an average of one angry storm per week. To pass through this region, ships typically wait on the periphery to slip between these storms. The Thunder did not.  

As the wider, heavier Thunder held steady over the next two days in the storm, the Bob Barker swayed back and forth, listing 40 degrees and battered by 50-foot waves. Below deck, fuel sloshed in the Barker’s tanks, splashing through ceiling crevices and filling the ship with diesel fumes. In the galley, a plastic drum tethered to the wall broke free, coating the floor in vegetable oil that bled into the cabins below. Half the crew was seasick. “It was like working on an elevator that suddenly dropped and climbed six stories every ten seconds,

As much as it was a test of wills and daring, the chase of the Thunder was a game of endurance. In prior weeks, the Thunder had done everything in its power to prevent its adversaries from replenishing themselves. The Bob Barker and the Sam Simon typically sailed parallel to each other, spread apart by about half a mile. When they moved near each other, the Thunder’s captain assumed they were trying to exchange supplies or top up the other’s fuel tank so he swung his ship around and wedged it between his adversaries. The Sea Shepherd captains laughed at the move because they were stocked well enough not to need resupplying for at least a couple months more. I never got a straight answer from the Sea Shepherd captains as to why they kept moving their ships near each other. I suspected it was simply to play head games with their opponent.

Today, many countries, including landlocked ones such as Mongolia and Bolivia, sell the right to fly their flag. Some of the biggest registries are run by overseas businesses, like the Liberian registry that is overseen by a firm based in Virginia. The company collecting fees for the right to fly a certain flag is also responsible for policing its customers, ensuring they abide by safety, labor, and environmental rules, and conducting investigations when things go wrong. But in practice, flags of convenience double as cloaks of misconduct, creating a perverse incentive for ship operators to shop around for the most lax registries with the lowest prices and fewest regulations. This regulatory regime was quite decidedly designed not to provide true oversight but to provide the illusion of oversight. And the way it functions is akin to being allowed to slap a license plate from any country on your car, regardless of where you live or intend to drive, and the police in charge of inspecting the vehicles and investigating accidents are paid by the drivers themselves.

While some countries will fight over inches of dirt on either side of a border, ocean boundaries are less clear, which makes chasing poachers seemingly futile. This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing.

To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crews to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port. The bodies of the sharks take up valuable space in the hold of smaller ships. When they decompose, the carcasses produce ammonia that contaminates the other catch. I’d encountered this pungent odor before on a fishing ship in the Philippines that had a stack of the carcasses in its hold, and it smelled like cat urine. To avoid wasting space and contaminating more valuable catch, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It is a slow death: the sharks, alive but unable to swim without their fins, sink to the seafloor, where they starve, drown, or are slowly eaten by other fish.

Scientists estimate that more than ninety million sharks are killed every year for their fins. By 2017, roughly a third of all shark species were nearing extinction. Sharks are keystone species: a reduction in their population can collapse an entire food web all the way down to reef habitats. Without the apex predator, too many smaller fish survive and eat too many of the microorganisms that sustain the reefs. Enforcing rules against shark poaching doesn’t just protect the sharks; it gives the reefs a fighting chance at survival.  

Over the past century, however, technology has transformed fishing from a type of hunting into something more akin to farming. With highly mechanized ships that operate more like floating factories, the industry became brutally efficient at stripping the seas of virtually everything in them. By 2015, about 94 million tons of fish were caught each year, more than the weight of the entire human population. Much of the credit and blame goes to the building boom in the 1930s of purse seiners. These ships surround an entire school of fish with a deep curtain of netting, sometimes nearly a mile around, with a thick wire that runs through rings along the bottom of the mesh. After setting the net, the ship hauls in the bottom wire, and the net is pursed, or cinched, like a laundry bag. A crane lifts the net out of the water, the fish are dumped into a gaping funnel, sorted (often by conveyor belt), and swallowed into the ship hold.

World War II spurred engineers to develop lighter, faster, more durable ships that could travel farther on less fuel. Submarine combat propelled innovation in sonar, helping illuminate the dark fathoms. Finding fish became more a science of spreadsheets than an art of dead reckoning. Subzero onboard freezers freed fishermen from their race against melting refrigerator ice. Innovations in plastics and monofilaments lengthened fishing lines from feet to miles. Lightweight polymer-based nets enabled super-trawlers to rake the ocean with the ruthlessness of two tanks rolling through a rain forest, a mesh of steel cables strung between them.

As the size and strength of nets increased, so too did the amount of bycatch that was inadvertently killed and thrown back. More than half the global catch is now tossed overboard dead, or it is ground up and pelletized to feed pigs, poultry, and farmed fish. For instance, feeding a single “ranched” tuna can require catching and pelletizing over thirty times the weight of that tuna in fish pulled from the sea. These technological advances, as well as the industrialization of fishing, are a big reason why catches from the high seas rose 700 percent in the last half a century. They also partly explain why many of the world’s fish stocks are at the brink of collapse.

Since the 1990s, ships had been able to deploy the automatic identification system, or AIS, a collision-avoidance system. AIS has its shortcomings: Captains could and were allowed to turn the transponders off when they feared being tracked by pirates or competitors. The system could be hacked to give false locations. Many of the boats involved in the worst crimes, like the Shin Jyi, were smaller than 300 tons.

More sea-traffic data would become available as countries deployed sonar and camera buoys as well as low-cost floating hydrophones to catch boats approaching restricted areas. Satellites, mostly used by governments and armed with synthetic-aperture radar, could also detect a vessel’s position regardless of weather conditions. As the 2015 capture of the Shin Jyi proved, all this information became especially powerful when coupled with sophisticated monitoring software that triggered alerts if, for instance, a vessel went “dark” by turning off its transponder or if a poacher entered a no-fishing area. Now, instead of blindly patrolling broad swaths of ocean, police had, in effect, eyes in the sky.

Still, this new technology was not a panacea. Popular television shows like Homeland and Person of Interest make aerial surveillance seem as reliable as Google Maps, but capturing this detailed imagery from the sky depends largely on military-grade drones. Taking high-resolution photographs from space is extremely costly (often over $3,500 per picture), and requests for images have to be made a week in advance so that the companies or governments operating the satellites know to aim their lens at the precise spot as they hurtle around the earth. — The vastness of the ocean also complicates surveillance efforts, even by sophisticated satellite tracking used by the likes of SkyTruth’s Bergman in West Virginia. Seen from above, the world’s largest fishing trawler, the Dutch-flagged Annelies Ilena, has a surface area of about thirty-five hundred square meters—equivalent to eight NBA courts. Even if a satellite were scanning just 1 percent of the Atlantic Ocean, the Annelies Ilena would take up only three-billionths of that swath. If a ship turns off its transmitter, any knowledge of its whereabouts can quickly evaporate. · · · For centuries, local fishermen have taken advantage of fish’s instinct to huddle near floating objects for protection and mating. By building special buoys with plastic and bamboo flotsam strung together with old nets, these fishermen attract fish to one spot, making them easier to catch and greatly cutting the time required to keep their boats at sea. The buoys, which modern researchers began calling “fish aggregating devices,” or FADs, have had a particularly powerful impact on the seas near Palau. To attract species like tuna and blue marlin, fishing companies are increasingly using “smart” FADs equipped with

Sonar and GPS, which let boat captains sit back and wait on land to be alerted when it’s time to gather up their haul. They’re so effective, in fact, that in some places in the world fishermen hire armed guards to sit on or near the FADs to ensure that competitors don’t destroy them or steal the fish around them.

In Indonesia, fishermen told me about villagers hired to stand guard on floating tarp-covered platforms alongside FADs, dozens of miles from shore. Usually these guards were supplied with several jugs of water, salted fish, a gun, and promises that someone would visit them in a week or so to provide new supplies or to take them back to shore. Sometimes, those promises were not kept or a storm killed the men, washing their bodies ashore. I heard similar stories in the Philippines, where FAD guards had been killed in firefights with other fishermen.

The absence of fish near the FADs served as a reminder that the seas, though vast, were inextricably linked and by no means inexhaustible. The success of Palau’s reserve depended in part on other countries creating their own. “They’re getting taken before they get here,” Baiei said about the missing fish.

Tuna, like many large ocean fish, are migratory. Near Palau, populations of yellowfin, bigeye, and skipjack are in sharp decline, partly because they never make it to Palau’s reserve. They are being picked off beforehand in a number of ways, including being netted at one of the more than fifty thousand floating FADs in the western and central Pacific Ocean, most of which are perfectly legal.

