The Colombo Bay [Hardcover]

Richard Pollak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2003

In the face of killer storms, fires, piracy, and terrorism, container ships the length of city blocks and more than a dozen stories high carry 90 percent of the worlds trade. This is an account of one ship's voyage and of the sailors who daily risk their lives to deliver six million containers a year to United States ports alone. Inside these twenty-foot and forty-foot steel boxes are the thousands of imports -- from chinos and Game Boys to garlic and frozen shrimp -- without which North America's consumer society would collapse.

To explore this little-known and dangerous universe of modern seafaring, Richard Pollak joined the Colombo Bay in Hong Kong and over the next five weeks sailed with her and her 3,500 containers across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. En route, this mammoth vessel called at Singapore and Colombo, passed through the Suez Canal (toll: $250,000), then put in at Malta and Halifax before tangling with Hurricane Karen on the two-day run to New York. Here is the story of the ship's unheralded twenty-four-man company; of the unflappable British captain, Peter Davies, a veteran of four decades at sea; of Federico Castrojas, who like the rest of the hard-working Filipino crew must daily confront the loneliness of being away from his family for nine months at a stretch; of Simon Westall, the twenty-one-year-old third mate, who reveals what it is like to be gay in the broad-shouldered world of the merchant service.

It is a world where pirates in the Malacca Strait sneak up behind ships at night in fast power boats, then clamber aboard and either rob the unarmed sailors at gunpoint and escape into the dark or throw the crew into the sea and hijack the ship, plundering her cargo and sometimes repainting her and setting out to do business under another name and flag. It is a world where families desperate to get to the United States or Europe pay thousands of dollars to the Chinese Snakeheads and other criminal gangs, who secrete these wretched migrants in stifling containers; after a week or more at sea these stowaways arrive in the Promised Land either starving or dead.

Pollak sailed on September 13, 2001, into a changed world, on one of 7,000 container ships whose millions of uninspected boxes suddenly had become potential Trojan horses in which terrorists could transport weapons of mass destruction into the heart of the United States.

Throughout his riveting narrative, Pollak interweaves the insights of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, whose masterful portrayals of seafaring make the voyage of the Colombo Bay a dramatic reminder of what a hard and rarely reported life merchant seamen have always led out on the "unhooped oceans of this planet."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Container ships lack the literary appeal of other, more romantic vessels, such as pirate ships and sail boats, and as a result their stories aren't often told. But as Richard Pollak demonstrates in The Colombo Bay, there's plenty to talk about. After all, a quick glance around your living room probably reveals numerous items imported from overseas and container ships are how they got to you. In 2001, after securing passage as an observer aboard a massive container ship bound from Hong Kong to New York via the Suez Canal, Pollak was just about to begin his journey when the 9/11 attacks struck, throwing the world into tremendous uncertainty. Pollak chose to go ahead with the trip but his trepidation serves as an appropriate undercurrent to the uncertainty that the crews of these ships face every day. Though the ships are enormous and strong, they live under a constant cloud of potential disaster. Piracy, far from being the stuff of old movies, is very much alive in the modern world, often with container ships being the victims. Storms, the threat of running aground, stowaways, and the possibility of being an unwitting accomplice to global terrorism are always top of mind for the people operating these massive, and massively important, pieces of machinery. Pollak approaches his journey with a dogged curiosity and a refreshing dash of naïveté that, combined with his skilled storytelling, make for a compelling read. He finds the accommodations more civilized than one might expect from such a utilitarian craft and a crew that, while they are used to the hardships of nautical life, are real people trying to cope with a profession that keeps them from their families for months at a time. Aside from a near miss with Hurricane Karen off the North American coast, nothing much dramatic happens during Pollak's ride on the Colombo Bay. But that inactivity, coupled with the constant possibility of palpable danger, provides an accurate depiction of life aboard a container ship. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly

