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

At the first glance of The Outlaw Sea, it looks like it will be an expose on modern day pirates, which is interesting in its own right. But once the book gets going, it takes an entirely new direction in addition to the piracy stories. The real story here is the modern shipping industry, which is both vital to trade and impossibly corrupt.

Modern freighters must pass inspections at the various ports that they pass through, both to prove the seaworthiness of the vessel and to make sure that nothing, and no one, illegal is being smuggled onboard. This sounds all very straightforward, and for the most part that's as far as anyone looks into the process. But William Langewiesche has gone much, much deeper, and exposed a world that few land dwellers are aware of.

The ports that take in and ship out freighters are in large part rented out to other countries to run. This means that whatever country is running it can use their laws for the inspections, or they use the laws of the country they are in, or they are not really even sure which laws they are supposed to be using. And in the end, it doesn't matter much anyway. Most laws are either so general or so lax that they may as well not bother. Langewiesche recounts one instance where a ship that had just passed inspection at a European port set out to sea and sank within two days. The boat simply came apart, being in the worst possibly condition, but good enough to pass inspection with flying colors.

Another part of this story is the extreme difficulty of tracing freight ships. Ships are registered in whatever country the ship's owner chooses, after paying a small fee to that country, and the ship does not have to have ever been there. Added onto that is the business tactic of constructing a separate business for each ship in the fleet, and then registering the business anywhere they would like to- which is often in a separate country from the ship's registry. All of this confusion often ends in even the ship's crew not knowing who owns the ship they work on.

The convoluted ship ownership is largely for liability reasons, and for good reason- it works. Langewiesche accounted in detail a ship that went down off the coast of
Europe
, and it was weeks before anyone could figure out who owned it. The crew had no idea, the government it was registered in had no idea, and it went on and on down the line.

The lax and often for-cash nature of shipping regulation has led to a secondary industry of immigrant smuggling. The

Outlaw
Sea

reports that Al Queda has been known to smuggle members across the ocean in these freight ships. And many ports are known to accept cash for whatever the crew might be smuggling.

The

Outlaw
Sea

has been getting some recognition lately, with the author appearing on C-Span several times, among other places. Here's hoping that the

Outlaw
Sea

will do for the shipping industry what Upton Sinclair's The Jungle did for the meat-packing industry.