In its grand fight to safeguard its waters, Palau was doing many of the right things, including having created a marine reserve that protected nearly 80 percent of its territorial waters from industrial fishing. But for the country’s conservation efforts to succeed, Palau needed other governments and industries to follow suit. Palau could not succeed on its own.

Palau’s unfettered tourism. More than half of the country’s gross domestic product was based on ecotourism, mostly because of people drawn to the world-class snorkeling and scuba diving. In 2015, the average number of tourists per month coming from China soared to nearly 11,000 from about 2,000 the year prior. It turned out, though, that many of these tourists were as eager to eat the fish as they were to see them. Not coincidentally, the variety of exotic seafood appearing on local restaurant menus in Palau grew as well, including banned fish like Napoleon wrasse, hump-head parrot fish, and hawksbill turtles that were mostly caught by local fishermen. Even as the Palauans tried to keep foreign poachers from entering their waters, they struggled to stop local fishermen from supplying protected fish to their own restaurants.

For Palau’s marine officers, catching poachers was just the first step. After they brought them to shore, there was no guarantee that Palau would have the translators to communicate with the foreign crews, jail space to hold them, or even the laws to effectively prosecute them. Most of the poachers they arrested were from small boats owned by family businesses. These operators typically had nowhere near the $500,000 to pay some of the tougher fines, much less the expense of repatriating their crews.

When these boats were seized, Palau was stuck with the cost of feeding, housing, and flying the crews home.  I left Palau less with hope than with a painful sense of the barriers to marine preservation. The threats facing the oceans were far bigger and more complex than criminality. Palau’s true adversaries were not best understood as legal or illegal. They were bigger: climate change, unchecked tourism, a vastly untamed geography, and a level of poverty that filled boats with men who cared more about survival than about laws.

I had done some reading about the rich and fanciful history of aquatic micronations. At least since Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was first published in 1870, people have dreamed of creating permanent colonies on or under the ocean.

Many of these projects might have made sense in theory, but they never accounted for the harsh reality of ocean life. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave, and solar energy to provide power, but building renewable-energy systems that could survive the weather and the corrosive seawater was difficult and costly. Communication options remain limited: satellite-based connections were prohibitively expensive, as was laying a fiber-optic cable or relying on point-to-point lasers or microwaves that tethered the offshore installation to land. Traveling to and from seasteads was challenging. Waves and storms could be especially disruptive. “Rogue” waves occur when smaller waves, sometimes traveling in different directions, meet and combine.

They can be taller than 110 feet—almost twice the height of Sealand. Running a country—even a pint-sized one—isn’t free. Who, for example, would subsidize basic services (the ones usually provided by the tax-funded government that seasteading libertarians sought to escape)? Keeping the lights on and protecting against piracy would be expensive.

In 2008, these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal who donated more than $1.25 million to the organization and related projects. Thiel also invested in a start-up venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California. Never getting beyond the drawing-board phase, Blueseed failed to raise the money necessary to sustain itself.

Michael grinned unexpectedly. He seemed as proud of the convoluted story behind his family’s bizarre creation as he was of Sealand’s resilience. Taking advantage of a gap in international law, Sealand had grown old while other attempts at seasteads never made it far beyond what-if imaginings. The Bates family was certainly daring, but the secret to Sealand’s survival was its limited ambitions. Irreverent but inconsequential, Sealand was not Al-Qaeda or ISIS seeking to create a grand caliphate. In the view of its powerful neighbors, Sealand was merely a rusty kingdom, easier to ignore than to eradicate.

August 14, 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 four hundred miles east in the South Pacific Ocean. When the ship arrived three days later, the captain, a 42-year-old man named Hyonki Shin, 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. A type of cod, blue whiting was sometimes ground up into fish sticks or imitation lobster. More often it was pelletized and sold as protein-rich food for farmed carnivorous fish like salmon. At about nine cents per pound, blue whiting was a low-price catch, which meant the Oyang 70 had to catch a lot to make a profit. As the crew pulled in the net, ton after ton of the fish slid to the deck—eighty-six thousand pounds in all, a decent haul. The battered 242-foot ship was long past its prime. The average age for distant-water fishing boats in the South Korean fleet was 29, and the Oyang 70 was 38 years old. Port captains called the Oyang 70 “tender,” a euphemism for unstable. A month before it set sail, a New Zealand inspector ranked the ship as “high risk,” citing over a dozen safety violations, including one of the ship’s main doors below deck that was not watertight.

Shin drove his men hard. As the first net was pulled that night, they sorted the squirming, oily mound on the aft deck, quickly heaving the fish down a chute to the ship’s interior to make space for the next haul. One floor down, in the ship’s factory, over a dozen men stood cramped before the “slime line,” a conveyor belt, wielding knives and operating circular saws. Their job was to remove heads, guts, and bycatch, while the valuable part of the fish continued down the line for packing and freezing. The men needed roughly half a day to fully process the first catch. But before they made it through the load, Shin ordered the men on deck to put the net back in the water. Work continued virtually nonstop over the next twenty-four hours. Around 3:00 a.m. on August 18, 2010, the ship’s first mate, Minsu Park, frantically roused Shin from his sleep. The net was too full, Park told him. It was pulling the boat under. Water in the engine room was already several feet deep. The crew on deck was begging to cut the net. The captain jumped from his bunk and raced to the bridge. But instead of ordering the net cut, he demanded that the bosun, the man in charge of the deckhands, command them to keep hoisting. That order would be Shin’s last.

For the Sajo Oyang Corporation, which operated the vessel, the poor treatment of workers and the dismal condition of its ship was nothing unusual. Time and again, Sajo Oyang abused its crew members, often treating them with the same disregard as it treated the bycatch in its nets—as a distraction and annoyance. Sometimes, that disregard cost men their lives. The infamy of the Sajo Oyang fleet, as well as the fate that befell its captain and crew, was well-known in maritime circles.  What stood out about the story of the Oyang ships was that safety risks and violations, and the persistent mistreatment of workers, were hiding in plain sight. But at every turn, inspectors and regulators largely shrugged off their responsibilities, often with a crass disdain for the lives at stake.

Aside from the eight Korean officers, the crew of the Oyang 70 consisted of 36 Indonesians, six Filipinos, and one Chinese. On average, the Indonesians earned $180 per month. The officers derided the Muslims on board as “dogs” or “monkeys.” The drinking water was often brown and tasted of metal, workers would later tell investigators and lawyers. After a certain point, the only food on board for the crew was rice and the fish they caught. Men were docked pay if they ate too slowly. The crew described the ship as “a floating freezer”; the heater on board barely worked. The shared toilet lacked running water. There were so many roaches that a crew member later said he could smell roaches cooking as they fell onto the hot engine block.

The Oyang 70 was known as a stern trawler, towing a long, cylindrical net from behind. The ship’s most intense work happened in the dark because blue whiting is a schooling fish that lives near the seabed, more easily caught at night when it feeds on plankton, small shrimp, and krill closer to the surface. As the crew struggled with the net on August 18, everyone on board knew it was more fish than the boat could handle. No one knew by how much, though, because there were no batteries in the net’s weight sensors. The cost of replacing the ship’s trawl net was more than $150,000. The price of losing a net full of fish would be the captain’s job.

A typical captain would have immediately identified how dangerous the situation aboard the Oyang 70 had become. Like fighter pilots, deep-sea fishing captains are as much born as made. It takes a rare, almost instinctual calm and spatial acuity to steady a 1,870-ton ship while reading the tides, countering gusts, and directing a dozen men scrambling on deck. This is especially true when hoisting a hundred-ton net, which has to be carefully centered behind the ship.

the Indonesians had snuck off the ship while the captain was still asleep. Because they were Muslim, the men had wandered the streets looking for a mosque; finding none, they took refuge in the church instead. One by one, the men described to church officials and later to government investigators their captivity on a ship of horrors. A chief engineer broke a deckhand’s nose for inadvertently bumping into him. Another officer punched a crew member in the head so often that he lost part of his vision. Insubordinate crew were sometimes locked in the refrigerator. Others were forced to eat rotten fish bait. On good days, shifts lasted 20 hours. Sometimes they worked for 48 hours straight. “I often thought about asking for help,” Andi Sukendar, one of the Indonesian deckhands, said in court papers. “But I didn’t know who to ask.” The worst part, the men said, was the sexual assaults, mostly at the hands of a sadistic bosun named Wongeun Kang. The 42-year-old Korean stole their clothing as they bathed so that he could chase them as they ran naked back to their bunks. In the galley, he approached the men from behind and jabbed them with his exposed erection. When they passed him in the halls, he grabbed their genitals. Other Korean officers made advances, the crewmen said, but none were as aggressive as the bosun. He assaulted deckhands while they showered. He climbed into their bunks at night when they were sleeping. “The bosun tried to teach me how to have sex with him but I refused,” one crew member recounted. Others were not able to stave him off.

