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

This book unveils the fascinating world of the sea. Written in a suspenseful style, William Langewiesche, carefully constructs his plot that the sea remains untamed and uncontrolled. I borrowed the audio version of this book from a local library really enjoyed hearing the author recount stories of bravery, treachery, and catastrophe. Especially interesting to me was the story of the Estonia, the major ferry that tragically sunk in less than 20 killing almost 700 people. I recommend this to those who enjoy non-fiction, investigative reporting.

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

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 w

Langewiesche is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and has written several books that combine hard reportage with the more ephemeral qualities of a travel writer. In this case, Langewiesche's goal is to illustrate with bold examples the ungovernability of the sea. For him, this is a law of nature, but it is also a consequence of the inability of the laws of men to deal with sea's expanses. His case studies, if you will, are many, but he spends the most time on a few memorable stories: the modern day pirate attack on the Alondra Rainbow in 1999; the post-apocalyptic landscape of the world's most heavily trafficked ship graveyard, the beaches of Alang, India; and the wreck of the ferry Estonia on which at least 852 people died when it went down in a storm in the Baltic Sea in 1994. The subtext in all of these stories is that the tragedies contained within are, at least partly, a result of the inability of modern societies to govern the seas. The greater implication, as Langewiesche makes clear, is that such lawlessness and statelessness make the sea fertile for the operations of lawless, stateless terrorists. The sea is everywhere, but it is nowhere in the eyes of the law. These timely concerns, and Langewiesche's sturdy prose elevate a book of riveting tales of disasters at sea to a book of more weighty importance.

As Melville knew, we look to the sea as a symbol for freedom, and "freedom of the seas" is proverbial. But freedom at sea can lead to such manifestations as piracy, and not just in the swashbuckling days of yore; it could also lead to corporate irresponsibility and malfeasance. William Langewiesche's _The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime_ (North Point Press) collects and expands upon his previous magazine articles on this theme. All of us are dependent upon international trade, and few of us understand how it works or in what ways it is working badly or dangerously, unless we hear about a capsizing or an oil spill. There are a lot more of those than we hear about, and a lot more crime on the sea than even governments acknowledge. Langewiesche's book is a fine way for lubbers to get to know how traditional maritime freedom is endangering them.Before World War II, ships were customarily built in a country, were registered in that country, flew the flag of that country, and sailed for the profit of businessmen in that country. Ironically, the United States began the current anarchical system in a pretense of neutrality during the pre-Pearl Harbor war, registering in Panama ships bringing needed supplies to Britain. The practice became widespread in the succeeding decades, with many ships now sailing under "flags of convenience." They might be registered in countries that have no navy and even no coastline, and the countries involved can get relatively small fees, which are actually almost pure profit. The countries don't pursue administrative niceties like taxes, labor laws, safety inspections, and so on, and the corporations which own the ships don't mind avoiding such things, either. Among the cases described here are a too-old ship (with full inspection documents) broken in half by stormy seas. Pirates can take advantage of the lax laws by making a ship disappear; capture, repaint, rename, and reflag the vessel, and it vanishes from the seas. Seas are big, ships leave no tracks, and patrol ships and aircraft can see only a tiny percentage of any hunting ground. Policing the oceans from such attacks is not now possible.The longest episode in the book tells of the _Estonia_, a giant luxury ferry that sank in the Baltic in 1994, with a loss of 852 of 989 passengers and crew. A victim of faulty design, poor maintenance, or even a bomb (none of the extensive investigations afterwards has satisfied everyone), the narrative here of well-chosen characters trying to escape from the swiftly-sinking ship is fast and terrifying. The book ends with a part of the maritime business that few people ever consider: what happens to the worn-out ships? Salvaging used to be a thriving business in our country and others; reclaiming the metal and reusing it was good for profits and good for the environment. However, showing the same pattern of lack of regulation and reduction of the job to the cheapest source available, shipwrecking ha