A voyage of discovery into world of modern transport and shipping

Deep Sea and Foreign Going Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything

One of the organisations which helps sailors is the network Seafarers’ Welfare Missions, and they need that help. On average, two ships sink a week: two thousand sailors die per year at sea. Men fall off gangways or are crushed between the ship and the quay.

The facts and figures sprinkled throughout Rose George’s new book, Deep Sea and Foreign Going, are on a scale that will stop you in your tracks, much like one of the vast container ships she describes.

The book gives a picture of the worldwide shipping trade and is framed around a trip George herself took on a container ship, the Maersk Kendal, from Britain to Singapore, and along the way she shares plenty of arresting information.

Consider: there are 20 million containers travelling the oceans at any given moment, and one of those large container ships can carry 15,000 containers. Five per cent of containers arriving in the US are inspected; fewer are inspected in Europe. Over 600,000 people work in the shipping industry in Britain, where it accounts for more of the GDP than restaurants, takeaway food, and civil engineering put together.

Incredibly, the book shows that is more cost-effective to ship fish caught in Scotland to China for processing — and back again for consumption — than it is to process the fish in Scotland itself.

George explains how writing the book educated her about this hidden industry: “Growing up in Britain — or Ireland — those are traditional maritime island nations, but I grew up with astonishing ignorance of the sea as a place of industry. If you’d asked me before writing the book the extent of goods which are shipped by sea I’d have had no idea. I’d have presumed more comes by plane than actually happens, which I think most people do. We think we live in an instantaneous, globalised economy, but we don’t realise how much that is underpinned by the concrete realities of shipping.”

Part of that is explained by the fact that the big container ships, which may take four miles to stop once they’re on the move, are simply hard to find.

“The fact is you have to go out of your way to see shipping, really,” she says.

“The ships are so big now that they can’t berth in cities, so the ports tend to be out of town. There are ship-spotters, people who watch ships, but it’s not that accessible as a pastime. Ships leaving Le Havre in France go past the beach, so they can be seen pretty easily, but in general it takes a bit of an effort to see these ships.”

There’s a terrific section in the book about Somali pirates, who are often set adrift by their masters and end up half-starved as they try to seize ships and hostages, but being captured off the east African coast isn’t the only danger to seafarers.

“There’s plenty of law at sea but what you find is that it’s easy for someone to do something unscrupulous, to slip out of governance. The best illustration of that is the flag of convenience system, which is something the shipping industry doesn’t like to hear, because 70% of ships fly a flag that has nothing to do with their own nation state.”

The reason is cost: a ship flying a flag of convenience doesn’t have to pay American or English rates of pay or recognise unions.

“Many of those flag of convenience ships are perfectly legitimate, but when something goes wrong, it can go very wrong, as in the case of the Danny F II, which is in the book, and which was flagged to Panama.

“Only now, four years after that ship sank, has the accident report been released, but it hasn’t been made public, so the families of the crew don’t know what happened to those who died.”

One of the organisations which helps sailors is the network Seafarers’ Welfare Missions, and they need that help. On average, two ships sink a week: two thousand sailors die per year at sea (she writes in the book: “Men fall off gangways or are crushed between the ship and the quay. They are thrown by swells against steel machinery. They suffocate.”)

It’s not uncommon for them to spend months on end at sea, and she tells the poignant story of the sailors who wanted to feel grass beneath their feet after a particularly long stint on board.

The man who facilitated those sailors was Fr Colum Kelly, an Irish priest who’s the chaplain at Immingham. If you’ve never heard of the place, don’t worry. You’re in good company.

“Immingham is the biggest port by tonnage in the UK,” says George. “I grew up 50 miles away and had never heard of it before I started writing the book.

“Fr Colum is a priest, a social worker, a counsellor, a whistle-blower — seafarers tell him things they don’t dare tell more official channels. It’s difficult for him because he can’t be a snitch, but he can offer them an ear: the crew of one ship confided in him that a bilge pump had been installed improperly, and that they’d sink if they went any further. He alerted the authorities and they were saved.”

The publicity for the book says it reveals the biggest industry you’ve never heard of, and it’s a convincing claim.

“The industry could do more if it wants to be more visible,” says George. “People within shipping tend to say they’re under-appreciated, that they’re only noticed if there’s a disaster — but they could do a lot more to improve their profile. The difficulty in simply getting into a port is part of that. One of the few is Maersk, who are very active on Twitter, they’re a rare warm corporate voice.”

Maersk is the company that facilitated George’s trip, and they’re to be commended for their foresight. If they hadn’t helped her we wouldn’t have this gem of a book.