I wish I could say I was surprised by these reports. But what I read was sickeningly familiar. The expanse of the sea and the dictatorial power of officers over crews allow cruel and abusive behavior that is often only uncovered when a ship sinks. Workers on Sajo Oyang ships described meals speckled with dead bugs and mattresses riddled with biting mites, men hiding in closets from violent officers, and rapes that occurred in nearby bunks that they felt powerless to stop. Crewmen recounted being issued torn hand-me-downs and ill-fitting boots, tattered jackets and gloves. Captains kept the sailors’ passports and certification papers to ensure they could not leave.

To get the jobs, the men often had paid over $175 in fees—more than a month’s salary for some. And as collateral, they often handed over their most prized possessions to ensure the completion of their two-year contracts: home deeds, car registrations, and in one case the land grant certificate for a community mosque. I knew that fleet owners exploited their crews, but the stories of these deckhands offered an unusually clear distillation of how they exert control, including blacklisting threats, cultural shame, and leveraging through property liens. Breaching the contracts would bring economic ruin to their families. Susanto, a deckhand on the Oyang 77, put up his elementary and junior high school graduation certificates. In his small village, such records are irreplaceable. If he failed to get the papers back, he would be unemployable. The documents were “the only things of value he had,” one affidavit said.

News of the scams and abuse in this work rarely made it back to the small villages where new crew members were recruited because those who had been tricked were too ashamed to talk about it and to warn others. Even those who knew the risks were willing to try their luck because they were desperate for work.

The 501 had embarked from Busan, South Korea’s southernmost port. Under a fisheries deal with Russia, it was one of six South Korean trawlers allowed to catch pollack, best known as the main ingredient of the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Pollack is also a popular dish in South Korea, which has at least twenty-eight names for the fish depending on its age, size, and location. South Korea began trawling for pollack in the Bering Sea in the late 1970s and early 1980s after depleting the stocks in its own waters.

Even though I had reported on quite a few grim industries over the years (coal mining, long-haul trucking, sex work, garment and glue factories), I was still stunned by the conditions on fishing boats. There were some obvious explanations—the lack of unions, the confining and transient nature of the job, and the vast distance from shore and from government oversight. Culture certainly plays a role as well. Ships are masculine and military-like arenas. There is honor in hardship and the ability to endure it without complaint. Governance on board is rigidly hierarchical and decidedly undemocratic. Feedback from the rank and file is generally unwelcome. Silence is core to the way of life on ships, and breaking it can be a dangerous crime. Perhaps the best advice I heard early during my reporting came from a British first mate. “You want to fit in?” he said as we left port. “Take up as little space as possible.” His counsel was less about the cramped living quarters than about the social risk of idle chatter. A respect for this silence, a comfort with it, the ability to use it at the right moments, was possibly the single most valuable tool I picked up during my reporting, because it was the key that allowed me to access people and places.

I came to admire mariners’ quiet self-possession and their comfort with these long silences, some of which seemed to last for days. Over time, I also came to respect the silence itself, particularly in contrast to the world back home, where so much of my life was online, a place prone to oversharing and immediate gratification. Life on these ships, on the other hand, was so utterly off-line and defined by privacy, quiet, and waiting. And yet I also wondered if this silence was what made mariners so famously gruff and frequently ill-suited for life back onshore. If nothing else, this silence was the backdrop for an almost theological resignation that many seafarers had about their fate. Many deckhands, especially in Indonesia, knew about what happened to the Oyang crew, and it seemed almost to bolster the grim inevitability that many of them perceived in this profession.

Abortion ships

Determining whether activity at sea constitutes a crime often depends, in a sense, on where in the water it happens. A provision in maritime law treats a ship in international waters like a floating embassy, in effect a detached chunk of the land whose flag it flies. That means the laws that apply on board are only those from the country where the ship is registered.

Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca Gomperts. The Dutch doctor and founder of Women on Waves traverses the globe in a converted medical ship carrying an international team of volunteer doctors that provides abortions in places where it has been criminalized. Running these often-clandestine missions since the early years of the twenty-first century, Gomperts has repeatedly visited the coasts of Guatemala, Ireland, Poland, Morocco, and a half dozen other countries, dangerously skating the edge of federal and international law. Where a country’s federal law may forbid abortions, the jurisdiction of that law only reaches the limits of national waters or, twelve miles from shore. At the thirteen-mile mark, where international waters begin, abortion is legal on Gomperts’s ship because it flies the flag of Austria, where the procedure is permitted.

Mexico has for centuries been a Roman Catholic stronghold. Since late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, dozens of Mexican women have been reported by family, hospital staff, or others for having an abortion and were later prosecuted for the crime. Abortion remains illegal, but an estimated one million women find clandestine ways to undergo the procedure each year. More than a third of those typically lead to complications, including infection, tearing of the uterus, hemorrhaging, or cervical perforation, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute,

Hundreds of women have been jailed after seeking medical care due to botched abortions. Hospitals were expected to report suspicious miscarriages to the police just as they would gunshot wounds.

In April 2007, Mexico City decriminalized abortion, allowing the termination of pregnancies without restriction during the first 12 weeks of gestation. That triggered a backlash across the country. At least half of the country’s 31 states passed constitutional amendments declaring that life begins at conception.

Globally, more than twenty million women annually have “unsafe” abortions, and about 47,000 of them die each year as a result, according to the World Health Organization

Stowaways

Over a thousand stowaways are caught each year hiding on ships. Hundreds of thousands more are sea migrants, like those desperately fleeing North Africa and the Middle East on boats crossing the Mediterranean. For the people making these crossings, few routes are as perilous. In interviews, half a dozen stowaways compared their experience to hiding in the trunk of a car for days, weeks, or months traveling to an unknown place across the most brutal of terrains. Temperatures are extreme. It is impossible to bring enough food or water.

To get on board, some stowaways posed as stevedores or deck cleaners. Others swam under the stern and squeezed through a space where the rudder meets the ship. Many brought “stowaway poles”—long bamboo sticks with toeholds and a hook—that they used to scale the sides of ships. Supply boats bringing fuel or food to anchored vessels also sometimes carried uninvited passengers. After sneaking on board, they would hide in hulls or shipping containers, crane cabs or tool trunks.

Refrigerated fishing holds became uninhabitable, exhaust pipes heated up, shipping containers were sealed and fumigated. Maritime newsletters and shipping insurance reports offered a macabre accounting of the victims: “crushed in the chain locker,” “asphyxiated by bunker fumes,” “found under a retracted anchor.” Most often, though, death came more slowly. Vomiting from seasickness led to dehydration. People passed out from exhaustion or starvation.

I contacted Edward Carlson, a maritime and trade lawyer based in New York, who worked on many cases involving stowaways. He added that stowaways are often savvy and skilled adversaries to captains or the shipping companies left with figuring out how to handle them. Many stowaways know, for example, that if they allege that they were assaulted by the crew, they can tie up a ship with a long investigation in port, leading to delays costing millions of dollars, Carlson said. “You have a tanker carrying $200 million worth of crude for Exxon or Mobil, tugs, supply boats, dock agents, an entire port refinery scene waiting to unload it in an extremely tight window of time before that ship needs to clear the berth,” Carlson said. “Then you have a fifteen-year-old kid who could delay the entire thing.

Some stowaways are “frequent fliers,” who are caught multiple times, Rabitz explained. To pin down their nationality, Rabitz’s staff consists of speakers of nearly a dozen languages, including an array of Arabic and African dialects. The stowaway’s accent, word choice, and facial features usually give away his home country, he said.  Once the stowaway acquiesces in leaving, he is usually escorted on the flight home. A guard or two are also often sent on the flight.

