Tag: seafaring

Out To Sea

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I was duffing off at work the other day, reading back issues of the Economist, and I came across this article on revenue shortfalls in the global shipping industry, and I seem to keep coming back to it in my mind. The article mostly focuses on what the big shipping companies are doing in Europe to respond to slowing global trade, but the story is introduced with a few disastrous details from Hanjin’s recent bankruptcy filing and the complete chaos this has caused in container ports and global supply chains around the world.

Hanjin, which is headquartered in Busan, South Korea is an enormous operation. It is the seventh largest shipping company in the world. It owns 74 container ships, an additional 15 bulk cargo carriers, and thousands upon thousands of shipping containers. All of these assets are scattered to the far corners of the earth and are almost constantly in transit. When Hanjin filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States and South Korea on August 29th, these assets were essentially abandoned by the company, literally overnight, with no capital or plan to bring any of it back to port. It is estimated that something on the order of $14 billion in cargo was left stranded at sea, along with the ships themselves and the ships’ crews. Ports wouldn’t let the Hanjin ships land for fear that they wouldn’t be compensated for docking expenses and unloading fees. And so dozens of ships, many with perishable cargos of food, were simply made to weigh anchor in the harbors of Tokyo, Sidney, New Jersey, Long Beach, Singapore, and everywhere else and await the bankruptcy suit to play itself out. In most cases the crews have been forced to remain with the their vessels. In some ports they are strictly forbidden from even leaving their ships. Korean news outlets have been following one such crew aboard the Hanjin Rome, which has essentially been incarcerated at sea since for the last month an a half. Their ship was arrested by Port of Singapore authorities just a few days after Hanjin filed bankruptcy protection. The admiralty laws of Singapore allow the port to seize vessels on behalf of claimants seeking payment from an owner. Under this method of arrest, the crew members of such vessels are more or less held as prisoners aboard their own ship. Of course they have committed no crime, nor have the been accused of any, but the law of the sea states that they cannot abandon their ship, and if their ship is held under arrest, then effectively so are they. It’s all very Kafka-esque, these men being held in purgatory, not even allowed to set foot on land; loitering about a piece of industrial machinery from one day to the next, waiting for the right paperwork to be shuffled through an endless judicial proceeding so that the order can be given to let them go. I think this a very literal illustration of what Melville meant to figuratively convey in the concept of being out-to-sea.
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I read the article in the Economist and came home tonight to research the matter further. I’ve found that since early September when the article was published Hanjin has managed to come up with the money to unload all of its stranded cargo and begin the process of recalling its vessels to their home ports. Fortune magazine reported last week that Korean Air lines, which holds stock in Hanjin, has made available $54 million to pay docking and handling fees at the different ports to which Hanjin is contractually obligated to deliver. Cargo will still be one to two months overdue, costing customers millions in lost commerce. But surely this is encouraging news for Hanjin crews. One need only know that an end is possible and that life will change to be able to endure a little longer.

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Industrial Whaling

In my last post I mentioned how during the 17th and 19th century piano soundboards were fashioned out of whale bone. This should not at all be surprising given the many consumer products that were contrived from whale parts during the period of the piano’s invention and refinement. Like the mercantile slave trade and the cultivation of opium, commercial whaling is another proto-industrial enterprise that seems astonishing that people even considered doing it as a way of making money. It must have been a strange kind of avarice combined with remarkable invention that caused people to see in the thick sheet of fat blanketing big sea creatures a splendid fuel source and industrial lubricant.

The actual process of extracting blubber from the whale’s body and rendering oil would be cartoonish if it wasn’t so gruesome. After doing the long day’s work of killing the whale with a thousand tiny stab wounds, men would pull its carcass along side the ship and for the next 72 hours set about peeling blubber away from the body like an orange. First they would hack out the blanket piece, which is a strip of flesh and fat about five feet wide and six inches deep. They would attach it to a hook hanging off of the mast and use a wench mechanism to pull the blubber from the body. Meanwhile, two or three men would slash away at the connecting tissue between the fat and muscle. Slowly, they would turn the body in the water as they peeled away the blubber in a spiral. The weight of the blubber is so great that the boat tips toward it as the men crane it around over the deck.

After the blubber is removed from the body, the men then decapitate the whale. They hoist the head onto the ship’s deck and gauge a hole into its side from which the men ladle prized sperm oil into buckets on the deck.
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Whaling ships in the 18th and 19th centuries had iron furnaces installed on deck called tryworks. Pieces of blubber were thrown into the trypots. Under high heat, the fat would begin to liquefy. The flesh and fiber would char into carbon and float to the top of the caldrons. The whalers called this the “cracklins.” They would scoop them off the surface and feed them back to the fire.

Whaling vessels were like floating factories. They would remain at sea capturing whales and processing oil for years at a time. They returned to port with hundreds of barrels, which were immediately sold to merchants in New Bedford and Nantucket. The oil would be used in lamps and lanterns. It was the brightest burning fuel available. It burned hot and slow. Candles made from whale oil were said to be favored by Benjamin Franklin, who preferred writing by their light over standard paraffin.