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

by William Langewiesche (Author) "Since we live on land, and are usually beyond sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world,..." (more)
Key Phrases: bow visor, manning agents, car deck, United States, Alondra Rainbow, Captain Ikeno (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker
For Langewiesche, the ocean is still a frontier, a lawless domain where brute economics always trumps moral considerations. His overview ranges from a story of contemporary piracy off the coast of Indonesia to a portrait of the ship-breaking yards of India, where workers die by the dozen. The centerpiece of his exploration is the sinking, in 1994, of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea, in which more than eight hundred and fifty people died. In harrowing detail, Langewiesche describes the chaos—sons abandoning mothers, criminals robbing fellow-passengers amid the confusion—and then follows the botched investigation that ensued. He makes an eloquent case that the ocean's forgotten corners have become too dangerous to neglect: Al Qaeda has begun to use freighters to smuggle its members across international borders.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

"Astonishing . . . Langeweische's narrative achieves an almost operatic grandeur . . . As [he] demonstrates time and time again in this brave, often electrifying book, [the sea] is a world that is both new and very old, and we ignore it at our own peril." -- Nathaniel Philbrick, The New York Times Book Review"The Outlaw Sea is impossible to put down." -- People

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Product Details

• Paperback: 239 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press; 1st edition (May 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865477221
• ISBN-13: 978-0865477223
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #487,922 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Replays Atlantic Monthly But Pleasantly Surprising, December 18, 2005

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Sea as a Scary Place, January 11, 2006

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good if shallow read, June 25, 2005

By	jarhead70 (PA United States) - See all my reviews

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.