I got in touch with Mansoor Adayfi, a former terrorism suspect and detainee from the Guantánamo Bay prison. He knew and had written about many of the other people held there, and I wanted his opinion about the use of the high seas for interrogation. He explained that many of the Afghans held at Guantánamo Bay had no knowledge of the ocean. To them, the sea was a fearsome beast, he said. “All that the Afghans knew was that it was a lot of water that killed and ate people,” he told me, adding that American interrogators took advantage of this. “?‘When we finish with you here, you will be taken to the sea and you all will be thrown there,’?” he recounted them saying. I believed the anecdote if only because it was, after all, the job of these interrogators to instill fear in their detainees so as to leverage them for information. The ocean was not just a convenient location for holding suspects, Adayfi said. “It was also a powerful psychological tool for getting information from these same suspects.” Most of the detainees at Guantánamo were held in outdoor cells, which happened to be only a couple hundred yards from the water’s edge, but none of the detainees could see the ocean fully because the surrounding fences were covered in tarps. They stole glimpses, though, through the slivers of openings at the bottom of the tarps.

Time and again, I had stumbled across men on broken ships anchored far from shore. These men were abandoned but unable to leave their ships. The backstory was usually the same: Having stretched their resources to the limit, cash-strapped shipowners declared bankruptcy. Cutting their losses, they disavowed their ships, stranding crew members who were usually still on board the ship far off at sea or anchored in a foreign port. Like the Flying Dutchman, these men were left to roam or sit and wait, sometimes for years. Usually, they lacked the immigration papers to come ashore and the resources to get home. Annually, there were thousands of these men globally languishing at sea, slowly falling apart, physically and mentally. Some of these men died, typically while trying to swim to shore.

In Athens, Greece, while exploring how ships are stolen by maritime repo men and corrupt port officials, I came across the crew of the Sofia—ten desperate Filipinos, marooned on an asphalt tanker, anchored half a dozen miles from shore, and unpaid for over five months.

***

In 1898, the wooden, 118-foot ship became stuck in a pack of Antarctic ice in the Bellingshausen Sea. On board were 19 men: nine sailors, two engineers, and an international team of eight officers and scientists, including a geologist, meteorologist, and anthropologist. As the sun disappeared for two months, the group hunkered down for a brutal winter. With no hope of being rescued, their true enemy was not the cold but madness. Within weeks, a crewman became paranoid and hid at night. Another announced plans to walk home to Belgium. The Belgica broke free from the ice and made it back to the port of Antwerp nearly a year later. The remaining crew members were haggard and thin, but their faculties were largely intact because the captain had imposed a rigorous regimen meant to maintain their mental health. This regimen included a “baking treatment” in which the men were required to sit in front of a warming stove for half an hour and eat a diet of foul-tasting but vitamin-rich penguin meat. There was also mandatory participation in routine exercise outside on the ice and in social gatherings, including a beauty contest between images of women torn from the ship’s magazines. News of the Belgica’s survival tactics spread among ship captains. The lesson that many of them took from the incident was that it is sometimes as important to take psychological precautions as meteorological ones. Ship captains on subsequent Antarctic excursions began packing straitjackets. Later in the twentieth century, infirmaries on many ships destined for the North or South Pole or any other long journeys also began stocking antipsychotic drugs. In 1996, an anthropologist named Jack Stuster used the journals written on the Belgica to help design the space stations. If astronauts were to survive, Stuster suggested, they would need to prepare for the melancholy and disorientation from spending long periods in extreme isolation. There was a lot to be learned from the men who had made similarly grueling voyages at sea. I was intrigued by the psychological challenges faced by the millions of other seafarers who go offshore willingly. Even under normal circumstances, the loneliness and boredom of long voyages at sea can be emotionally brutal. One study by the ITF found that over half of the six hundred mariners interviewed reported feeling depressed during their time at sea. Another study published in the journal International Maritime Health found the global percentage of suicides among seafarers while at sea was more than three times higher than that of land-based suicides in the U.K. or Australia.

Seafaring has always been an isolating profession. This intensified, though, after the September 11 attacks, when antiterrorism laws in the United States and much of Europe restricted crews’ access to ports. Crews were required to park no closer than half a mile from shore as they waited for a call from ship operators informing them of their next destination. On board, a crewman can sit, sometimes for months, within sight but out of reach of sending his wife an email, eating a decent meal, having a doctor check the toothache that keeps him up at night, or hearing his daughter’s voice on her birthday.

In many ports, dockside brothels adjusted their business models to these new norms. “Love boats,” or floating bordellos, began shuttling women or girls, along with drugs and alcohol, out to the parked ships. But the longer the men were stuck, the less such boats came calling. Everyone knew that a stranded seafarer is soon a penniless seafarer.

And yet for all the homesickness involved in this work, most of the mariners I interviewed said they were reluctant to leave their ships, even in the face of abuse or abandonment. Often, there was shame in returning home unpaid. On land, these men were spouses, fathers, and sons. At sea, they had a rank that carried status. With this status came strict rules, and abandoning their post was a violation of the highest order. Seafarers were overwhelmingly male, and their ship, almost always called “she,” had a distinct emotional hold over them. They loved her as much as they resented her. Having traveled together, grown annoyed with each other, protected each other, these men often said their ship was as much a wife as a workplace to them.

Virtually all of the stranded men said that once they found their way home, they hoped to go back to sea. This seemed puzzling in light of what they’d been through. Obviously, necessity was driving them: it’s a decent-paying job where options are few. But there is also a pull to life offshore. For all the suffering I heard about from these men, this pull seemed closer to resignation than enchantment, though powerful nonetheless. Spend enough time away from land, I was told, and you rarely come out the other side the same. “It changes you,” one of the stranded men said.

After stints at sea, I sensed in myself subtle changes in how I related to sleep, conversation, and food. On trips, I grew accustomed to extremely tight bunks, long and extreme silence, and eating whatever was put in front of me, most often half-cooked fish and barely boiled rice. When I got home, I noticed I ate faster, more dutifully than for enjoyment. I snuggled with my wife tighter in bed, uncomfortable with the extra space. I tired faster of talking, wanting more often to withdraw behind my headphones. A grumpier version of my former self returned to shore each time.

The biggest change, though, I felt in my stomach. During several years of reporting at sea, I grappled with a worsening case of what some mariners called sway. Others referred to it as dock rock, land sickness, reverse seasickness, or mal de débarquement (French for “disembarkation sickness”). As important as it was to get your sea legs when adjusting to life on a ship, it was equally essential to restore your land legs when you returned to shore. Sometimes, though, re-acclimating was difficult, and the result was as bizarre as it was nauseating. The minute I stepped back on land, I started feeling sick.

The experience was akin to drunken bed spins. My head felt like a bobbing buoy as my body’s vestibular system, the internal gyroscope for balancing, created a persistent rocking sensation. In a spatial equivalent of jet lag, my body clung to the memory of a place it had already left. Usually people who are least susceptible to seasickness are most vulnerable to land sickness. I never once threw up on a ship due to seasickness, but I twice vomited after stepping on land. The longer the stay offshore and the rougher the waters, the more stubborn the sway was when I got home. Sometimes it lasted days. Working at sea was not my lifelong profession, of course; I was a mere visitor, a land creature passing through. Unlike many of the men I interviewed, I always had the option to leave. Still, this strange disorder instilled in me a respect for the sea’s grasp. It changed me—not just psychologically, but also physiologically. I had to imagine it also changed the many mariners I’d met.

If insurance fraud was the goal, the glossary offered a tried-and-true tactic. A corrupt operator hired a crew to take the ship to sea, where the ship would ostensibly break down. The operator then arranged for the vessel to hire a mechanic who was in on the scheme and deemed scuttling as the only affordable option. The mechanic and the ship operator then split the insurance money from the scuttling, and the operator re-flagged and renamed

The glossary also provided some helpful guidance for changing a pilfered ship’s identity. To sever ties between a ship and its past, the document suggested removing all tracking devices that might be built into the ship’s console or hull. Get rid of anything on the vessel with its name written on it, including life jackets, bridge paperwork, buoys, stationery, and lifeboats, the glossary advised. “Replace the ship’s first or build name,” it said, which is usually welded onto both sides of the bow and on the stern in foot-high, raised steel letters. “Don’t forget the serial plate on the ship’s main engine,” the document added, because it’s a favorite way for investigators to trace a stolen ship’s original identity.

Most of Zolotas’s fleet of half a dozen ships, including the Sofia, were tankers carrying bitumen, or liquefied asphalt. Bitumen, which looks like thick black paint, is used primarily to build roads, so the market for this product is global. But the ships that carry it are expensive to maintain, because the bitumen has to be kept heated at all times or else it solidifies.

