Customer Reviews

The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship "break-up" by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation--on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. "Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died."

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships--instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs--in all forms--of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

See also, with reviews:
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness

This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship "break-up" by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation--on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. "Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died."

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships--instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs--in all forms--of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

I came to this book as a person who spent over a dozen years in the ocean shipping industry. For me, William Langewische's The Outlaw Sea is a fascinating look at a subject with which I am intimately familiar.

Langewiesche's gloomy, albeit accurate, portrayal of life at sea for the `low-end' portion of the ocean shipping industry is marked by excellent research and even better writing. The book has some of the hallmarks of the best fiction. It unfolds dramatically and keeps the reader's attention. Langewiesche's portrayal of the passenger ferry Estonia is heartbreaking. The author pulls no punches. At one point, Langewiesche discusses the horror of the loss of 852 lives on the Estonia, notes the worldwide outpouring of grief (particularly in Northern Europe) but then pauses to mention that ferry accidents such as this are a routine way of life in the third world (in Asia and Africa in particular) and yet these accidents barely attract our attention. The terse, matter-of-fact fashion in which Langewiesche imparts this information has a greater impact than it would have if set out in a dogmatic fashion.

Last, Langewiesche turns his eye to the ship breaking business in India. Vessels that have reached the end of their useful life (and as set out in the book a ship owner's definition of useful life is far longer than may be prudent for safe operation) are run onto beaches in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan where they are dismantled in a manner that endangers everyone involved. Life for these ship breakers is nasty, brutal and short. Langewiesche's portrayal is so well written that one can almost smell the befouled air that lingers over the work area. The author also sets out the political confrontation between the ship breakers and Greenpeace. It is an excellent overview of the conflict that arises between first-world political activists and third world throngs struggling to make a life for their families.

I only take two minor issues with the author. First, in discussing the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the coast of Spain, I think the author did not pay sufficient attention to the horrible decision of the Spanish government to deny safe harbor to the damaged vessel. It is mentioned in passing. The decision to force the Prestige out to sea, before she was damaged beyond repair and before there was a major loss of oil, into stormy and unsafe seas was as much, if not more, to blame for the environmental disaster that followed as the general condition of the vessel before the accident. The actions of the Spanish government in this regard were reprehensible. Second, Langewiesche makes much (rightfully) of the negative impact on foreign flag registration, specifically flags of convenience, in terms of vessel safety, poorly trained seamen, etc. However, it would have been useful to point out as a counterbalance the fact that the Exxon Valdez, the vessel responsible for one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history, was a U.S. flag vessel, built to U.S. flag standards, fully accountable to all U.S. maritime laws and regulations with U.S. officers and crew.

This book is well written, informative, and interesting, whether or not one happens to be in this business. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in first rate, well researched and written non fiction.

I really liked Langewiesche's previous book on the Sahara desert, and also have a minor fascination with modern piracy, so I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it. The six chapters function as semi-independent essays (bits of which appeared in The Atlantic), within an overall thesis that the world's oceans are essentially places of anarchy, and civilization exists only tenuously (at best) aboard seagoing vessels.

Chapter One introduces the reader to this anarchic world of flags of convenience, shadow ownership, holding companies, the cheapest crews money can buy, and unsafe, decrepit ships. This is done via the case of the Kristal, a 27-year-old tanker carrying molasses and a Croatian, Spanish, and Pakistani crew when it split in two and sank in off the coast of Spain in February 2001. The disaster is reconstructed from the testimony of the few survivors, and concludes with furtive settlements to them and an utter inability to determine who actually owned the ship. Through this, Langewiesche describes how most shipping is regulated by the International Marine Organization (a UN agency), and, rather depressingly, how -- despite all kinds of conventions, agreements, regulations, and inspections -- ships are constantly sinking at sea and lives are being lost.

Chapter Two is about security, both of ports and of ships. The vast majority of modern commercial piracy takes place near the Straights of Malacca, and Langewiesche takes the reader through one such case -- the October 1999 hijacking of the $10 million Japanese cargo ship Alondra Rainbow and its $10 million cargo of aluminum. Again, Langewiesche reconstructs the event through individual testimony and court records: from the Indonesian pirate leader's planning via cell phone with a Chinese boss, to the storming of the ship by multinational gang of Malays, Thais, Chinese, and others, to the ship's disappearance, and the pirates' eventual capture and prosecution by India. The disappearance is especially fascinating in this era of GPS and satellite imaging, and an important digression is made on the impossibility of tracking, never mind identifying all the ships at sea (some 30 million by one U.S. Coast Guard estimate). Anyone concerned about terrorists using boats or ports to deliver WMDs to the doorstep of the U.S. will probably not want to read this section, as it is rather chilling stuff.