Container ships are the pack mules of the global marketplace. Their role is crucial, if unglamorous, and Pollak's exceptional piece of literary journalism should make readers appreciate the mostly monotonous, sometimes dangerous work of these ships and their crews. Pollak arranged to board the Colombo Bay on one of its regular westbound trips out of Hong Kong in the fall of 2001. The ship's five-week itinerary included calls at several ports in South Asia before passage through the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic to New York. Pollak, a contributing editor at the Nation, learned of the 9/11 attacks just before he boarded and considered canceling his trip, but he and the ship sailed on. Had he held exclusively to a first-person travelogue, Pollak still might have produced a worthy book, but to his readers' benefit, he weaves in profiles of the officers and crew, facts about the history of merchant shipping since antiquity and lore about the romance of seafaring from Conrad and Melville. Many of the ports and passages (Singapore; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Aden, Yemen) already had a history with ships, pirates, smuggling and terrorism. Because the ship sailed so soon after 9/11, the calls at these ports were anything but routine, allowing Pollak to convey with greater urgency both the vitality and vulnerability of cargo shipping. To balance the somber realities, there are irony and humor, not to mention technical descriptions and analysis to rival the best of John McPhee.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (December 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074320073X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743200738
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,702,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Modern High Seas Adventure, April 11, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Colombo Bay (Hardcover)

Richard Pollak, a writer with no previous nautical bent, got interested in the marine shipping business for no particular reason except curiosity. A friend became a vice president at P & O Nedlloyd which has a fleet of container ships sailing all over the world, and Pollak asked to book passage in one of them. He left for Hong Kong to board The _Colombo Bay_ carrying a landlubber's baggage including books by Conrad and Melville, CDs of music by Rossini and by Sondheim, and the sort of innocence we all had on 10 September 2001. In _The Colombo Bay_ (Simon & Schuster), Pollak relates how he was asleep in his hotel in Hong Kong and his family was in New York when the World Trade Center towers fell. His family was all right, but the voyage and book project that he had so looked forward to now appeared "indulgent and worse, irrelevant." He wanted to go home, but his wife talked him out of it, and he shipped out. It is good that he did. He didn't know much about the shipping industry when he started, and he learned a lot, and shares it with good humor and the sort of careful explication one expects in, say, a book by John McPhee.

Most of the rest of us are ignorant about container shipping, and we shouldn't be. It affects us all. Almost undoubtedly in the very clothes you are wearing are plenty of items that came by container ship, and you own plenty of similar goods all around your house from Asia and the rest of the world. The containers keep the ships at sea, rather than spending time loading and unloading in port. They have to be stowed by computer, to keep the ship balanced, to keep the ones that will be offloaded soon near the top, to keep dangerous contents separated, and so on. The work is dangerous, and as Pollak considers during the weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the dangers have gotten greater. "Flags of Convenience" vessels are registered in countries with minimal shipping industry, and also minimal attention to maintenance, safety, and professional manning. Such vessels would be easy targets for terrorists who wish to tamper with the cargo, or slip a dirty bomb into the thousands of tons of commercial goods. There is a simple threat of piracy, which actually changes some of the routing of Pollak's ship. There are no firearms aboard the ship, reflecting the policy of most liner companies which oblige rather than confront boarded pirates.

Pollak has loaded his narrative with facts. The sludge residue from the burned ship's oil used to be a nuisance that had to be cleaned out periodically, but now such removal is done by specialists who use the sludge in such alchemy as cracking fuels. Pollak feeds a pair of crows that have mistakenly boarded the ship in Colombo, and unable to go anywhere else, stay on for 4,000 miles to Suez. Among the goods carried by the ship are cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, which seem to be an internationally accepted present for, say, quarantine officials who need to be persuaded to hurry about their business and be off. Pollok's book, though, is also intensely personal. He had satisfying friendships with the men on board. He includes conversations and e-mail from those anguished days as he and his family try to understand what has overtaken the world. He has many surprisingly apt quotations from his on-board reading of Melville and Conrad. He has proper reflections on how merchant shipping, moving everything everywhere, improves the world's standard of living, and that globalization is in such a way not only inevitable but good. It is a literally vital industry, remaking the world, but is still an invisible one to most of us. It is worth learning about, and here is a thumping good book by a curious and intelligent tourist to do the job.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Adventures in Shipping, January 28, 2004

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Colombo Bay (Hardcover)

Richard Pollak's new book is a gripping tale of the sea mostly worthy of Conrad and Melville. Pollak rode on the 'Colombo Bay', a modern containerized freighter owned by P&O Nedlloyd, the second biggest shipping concern in the world for a five week voyage halfway around the world. Starting the day after the 9/11 attacks in Hong Kong, and eventually traveling the long way around the world back to his home in New York, Pollak tells readers of the drudgery and excitement that go hand in hand on one of these mammoth vessels.