TCA was not the only one to pounce on Zolotas’s assets. In Savannah, Georgia, U.S. marshals stormed one of his sugar freighters called the Castellano, ordering it to stay put due to unpaid debt. In Baltimore, the U.S. Coast Guard detained one of his asphalt tankers called the Granadino, ostensibly because it had stranded a dozen of its crew. Another Zolotas tanker called the Iola sat in the port of Drammen in Norway as creditors argued over it. The crew on the Katarina, also a bitumen carrier, had taken matters into their own hands, seizing control of the ship to demand back wages.

The net around Zolotas’s properties was tightening fast, and if the Sofia was arrested in Greek waters, neither the bankers nor the unpaid Filipino crew on the ship could expect to see their money anytime soon. The Greek legal system was not known for its efficiency or for being sympathetic to foreign lenders or crews.

I learned that over the prior two decades Hardberger had seized more than two dozen ships and he had a reputation for taking on the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs, usually on behalf of banks, insurers, or shipowners.  I asked him to describe the ruses he had used over the years for boarding ships. “Let’s see here,” he responded, his face lighting up as if I’d asked a grandfather to show me photographs of his grandchildren. Most often, he explained, he posed as an interested buyer, a port official, or a charterer. He plied guards with booze and distracted them with prostitutes; spooked port police with witch doctors; and duped night watchmen into leaving their posts by lying to them about a relative being hospitalized.

People often took ships to Miragoane to give them new identities. The port was remote and relatively unpatrolled, its waters deep and ideal for bigger vessels. Someone who wanted a fast makeover and new paperwork for a stolen boat could have it done in under two days—removing all names, prying loose the serial plate from the engine, and welding off the original metal name. As we wound our way down Miragoane’s narrow boulevards choked with motorbike traffic and lined with food stalls selling griyo (fried pork) and lambi an sòs kreyol (conch in creole sauce), Hardberger explained the simple math of giving a ship a new identity. “All you need is about $300, four welders, and a fax machine,” he said. “But especially the $300.

Bribery is ubiquitous in many developing-world countries, but nowhere is it more pervasive than at their ports. Harbormasters wield unusual power. Inspectors can detain a ship for any number of reasons, including the condition of the hull, the size of the sleeping quarters, and the legibility of the logbooks. In poorer countries, keeping a ship in port as long as possible is an easy way to boost the local economy. Even if an inspector does not directly profit by detaining a ship, his relatives and friends will, selling fuel, food, repairs, and booze to the crew stranded in port.

The port of Lagos in Nigeria has one of the worst reputations for bribery, perhaps because for many years a ship required more than 130 signatures from inspectors before it could off-load any international cargo.

Although stealing a ship is sometimes the goal of maritime scams, most port corruption consists of “squeeze and release” bilking schemes. Corrupt local authorities typically used this tactic to detain a ship just long enough to extort fees. And their pretexts varied: from inflated repair bills and fake docking charges to bogus liens, or trumped-up environmental violations. “But squeeze long enough and you strangle,” Lindsay added. Even an idle cargo ship can cost up to $10,000 per day to support. Shipping businesses go bankrupt as waiting cargo spoils, delivery deadlines pass, and owed wages accumulate. Sometimes these detentions are part of a broader plot to take ownership of the vessel through a hastily convened public auction or judicial sale.

More than 90% of the world’s goods, from fuel to food to merchandise, is carried to market by sea, and bribery in ports adds hundreds of millions of dollars each year in unofficial import taxes and added costs of cargo and ship fuel, which in turn raise transport costs, insurance rates, and sticker prices by more than 10 percent.

There are also geopolitical costs to the world’s vast “phantom fleet” of purloined ships, which are virtually impossible to track as they are used to carry out a broad array of crimes. In Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, for example, phantom vessels are used to transport fighters tied to Islamic militant groups, and they were used in 2012 by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai. In Iran and Iraq, phantom ships have been popular for circumventing international oil or weapons embargoes. Elsewhere they are typically used for other purposes: in Southeast Asia, human trafficking, piracy, and illegal fishing; in the Caribbean, smuggling guns and drugs; and off the coast of West Africa, transporting illegal bunker.

Ship sales are also more anonymous and final than sales of other types of property. This is one reason why ship purchases are a popular method for laundering money and dumping assets that corrupt individuals or corporations don’t want governments to find and tax. Because a ship may be bought in one country, flagged to another, and parked in a third, it becomes difficult for countries to trace the origins of the money invested in a ship.

The anonymity of ship trading also makes stealing easier. If the rightful owner can catch up with a stolen painting, car, or artifact at an auction, he can make a claim and, in many cases, repossess his property. Such redress is far more difficult under international maritime law. A vessel sold at a judicial auction is deemed in industry parlance to have had its “face washed” clean of liens and other previous debts, including mortgages. Police struggle to chase stolen ships. In most cases, marine authorities can pursue, intercept, board, and seize a foreign-flagged ship on the high seas only if the pursuit started in the authorities’ territorial waters and they kept the fleeing vessel in visual contact the entire time. In many courts of law, visual contact means neither satellite nor radar observation but actual line of sight with the human eye. From the bridge of a ship, that’s usually about seven miles in clear weather.

If a chase starts on the high seas, it’s even more fraught. Except under special circumstances, a ship may only be stopped in international waters by a warship of its own flag or with permission granted from the fleeing ship’s flag state. Liberia, the country with the most vessels sailing under its flag—more than 4100—has no warships. The country with the second most, Panama, does not routinely operate warships beyond its own coast. Therein lies the beauty of international ship thievery: crooks only have to run if someone’s chasing them, and that’s rarely the case.

Tens of thousands of vessels, from minuscule to massive, are stolen around the world each year. Finding them is far more difficult than it might seem. Once it’s on the move, a stolen ship can travel thousands of miles in under a week. Investigators post reward notices, comb sale listings, and contact port officials. Seeking clues, they publish fake job advertisements and call on the relatives, ex-wives, or jilted girlfriends of the ship’s former crew. Sometimes, they send up planes, hire speedboats, and alert shipping companies to keep watch. These tactics rarely work. Unlike pilfered cars, which tend to stay in the country where they’re taken, and planes, which are tracked more closely because of terrorism fears, stolen ships are among the toughest types of property to recover. Even domestic recoveries of boats in the United States are difficult because the relevant databases are not well connected across states and they have less information than the ones dedicated to automobiles.

he tried to avoid recovering stolen vessels while they were in “unfriendly” ports because the criminals who took them tended to have friends in the local government. As an alternative, he cited an example where his men posed as drug enforcement agents to board a suspect ship on the high seas. Dalby’s team secretly placed a tracker on the vessel and, after disembarking, waited for it to enter Indonesian waters, where he had friends in law enforcement who were willing to arrest it. Devising a plan for sneaking a ship out of port typically starts with surveillance, several repo men told me. Watch long enough and there is almost always a thirty-minute block each day, typically during the guards’ shift change, when the vessel is unmanned. Most extraction teams need less than fifteen minutes to board a vessel, the repo men said. But getting it out of port takes longer because larger ships have engines that need half an hour or more to warm up. For surreptitious boarding, repo men said that they need little more than a headlamp and a knotted rope attached to a grappling hook. It’s helpful to wrap this metal hook with a cloth to muffle the clank when it lands on the ship’s metal railing, one of the repo men added.

Whenever possible, Hardberger preferred to talk his way on board, using the collection of fake uniforms and official-sounding business cards he maintains. Among them: “Port Inspector,” “Proctor in Admiralty,” “Marine Surveyor,” “Internal Auditor,” and “Buyer’s Representative.” If he could win himself a formal tour from the ship’s crew, Hardberger wears glasses with a built-in video camera. He also leaves a tape recorder on the bridge in some corner where it will go unnoticed so he can capture what officers say when he is not in the room, and then he picks it up at the end of his tour. To verify the identity of the ship, he checks the engine serial number, which thieves often forget to remove. If he can get private access to the engine room, Hardberger carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull where the ship’s original or “build” name has often been pried off. The shadow of the name still shows up because welding it off changes the metal’s valence, which makes the magnetic powder adhere differently.

Sometimes getting a ship out of port requires a clever diversion. Repo men hire local politicians to close nearby roads, street youth to set alley fires, or bar owners to host grand parties on the opposite side of town. Hardberger said the worst thing he had ever done to get a guard off a ship was to pay someone to lie to him, saying the guard’s mother had just been hospitalized. More often, he said, he preferred to hire prostitutes. “They’re the best actors because they have a lifetime of practice,” he observed.

