Book Review: What’s Going on in the High Seas?
A review of The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina.
There are many tales about oceans. You may have heard many of them, piracy off the coast of Somalia, or the Japanese whaling industry. As one of the few remaining frontiers of planet Earth, the ocean is often considered to be the wildest. High seas are ‘too big to police’, it has no rigid boundaries and under no clear international authority. Such circumstances, therefore, turn high seas into immense regions that host rampant criminality and exploitation.
The Outlaw Ocean collects stories written by Ian Urbina throughout his journey working in places off the coast. It is a continuation of his New York Times’ Op-Docs with the same title. In this book, Urbina tries to unravel the unheard story of those who work far off the coast — those who work in the middle of the ocean, the place that has often been forgotten. Despite being a backbone of the global trade and the global economy and having more than “56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats”, those who work at sea are constantly facing perils. This book collects Urbina’s investigations upon murky maritime law, illegal and unreported fishing, and modern-day slavery. This book consists of separate essays which tell different stories from different people around the world. Through his writing, Urbina manages to deliver complicated topics concisely and understandably. His narratives are so easy to digest as the story often focuses on the person as though he was writing a novel.
Despite having different stories in each chapter, few recurring themes turn up in many of those chapters; the unclear boundary of (international) maritime law, forced labor, and environmental impact of the maritime industry. For instance, the book started with a chapter covering the chase of the Thunder, an outlaw fishing vessel. The Thunder was part of a group of rogue ships known as the Bandit 6. Before its sinking in April 2015, the Thunder had operated under several different names and flags and was wanted by Interpol. Throughout this chapter, Urbina explores the challenges of implementing maritime law when the maritime borders are less precise than the land borders. The problem of jurisdiction also has a significant impact as it was later explained in the Raiders of the Lost Arks. When rogue ships embark to other ports in a different country, it becomes difficult for marine authorities to either pursue, intercepts, and let alone board the ship.
“For all its breathtaking beauty, the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.”
Urbina completes his reporting by bringing his readers face-to-face not only to the ‘good’ guys but also with the stowaways, repo men, human traffickers, and the survivors. He explores the truth of maritime industry which is believed to be beneficial for everybody, while it’s actually not. Force labor and modern slavery are common in the maritime industry, particularly in the fishing vessel. Labor rights are often overlooked since maritime law mainly focuses on the economic aspects of the industry. Labors are often recruited using debt, trickery, fear, and even violence. The price of “a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of miles away” comes with hidden costs, labor rights and environmental impact are few of them.
Among other topics such as micronation of Sealand, Somali pirates, and the race for offshore natural resources, Urbina sometimes looks into personal narratives which affected by certain circumstances. As an example, he admits that the common issues of the seafarers are boredom and loneliness. Long periods of self-isolation are one of the most dangerous threats for the seafarers.
The Outlaw Ocean maybe seems like a pessimistic book, nevertheless, it reminds all of us that in the world where international laws are considered highly, the ocean remains to be a limbo. The development of technology, from radar to sattelites, have done little to tame the last untamed frontier. Ocean remains what it’s always have been: a watery No Man’s Land — a gray area where countries and virtually everyone else make up the rules as often as they ignore them.