During the course of the voyage he talks with all crew members (as well as with many other characters of all types he meets in port) and relates not only what they say, but what their real points of view are, generally attempting to tell a story from both sides. He not only describes who the sailors are, but their backgrounds and aspirations. He makes the point repeatedly, for instance, that Filipino sailors are prized by shipping companies for three fundamental reasons: they are good workers; they have good attitudes; and they work cheap. He then goes on to deliver the rest of the story from the Filipino sailors point of view, that though they may be making less than someone from the US or Europe would be making doing the same job, they are happy to have the job, as jobs in the Philippines are very scarce and they make more than ten times the average earnings of land based Filipinos. This same type of 'both sides of the story' journalism penetrates the vast majority (with exceptions) of the commentary in the book.

Pollak not only discusses the men but the machines involved, and gives us the basic history of containerized cargo. This may not sound very exciting, but it actually is quite interesting to anyone with a view for history and world balance of trade and power. After World War Two, the US led the world in cargo shipping, and now controls almost none. In fact the twenty largest carriers are now headquartered outside the US (even the United States Lines was sold to an Asian investor a few years ago.) The net result of this revolution in containerization has led to much more efficient shipping as well as a huge increase in imports to the US; after all the US has been a net importer since 1976, and now has a roughly $500 Billion trade deficit. Even politicians are beginning to see that this is a significant problem as the US has had a net outflow of jobs to the cheaper countries of the world, taking US dollars with them. Pollak tells this story generally quite well, though his personal biases begin to creep into the discussions. He can't seem to make up his mind if he is protectionist of US jobs (he is a self described liberal), or if he is a free trader (after he sees how much the jobs mean to the third world.) I am sure he isn't the only one with these quandaries, but the net effect here is one of a brilliant opening and discussion of the geopolitics of containerized shipping, with a muddled conclusion drawn from it.

He also discusses other threats to shipping, including piracy (a bigger deal than you probably realize), stowaways (shipping companies and crews can't win no matter what they do), fires (the biggest threat to a ship), and weather (still a huge factor in maritime accidents.)

My biggest problem in the book is when he digresses from discussing issues relevant to shipping. For instance he has a long discussion about how awful it is that the US is only sixth in the world in foreign aid on a per GDP basis, ignoring the facts that the US is by far first in the world overall (the other countries have vastly smaller economies), and he does not include the overwhelming first place expenses of military and peacekeeping operations worldwide (many of which (for instance, Somalia) came about during the more to his liking Clinton administration) that the US has. He also takes an opportunity to make personal statements about how inhumane it is that the US converted containers into shelters in Guantanamo Bay for Taliban detainees, and alleges with no evidence given that US troops were part of a massacre of Taliban prisoners in the spring of 2002, despite a rigorous investigation that found otherwise. This was brought into the book on the tangential basis that it is relevant because the prisoners were transported in containers. This is his book, and he can put anything he wants to in it, no matter how irrelevant it is. I recognize that as his right, but that is the sole reason that I downgraded this book to four stars. On the plus side, he does discuss the potential for container ships to be used as weapons by terrorists, and generally presents a good introduction to that subject (although even here he decries the prohibition of crewmen being able to leave the ship in the US without background checks, all the while talking about how awful 9/11 was.)

Overall, I think 'Colombo Bay' is a masterwork: it is taut, detailed, and human. I recommend it for anyone interested in the global economy, politics, or, obviously, shipping.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyed the shipping, could use less politics, May 5, 2004

By 

Tom Herbst (Redwood City, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Colombo Bay (Hardcover)

The portions of the book that are focused on the container ships and shipping are very good and interesting. Unfortunately the author decided to sprinkle political commentary that has little or nothing to do with commercial shipping throughout the book .

Don't know if it is appropriate to blame the author or his editor for these shortcomings. It is still a worthwhile read, but with a tigher focus on the claimed subject it could have been a excellent book.