Manning agencies like Step Up Marine handle everything from paychecks and plane tickets to port fees and passports. These agencies are also poorly regulated and frequently abusive. When mariners get trafficked—transported from job to job against their will, often driven by debt, coercion, or scams—manning agencies are often to blame. Taking that blame is part of their job, in fact. These firms provide ship operators plausible deniability and easy deflection of responsibility—an even more valuable role than the logistical support they offer. Indeed, manning agencies take the blame but are rarely held accountable because they tend to be in places far away from where the workers live and from where the abuses occur.

If Andrade’s experience was like that of the other Filipino men from his village whom I interviewed, he was probably told when he arrived at the Step Up Marine office in Singapore that a mistake had been made and that his pay would be less than half of what he had been promised. Forget that original quote of $500 per month. The new salary was $200 per month, which would shrink even further when the company factored in “necessary deductions.

Half a dozen other men from Andrade’s village—who prosecutors said were also recruited by Step Up Marine—described how they were required to sign a new contract, which typically stipulated a three-year binding commitment. The contract also specified that there would be no overtime, no sick leave, eighteen- to twenty-hour workdays, six-day workweeks, and a $50 monthly food deduction and that captains were granted full discretion over reassigning crew members to alternate ships. Wages were to be paid not monthly to families but in full only after completion of the contract, a practice that is illegal in most countries.

The document noted that to collect their wages, crew members had to fly back to Singapore at their own expense.

Over the past decade, no country has exported more seafarers annually than the Philippines, which provided roughly a quarter of the crews on merchant ships globally, despite comprising less than 2 percent of the world’s population. By 2017, the Philippines was sending roughly a million workers—about 10 percent of its population—abroad annually.  These workers, who collectively sent more than $20 billion a year on average back home, were in high demand because many spoke English, they tended to be better educated than workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India, and they had a reputation for being compliant.

if a Filipino housekeeper in Kuwait was raped by her employer, she could go to the Philippine embassy for help. “At sea, on the other hand,” he said, “there are no embassies.

the Obama administration realized that the U.S. government had no central governing body to make decisions about how to chart and manage this offshore territory. Altering this reality posed a threat to the drilling and fishing industries, which lobbied aggressively against the federal efforts to exert more control over this region, as they had in the past. These industries viewed mapping the oceans as a precursor to zoning them, which would likely lead to greater limits on the industries’ reach. In April 2017, President Trump revoked Obama’s executive order.

Over the past decade, roughly half the murders of environmentalists worldwide took place in Brazil.

Further destruction awaits the bycatch in trawling. Fishing crews discard much of what they net because there’s no market for the fish or because the fish are simply too small or too squashed. In 2008, Greenpeace set up its sites on the North Sea. To stop a fleet of German trawlers, Greenpeace spent months strategically placing more than a hundred stone boulders on the ocean floor near Germany around the perimeter of the Sylt Outer Reef, which the fishermen were rapidly leveling. In port, everyone knew what Greenpeace was up to (it’s tough to hide objects that huge), but as is often the case with maritime matters, it wasn’t clear whether its actions were illegal. So, no one knew whether and how to intervene and stop it. Weighing a little over three tons each, the boulders were roughly the size of a two-door refrigerator—big enough to destroy trawlers’ nets if they were dragged over the boulders. Using cranes, Greenpeace lifted each, one by one, and dropped them to the seafloor in designated spots. Hoping to stop the trawling, not to destroy the fishermen’s expensive nets, Greenpeace provided local authorities and fishing boat captains with updated charts, showing where it was placing the boulders. By 2011, Greenpeace was using the same tactic in the North Sea off the coast of Sweden.

Advances in drilling technology have made previously untouchable Arctic reserves accessible, and countries are fighting over rights to tap these resources. Drilling occurs now so far offshore that rigs can no longer be anchored to the seabed because it is too deep to be practical. Instead, they are held in place by propellers, each as big as a school bus. Their locations far from shore mean these drilling rigs are no longer fully subject to the territorial laws of the countries for which they’re drilling.

Barents Sea, off the north coast of Russia and Finland. Statoil, the partly state-run Norwegian oil company, had parked a drilling rig called the Songa Enabler in the Korpfjell oil field there. Like the drilling planned off the coast of Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon River, the project near Norway represented a new level of risk-taking by the oil industry. No company had ever tried to drill this far north into the Arctic. Statoil’s well was even more controversial because it was located in international waters, over 258 miles north of mainland Norway. Located in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Russia and Finland, an oil-drilling rig called the Songa Enabler sits in international waters, the farthest north incursion into Arctic waters by a drilling company.

Despite its reputation for having especially protective environmental policies, Norway depended on oil and gas production for roughly 40 percent of its export revenue, and it wasn’t about to give up a significant portion of that to placate some pesky environmental group.

Stella Maris offers social services to seafarers and their families. I was in Songkhla because the social workers at Stella Maris said they would help me meet victims of trafficking and introduce me to the officials charged with investigating those abuses. As I waited to meet Long, I spent hours at the Stella Maris office poring through a binder full of case files. It was a horrifying catalog of cruel abuses, torture, and murder at sea. In page after page, in photographs and scribbled notes, the documents described the sick being cast overboard, the defiant beheaded, and the insubordinate sealed for days below deck in a dark, fetid fishing hold.

Surviving these ordeals often depended upon chance encounters with altruistic strangers who contacted Stella Maris or other groups involved in the clandestine rescue of sea slaves, part of a mariners’ underground railroad stretching through Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand.

Som Nang had worked on a type of boat known as a mother ship. Carrying everything from fuel and extra food to spare nets and replacement labor, these lumbering vessels, often over a hundred feet long, functioned as the Walmarts of the ocean—floating, all-purpose resupply stores. The same kind of boat delivered Long to captivity and subsequently rescued him as well. Mother ships were the reason slow-moving trawlers could fish more than fifteen hundred miles from land. They allowed fishermen to stay out at sea for months or years and still get their catch cleaned, canned, and shipped to American shelves less than a week after netting.

Once a load of fish was transferred to a mother ship, it was combined with other catch below deck in cavernous refrigerators, and there was almost no way for port authorities to determine its provenance. It became virtually impossible to know whether it was caught legally by paid fishermen or poached illegally by shackled migrants.

During his several years of captivity in the Thai fishing fleet, Lang Long was shackled by the neck and sold between fishing boats.

the catch per unit effort, or CPUE, is an indirect measure of the abundance or scarcity of a target species. In both the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, on Thailand’s western side, the CPUE on fishing boats fell by more than 86 percent between the mid-1960s and the early years of the twenty-first century, making Thai waters among the most overfished on the planet. Even though there were fewer fish to catch, Thai boats were catching more, partly by traveling to more distant waters.

Globally, fishing boats had to venture farther just to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago.

Most deep-sea fishing ships around the world work on commission. “Crews only get paid if we catch enough,” Tang explained. This means tensions run high on the boats, and captains fear their crews as intensely as they drive them. Language and cultural barriers add further divisions; most boats have three Thai officers (the captain, the engineer, and the first mate), while the rest are foreign migrants

Shorthanded at the eleventh hour, captains sometimes took desperate measures. “That’s when they just snatch people,” one captain explained to me with remarkable candor, referring to cases where workers were drugged or kidnapped and forcefully put on boats.

Of all the evil things I saw while reporting for this book, the karaoke bars in Ranong were perhaps the most sinister. Not only did these brokers and bar owners use one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, but the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children. When I finally left Ranong, I hoped never to return.

In Kota Kinabalu, I met a thirty-eight-year-old Cambodian deckhand named Pak who said that during his year of captivity on a fishing boat he had been temporarily dropped off for several weeks on what he and other migrants called a “prison island.” One of thousands of mostly uninhabited atolls in the South China Sea, it was a place where fishing captains routinely disembarked captive workers, sometimes for weeks, while their vessels were taken to port for repair. Typically, the captain would leave the crew with a guard who was equipped with water, canned goods, and means to fish. The guard ensured that the men were fed and that none of them tried to leave with another boat. Pak did not know the name of the atoll where he was left, but he said there were other crews there, being sold between boats or waiting for their next deployment.

A Thai man whom she helped return home from an Indonesian island called Ambon. He had fled a ship and survived in the woods for nearly a year by eating dogs and cats that he captured at night from villages.