The very brief third chapter provides a little more background on how international regulations work in practice, here in the case of oil spills. This first grew into a major concern following a series of incidents in the mid-1970s, and blossomed into a full political issue after the Exxon Valdez crash. Langewiesche shows how American and European bureaucracies have responded over the last several decades, and how ineffectual these new rules regulations have been.

Chapters four and five (totaling around 100 pages) deal with the September 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in rough Baltic waters, killing more than 850 people. And if you thought "The Perfect Storm" was heartbreaking, wait until you read this. The reconstruction (again, from survivors and the massive legal record) makes for terrifying reading, and no one who reads it will ever take a ride on a Baltic ferry. It's brilliant writing, tackling both the furious legal and technical debate about the cause of the disaster, and the harrowing human side, as people literally claw and climb over each other to survive. At times, the reconstruction gets a little too colorful as the attempts to show how most of the people become Darwinian animals get a bit much, but it's still nightmare-inducing stuff. It's an incredibly convoluted and contested tale, but one that does a very effective job of showing how the ocean can quickly reduce order to chaos and how the failure of regulation can lead to large tragedy.

The final chapter is somewhat tangential to the book's main thrust, as it deals with what happens to ships at the end of their lives rather than the chaos that rules the high seas. Here, Langewiesche covers the shipbreaking beach at Alang, India. Here, ships come to die, driven ashore and then manually broken down in scrap metal and salvageable parts by poorly paid crews who live in squalid work camps and are exposed to all manner of toxins from the dead ships. Various activist campaigns have brought world attention to the plight of these workers, but Langewiesche points out that shipbreaking is a booming field and even more wretched facilities exist elsewhere in South Asia. What the responsibility of shipbuilding nations is becomes a very murky matter and there are no easy answers.

This is a very good book, and each chapter stands on its own as an accessible introduction to one or two maritime topics which could easily merit entire books. Langewiesche is very good at blending travel reportage, investigative interviews, and archival research to create very compelling stories. Throughout, even though the topics can be rather abstract legally or technically arcane, he always writes with great compassion and clarity about the people who are affected.

"The Outlaw Sea" is as good an introduction as one can find to the marvel and mystique of the ocean world-a frontier were states, businesses, pirates, crewmen, and scavengers vie for freedom, livelihood, and control. It is a world that is as exciting as it is dangerous-a perennial clash between the desire to place under control and the reality that the open seas are simply too vast to be governed.

William Langewiesche, writer for the Atlantic, looks at the various aspects of the shipping industry and chronicles its main characteristics and hazards. He writes about old ships that pass lax inspections and end up in accidents that damage the environment or kill people; he narrates the hazards of traversing though waters mired with pirates; and he even discusses the end-point of many ships, as they sold for scrap, usually in South Asia.

Throughout this story comes the dialectic between the chaos of the sea and the attempts by governments to bring the whole edifice under control. Characteristically, he tells of the various efforts and fears of the US Coast Guard about the potential of a terrorist attack carried out through a merchant ship-a likelihood that is much feared but almost impossible to protect against.

In the end comes a balanced account of the realities of the sea. Save one narrative that is slightly overdrawn, the story is poised and well-focused, though at times it could have used more background and analysis instead of storytelling. But the underlying theme-that the chaos of the sea is unlikely to managed, comes across as powerfully as it could.

The book begins strongly, colorfully describing the byzantine world of ship registry, possible terrorism, and modern-day pirates. But when it turns to maritime disasters, the author chooses a selection of ship sinkings which take entirely too much of the book. His exhaustive description of the wreck and great loss of life of the auto ferry Estonia in 1994 takes up almost an entire third of the book and exhausts the reader. And somehow he misses the point of the book. The book ends on stronger ground with his coverage of the largely unregulated salvage of hundreds of commercial vessels each year, raising important ecological and social issues, though the book kind of dribbles to a close as if the author needed to complete the book by page 239.

I liked the book for all that. The author's coverage is a bit shallow (pun intended) of a vastly important and interesting subject. He would do well with a follow-up, picking up where this one leaves off.

If the attacks on the World Trade Center towers made you nervous, then this book will load you with solid reasons to be fully frightened about the potential for even more destructive terrorist attacks.