Cruise liner pollution

Keays was on his second stint on the ship, which was 23 miles from its destination in Southampton, England, when he went exploring in the engine room. A cavernous three-story maze of tangled metal with massive shiny pipes big enough that a small child could crawl through them, the engine room was located in the bowels of the ship and staffed by four dozen men who were surrounded by dozens of pulsing machines and glowing monitors. Venturing into an unfamiliar section where he did not typically work, Keays saw something that swiftly soured his exuberance over his new job: an illegal device known in the industry as a magic pipe. From his marine studies in Glasgow, Keays knew exactly what he was looking at. Several feet long, the pipe stretched from a nozzle on a carbon filter pump to a water tank. Its magic trick? Making the ship’s used oil and other nasty liquids disappear. Rather than storing the highly toxic effluent and unloading it at port, as the ship was legally required to do, the pipe was secretly flushing the waste into the ocean, saving the ship’s owner, Carnival Corporation, millions of dollars in disposal fees and port delays.

Cruise liners also produce millions of gallons of oily water. This is the runoff of lubricants and leaks that drip from the ship’s many diesel generators, air compressors, main propulsion engines, and other machines and that drain into the ship’s bilge tanks. Other liquid wastes accumulate, too. “Black water” refers to sewage from hundreds of toilets flushing day in and day out. “Gray water” comes from washing dishes and clothing for the thousands of passengers aboard, or from the slimy food scraps and grease from the ship galleys and restaurants. Some of these liquids can be released into the ocean after light treatment, but ship engineers are responsible for ensuring that none of the nastiest fluids get discharged. Sometimes, though, these engineers and their companies resort to magic pipes to make those fluids disappear.

In subsequent court papers, Carnival called the Caribbean Princess an isolated case. But oil logs from the company’s other ships, also disclosed in court records, indicated that oil dumping was a widespread practice and that on occasion engineers on other Carnival ships tricked the monitoring equipment by pulling in the same volume of salt water to replace the liquids they dumped.

On the Caribbean Princess, the company had installed three separate machines to monitor and collect waste oil, well beyond what was required by law. Carnival often pointed to the additional machines as proof of its commitment to environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, onboard engineers had devised systems to bypass each of the three monitors. After discovering these ruses, federal prosecutors wrote that Carnival, whose income in 2016 was roughly $2.7 billion, had a “high consciousness of guilt.” In 2016, a federal judge levied a $40 million fine against the company, the largest penalty of its type in nautical history.

A hundred years ago, what happened on the Caribbean Princess would have been a nonissue, and the idea of fines might have been laughable. The practice of ships dumping oil and other waste at sea was perfectly legal for most of maritime history. And dump we did. After World War II, Russia, the U.K., and the United States loaded about a million tons of unexploded mustard gas bombs and other chemical munitions onto ships, which were dispatched offshore to scuttle the matériel overboard.

Other waste disposal

More than a dozen countries, including the United States, the U.K., and the Soviet Union, dumped nuclear sludge and unwanted reactors, several still containing their radioactive fuel, into the Arctic, the North Atlantic, and the Pacific Oceans. The practice was only banned in 1993, at which point the remaining business shifted to an underworld of global waste traders operating in the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and off the coast of Africa. The most infamous of these syndicates was the ‘Ndrangheta, a criminal organization from Calabria, Italy, which sank hundreds of drums of radioactive waste in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Somalia, according to criminal prosecutors and journalists who investigated the matter.

Airborne pollution is a less visible but even more destructive form of ocean dumping. Over the past two centuries, the concentration of mercury in the top three hundred feet of the oceans has tripled because of human activity, especially the burning of coal. Likewise, carbon dioxide levels in the air have risen about 25% since 1958. A great deal of this extra carbon dioxide has dissolved in the oceans, thereby dangerously spiking carbon levels. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create carbonic acid and perilously high acidity levels across the world’s oceans.

Many governments give big industries permission to use the ocean for waste disposal on a grand scale. Off the southwest coast of Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province near Bali, for example, a four-foot-diameter pipe runs from the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine into the Indian Ocean. The pipe spews 160,000 tons a day of a toxic sludge, consisting of heavy metals and pulverized mine cuttings, called tailings, into the ocean. At least sixteen mines in eight countries, including Papua New Guinea and Norway, also get rid of mine waste by dumping it offshore.

Ships also dump inordinate amounts of human sewage. In small quantities, dilution does indeed work. But some modern cruise ships now carry thousands of people and flush more untreated waste into the sea than is handled by small-town sewage plants. In addition to this nitrogen-rich sludge from ships, urban sewers spew even larger amounts of toxic runoff into the sea, and farms produce still more in the form of animal manure and chemical fertilizers. Together, this fecund waste spawns red tides and other harmful algal blooms, some larger than California, which rob oxygen from the water, kill sea life, and sicken seafood consumers.

Consider the fate of offshore oil platforms once they reach retirement age. By 2020, thousands of these platforms, many of them constructed during a global building boom in the 1980s, will have to be decommissioned. Countries will have to decide whether to sink, remove, or repurpose them.

Some ideas of how to use these aging behemoths include high-security super-max prisons accessible only by boat, private luxury homes with 360-degree ocean views, deepwater scuba schools, fish farms, and windmill stations. The option that oil and gas companies generally prefer, because it’s cheapest, is to sink the platforms. Many scientists back this approach, too, arguing that it creates underwater marine habitats where fish can hide and mate and provides a foundation for the growth of coral reefs. Scientists also argue this solution is less expensive and carbon intensive than removing the platforms. Just renting the tugboat to tow a rig to shore for scrapping can cost more than $500,000 a day.

The argument against repurposing the platforms—for scuba hotels, fish farms, solar platforms, or anything else—was that the metal on these structures, some as long and wide as a football field, corrodes and leaches dangerous pollution over time. Sinking the rigs so that they could become scaffolding for reefs was an equally bad idea, he contended. Collapsing the rigs onto the seafloor does not actually promote aquatic life; it just attracts fish, which makes them easier capture, he said.

Renewable-energy firms have started planning wind farms, wave-energy converters, and floating solar panels in international waters. Who will be responsible for cleaning up the contraptions if they do not work, if their companies go bankrupt, or when they become obsolete, like the oil platforms in Malaysia?

there will likely be more controversial technological experiments at sea beyond the reach of most governments

The ocean may be vast, blue, and deep, but it’s still being used as a junkyard.

For larger cruise ships, the cost of properly disposing waste onshore can be more than $150,000 per year.  The cruise industry is a lucrative business. With more than 450 large ships globally, the international cruise line industry generates roughly $117 billion of revenue annually. It employs more than a million workers, who cater to nearly twenty-five million customers a year. With any enterprise on that scale, lawbreaking is inevitable. Dumping oil is by no means the only crime that occurs on these ships.

I interviewed a former firefighter who used to work on large cruise liners. He recounted how eastern European women, hired to be servers in the ship’s restaurants, were often expected to double as prostitutes for passengers and staff. If these women wanted to switch shifts or bump up to a restaurant with better tips, they had to have sex with certain managers or officers, he said. The ships had strict dress codes for staff, and the in-house laundering services functioned like an extortion racket, he explained. If you didn’t pay dues to a certain someone, parts of your uniform went missing or came back with mysterious stains on them, which would get you docked or reprimanded. Such black-market services and payoffs are standard fare in prisons,

I was curious about the country’s rare no-tolerance policy that banned all foreign boats from fishing in its waters. Other countries like New Zealand banned foreign boats from fishing in their national waters, but Indonesia was taking the extra step of sinking or blowing up the ones that it caught breaking this law.

Having arrested and sunk dozens of illegal ships since he started working with the ministry in 2000, Samson was a legend among the several hundred marine officers who worked on the thirty ships in Indonesia’s fisheries fleet. Samson patrolled the most crime-ridden outer edge of Indonesian waters, an area with bigger and more violent poacher ships than those encountered nearer to the Indonesian coast.

Built in 2005, the Macan was 117 feet long and relatively fast for its size, with a maximum speed of twenty-five knots. Most of the fishing boats Samson chased had a top speed of about eighteen knots. The Chinese boats were the exception. Not only could the bigger ones reach thirty knots, but their captains were more aggressive and known to ram their adversaries, including foreign military or police ships. This was especially worrisome for Samson because the Macan was fiberglass, rather than having a steel hull, and therefore easier to sink. The Macan tried to make up for this Achilles’ heel by being better armed than most other Indonesian fishery boats. Its forward deck had a mount for a formidable 12.7 mm deck gun, and its crew carried submachine guns.

The one big difference was that Palau’s fisheries force had one patrol boat; Indonesia had thirty. The size of Indonesia’s enforcement effort meant that Pudjiastuti’s forces were making a lot of arrests—several hundred boats per year, which was creating logistical difficulties, like how to handle the thousands of men being removed from these boats.

Not unlike frontiers on land, border zones at sea were notoriously dodgy places. The ones with three-way intersections were especially attractive to fish poachers, human smugglers, gunrunners, and sellers of illegal bunker fuel because they knew that if they were chased by authorities from one country, they could flee in two other directions—a pickpocket’s hideout with easy exits.

Far from comprehensive, the database offered a cursory snapshot of lawlessness at sea. Typically, the death tolls captured in the records were murky because follow-up investigations were rare and reports often lacked details. On land, police can dig up graves to investigate murders. Offshore, “the dead stay gone,” as one investigator said. The database showed, however, that in 2014, the latest year for which data was available, more than 5,200 seafarers were attacked by pirates and robbers, and more than five hundred were taken hostage in three regions alone—the western Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Guinea, and Southeast Asia. The culprits were a diverse cast of characters: rubber-skiff pirates armed with rocket-propelled grenades, night-stalking fuel thieves, and slash-and-dash bandits wielding machetes. Others used deception. Hijackers masqueraded as marine police, human traffickers posed as fishermen, and security guards moonlighted as arms dealers. I could wrap my head around most of these accounts, but some were more difficult to parse. Victims

The “team leaders” on the Resolution—most of them American, British, or South African military veterans—explained to me why more seasoned guards were important and what made gun battles at sea so different from those on land. Maritime fighting was tactically different from land combat and experience was crucial. “Between fight or flight, out here there’s just fight,” said Cameron Mouat, a guard working aboard the Resolution. There was no place to hide, no falling back, no air support, no ammunition drops. Targets were almost always fast moving. Aim was shifty because of waves. Some ships were the length of several football fields—too big, these guards contended, for a two- or three-man security detail to handle, especially when attackers arrived in multiple boats and from different directions. It had also become extremely difficult to discern what was a threat and what was not. Automatic weapons—formerly a pirates’ telltale sign—were now commonplace at sea, found on virtually all boats traversing dangerous waters, they said. Smugglers, with no intention of attacking, routinely nestled close to larger merchant ships to hide in their radar shadow and avoid being detected by coastal authorities. Innocent fishing boats also sometimes tucked behind larger ships because they churned up sea-bottom sediment that attracted fish.

“The concern isn’t just whether a new guard will misjudge or panic and fire too soon,” explained a South African guard. “It’s also whether he will shoot soon enough.” If guards hesitate too long, he said, they miss the chance to fire warning shots, flares, or water cannons or incapacitate an approaching boat’s engine. By the time you shoot in such cases, he said, the only option left is “kill shots.

Mostly, the guards complained of boredom. Though intangible, this boredom had weight, and the longer it sat on the men, the more it crushed them. Nowhere was it heavier than on these armories. Partly that was because these ships were anchored. Having a destination and being in motion lightens the pressure of time and waiting. There was also less social cohesion among armory guards compared with most ship crews. The guards came from different security teams, countries, and cultures, which heightened their skepticism of each other and led to testosterone-steeped displays of macho gruffness.

Complicating matters further, the shipping industry reacted in its own way, and the economics of that response was at times perverse. For example, freight companies and their insurers began imposing piracy fees—upwards of $23 per standard shipping container—to cover additional security costs, which on bigger ships could mean a quarter of a million dollars per trip. Even factoring in the cost of private guards and the occasional multimillion-dollar ransom payouts exacted by pirates, shipping companies and crews were sometimes profiting from the threat of Somali piracy.

In the several years after Thailand imposed stricter rules on its overseas fleet, every one of the country’s fifty-four long-haul fishing ships dropped its Thai flag, and most of them switched to Oman, Iran, Myanmar, or elsewhere.

After World War II, the country was struggling through postwar poverty, and whale meat became a crucial part of the Japanese diet, including as a staple in school lunch programs, because it was a cheap source of protein. By 1958, whaling supplied a third of all meat consumed in Japan.

I pointed out that Norway annually catches more whales than Iceland and Japan combined. “Why not focus on them?” I asked. Sea Shepherd does not interfere with other countries because they whale only in their national waters, Meyerson said. The Japanese are the only ones who still whale in distant, international waters. “And that’s where no one is policing but us,” he added.

Antarctica is also a feeding ground where everyone seems to be chasing someone else’s meal. While the Japanese hunt the whales and Sea Shepherd tries to block them, the whales track the ships hunting longline toothfish. In a phenomenon known as depredation, whales routinely shadow these boats, sometimes for hundreds of miles, waiting for their lines to fill with fish. When captains begin retrieving their catch, the churning of the winch motor that tugs the fishing line makes a distinctive sound. This sound serves as an underwater dinner bell for the whales. Before crews can pull the fish on board, the whales attack the lines, stripping them clean. On a clear day, when sound underwater travels farthest, whales can hear this dinner bell from more than fifteen miles away.

Whales stalk long-liners elsewhere, too, including off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Chile, Australia, and Hawaii. In the western Gulf of Alaska in 2011 and 2012, killer whale depredation cost each vessel $980 per day in terms of additional fuel, crew food, and the opportunity cost of lost time, according to a study of six longline boats. The problem got worse in Alaska in the 1990s, after fishery authorities lengthened the fishing season from two weeks to eight months.

The authorities’ goal in extending the fishing season had been to discourage boat captains from taking dangerous risks as they tried to beat the weather and race the clock. But an unintended consequence of the policy was that by having boats in the water for longer, the likelihood of overlap between the whales and these boats went up. It also gave whales the time to hone their skills and pin down exactly when and how to best hijack the long-liners. “So far,” Tixier said, “we haven’t found an effective way to outsmart the whales.

A grown whale can scrape all the fish from a five-mile line in under an hour. To avoid snaring their own mouths, the whales bite off the fish just below the hooks. Sometimes all that’s left behind, he said, are fish lips dangling from the lines. More experienced whales bite the line, shaking loose the fish so they can eat them whole.  On an unlucky day, a single toothfish boat can be “assaulted” by a pack with as many as a dozen sperm whales and twenty killer whales.

There are no clear rules on how fishing boats are supposed to handle depredation. Some companies have used decoy boats to trick the whales. Others blast heavy metal music to annoy them. Some fishing captains have tried waiting the whales out, not pulling in their lines until the whales decide to leave. Other captains attach satellite devices to serial offenders to avoid them. Attempting to outrun the attackers tends to be futile because they’re too fast. When pursued by whales, some fishermen deliberately go near other boats, hoping to divert their pursuers.

Orcas are by far the worst, Infante told me, explaining that they are smarter and more persistent. Also known as killer whales, orcas are the largest apex predators on earth,

Toro-Cortés explained that in the past fishing boat captains repelled depredating whales using rifles, harpoons, and dynamite, as well as “cracker shells” and “seal bombs,” which resemble M-80 firecrackers. One study estimated that lethal responses to the whales were so common in the mid-1990s near the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean that it led to a near 70 percent reduction in the size of the killer whale population there.

Over the past decade, the krill-fishing industry has begun intensively targeting the exact locations where whales migrate to eat these animals—near the ice and continental shelves along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Over the past forty years, populations of adult Antarctic krill have declined by 70 to 80 percent in those areas, studies have shown. Climate change is shrinking the pack ice where krill hide from predators and feed on plankton. Demand for krill has increased over the past decade, with catches growing 40 percent between 2010 and 2016, as the creatures are ground into fish meal to provide protein for pigs and chickens. Oils squeezed from krill are also popular as nutritional supplements, though their health benefits are still in question.

Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise hoped to gather evidence that the Chilean and Argentinian governments needed to support their application to create a 172,000-square-mile protected area in these waters.

To create the Antarctic marine protected area, the team of scientists would have to sway the countries that fish most heavily for krill—especially Norway, China, Russia, and South Korea. In recent years, these krill ships have drastically improved their efficiency using a newly developed method called “continuous fishing,” which uses long, cylindrical nets attached to underwater vacuums that suck the massive swarms on board.

The Australians argued that Japan’s so-called scientific whaling program was an unlawful ruse. Among the pieces of evidence the Australians presented supporting their allegation was that large amounts of the meat from the whales ended up in Japanese restaurants