"The challenge is daunting. The United States has ninety-five thousand miles of coastline and more than a hundred seaports capable of handling large ships. It is the most active sea-trading nation on earth, accounting for a large percentage of long-distance maritime traffic worldwide and annually accomodating more than sixty-thousand port calls by oceangoing ships, the great majority of which are foreign flagged, owned by offshore companies, and crewed by anonymous sailors -- almost all of whom come from troubled parts of the world where America is resented, corruption is rife, and authentic documentation can easily be bought," Langewiesche explains.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, focused attention on aircraft smashing into buildings. Ships are mostly ignored, except for "big bang" fantasies generated by Sept. 11, 2001. However, an equal or worse disruption of trade is possible simply by running a large oil tanker onto shore in a vulerable region -- think Exxon Valdez, and the impact of a larger spill on San Francisco, or Seattle, or Boston, or any other of those hundred US seaports.

Can terrorists get a ship? Pirates already seize dozens of ships every year, and it often takes weeks before the ship is recovered. Al Qaeda already owns 20 ocean-going ships. Tankers have inflicted billions of dollars of damage on coastal regions for decades; now, think of this being done deliberately. The federal building in Oklahoma City was demolished by fertilizer and fuel oil -- in 1917, a French munitions ship blew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in a blast so massive that it briefly bared the bottom of the harbour.

Despite an impressive bureaucratic and paper facade, ocean shipping is virtually unregulated. The total chaos of trade is an open invitation to the greedy, the pirates, the terrorists and anyone else with modest means and massive hatreds. Ships are the world's best cargo carriers, they are the essence of globalization and low prices in the US; in the hands of the world's world terrorists, they are also awesome weapons.

In brief, it leaves Americans and the industrial world with a choice: either live with the "Russian Roulette" of ocean-bound terrorism, or develop a system equivalent to NORAD that was created to provide aerial security during the Cold War.

This book is awesome. Read it, and you'll weep with rage at the $200 billion War on Iraq while leaving the "cargo door entrance" to America as an open, unprotected and deadly invitation to each and every terrorist.

Control of the world's oceans was once considered a primal goal of the foreign policy of many nations. The advent and spread of air, then jet travel has reduced the importance of the sea, especially in terms of human transportation. But the sea is still the medium by which most of our goods are shipped, and as world trade increases, more and more produce is shipped over the ocean every day. This dichotomy then leads to an interesting situation. As people increasingly move about by air, the importance, and danger of sea travel recedes from public attention and the political limelight. But as more and more of the goods we use everyday are brought to us from places oceans away, the importance of oceanic commerce grows. Hence the growth in the shipping and shipbuilding industries and piracy. This then is the subject of this book, industry, crime, chaos and anarchy on the world's oceans.

The book focuses on several parts of man's current relation with the sea. One chapter is devoted to shipbreaking, or the destruction of old ships. This environmentally hazardous and dangerous job often gets relegated to third world countries such as India. Another chapter examines piracy, and shows how some of the world's most traveled waters are often some of the most dangerous. Case in point are the waters between Malaysia and Indonesia. A third chapter examines the international shipping industry, and shows how shipping companies often sail under flags of multiple nations to help the bottom line and avoid government inspections.

All told, this book shows how the world's oceans are a world apart from the land-based countries we are all used to. Rules that apply on land often do not on the high seas, and greed is often the determining factor in what goes and what does not. This book is especially relevant given the current war on terror.

The title is the premise.
The premise is interesting. The writing journalistic and a bit pedantic (though highly acclaimed on the books back cover).

It's interesting in parts, like the "recycling" that goes on
in India and the fact that almost all carriers fly flags of
convenience, the real owners often hidden behind
double blind dummy corporations. It is a real warning note on the dangers inherent in the lack of regulation in shipping.
I was surprised to find that large scale piracy of freighters
exists today (on the order of roughly 1-2 ships a week, world-wide).

The book is essentially a collection of 4 or so articles.
While interesting, I think it lacked overall cohesion.

Exploring the edges of order in the modern age, Langewiesche again demonstrates that the world is getting larger, not smaller.

In a recurring theme (compare the 'pencil whipping' ValuJet employees certifying the payload of flight 592), The Outlaw Sea highlights the contrast between the bureaucratic fictions of the regulators (in this case, the IMO) and the sobering vastness of the world's oceans and the consequent intrinsic unruliness of their traffic.

With crisp, distilled, yet lyrical prose, and examples ranging from Spanish sailors to supranational pirates, from devastatingly impoverished shipbreakers of South Asia to paternalistic European environmentalists, Langewiesche uses the sea as a lens through which to focus on the unbridgeable gaps in perspective between rich and poor, East and West, order and chaos.