Moby-Duck (40 page)

Was it a
Monsterwelle
that had ravaged the Evergreen
Ever Laurel
? Probably not. According to Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the ship had encountered hurricane-force winds and forty-foot waves—rough conditions, to be sure, but altogether typical of the North Pacific in winter, and twelve containers overboard isn't, comparatively speaking, all that much; not enough to upset the underwriters. What about the
China
? To people like the longshoreman Rich Austin, it sure as hell looked like something monstrous had happened out there in the Graveyard of the Pacific. Still, even when a captain, with help from weather-routing services that recommend course changes via fax, can't avoid severe weather, the ship is supposed to survive it. If the cargo has been properly lashed and the hatch covers tightly battened, if the engines have not failed and the helmsman has time to take evasive action, not even eighty-foot waves are supposed to send stacks of containers tumbling over the rails—certainly not 407 of them in a single night.

Even before the
China
entered Puget Sound, the speculating and finger-pointing had begun. To limit its liability, APL had to prove that the accident had been a so-called act of God. They appeared to have a strong case. Weather reports pointed to a prime superhuman suspect: Super Typhoon Babs. In late October 1998, when the
China
was at port in Taiwan, Babs was laying waste to villages in the Philippines. Early news reports assumed that Babs had laid waste to the
China
too. But as weather records reveal, the
China
and Babs had not crossed paths. Reports to the contrary were mistaken. The ship had departed Taiwan on October 21, six days before the remnants of Babs hit.

When lawyers questioned the officers in Seattle, what they heard strained credulity. The scuttlebutt at the longshoremen's union hall was that the ship had lost power and gotten caught in the trough between waves. But the officers claimed that the engines had failed after they watched the container stacks fall. Before it ever lost power, the ship had rolled wildly, inexplicably, they said, despite attempts to take evasive action, and at the worst of it, they'd seen, at bridge level, “green water”—nautical-speak for a wave tall enough to wash over the main deck. In calm seas, the main deck would be about four stories above waterline, and the bridge eight stories above that. Most of the lawyers listening to this tale took it to be a tall one, literally. After all, sailors always exaggerate, especially when trying to exonerate themselves, and such giant waves have long been the stuff of sailors' lore.

Wrote Melville, “In maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.”

Steaming east through the snowy Sea of Japan, birthplace of storms. Last night sometime after four, trying to remain awake for our departure, I nodded off with my shoes on reading
Typhoon
, Conrad's novella about the ill-fated steamship
Nan-Shan
, commanded by the unlucky yet miraculously competent Captain MacWhirr, of whom, when the barometer suddenly plummets, Conrad writes, “Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door.”

When I woke up this morning, I sensed from the motion of the ship and the throb of the engine that we were already under way. I rushed outside and up three flights of stairs to the bridge deck, where I was hit by a cold blast of headwind. It wasn't all that windy; mostly it was the ship's speed—twenty-four knots—that knocked me back. Ahead, the Pacific was lost in fog. Behind us, Pusan was vanishing into it. I could hardly feel the roll of the ship, which didn't seem to be steaming through the waves so much as steamrolling over them.

On the bridge, sleep deprived but nattily attired in a navy sweater with black-and-gold epaulets, the captain was doing his paperwork. Jakubowski has been a merchant mariner for forty-four years, since the age of eighteen, when, against his parents' wishes, he shipped out on a Baltic Sea break-bulk freighter. I asked whether he'd ever lost containers overboard. “Never,” he said, but he'd come close. Once, near the Azores, the ship he was commanding was struck by a wave sixty-six feet tall; and on this very trip, westbound from Seattle, the
Ottawa
had rolled 20 degrees to starboard, 26 to port. “Here, you can still see.” He pointed above the helm, to the clinometer, which had yet to be reset.

Like Europe-bound flights that arc north over Greenland, a container ship from Asia usually describes an arc—the Great Circle route—toward the Aleutians, passing through the Graveyard of the Pacific. Because of the stormy forecast, the weather-routing service recommends we take a northerly detour, straying from the Great Circle route and into the Bering Sea, seeking shelter in the lee of the Aleutians. “Will we see any ice?” I asked, hopefully.

“We want to get close to it,” the captain said, “but not that close.”

Mariners of the age of sail avoided the Great Circle route in winter. It's easy to understand why: Back then the only way to forecast the weather was to watch the barometer, study the portents, and heed the wisdom of the almanacs. Every year sailing ships nevertheless sank by the dozens, in bad years by the hundreds, which is why both underwriters and classification societies had to be invented. British shipowners of the age of sail lost 10 to 20 percent of their revenues to shipwrecks, and accounts written by the survivors were so numerous and so popular they constituted a veritable literary genre—naufragia, it was called, after the French,
naufrage
, for shipwreck. The authors of these accounts, perhaps appealing to the sensibilities of their landlubber readers, tended to interpret their harrowing experiences as religious allegories, and their publishers tended to favor subtitles the length of paragraphs, as in,
God's Wonders in the Great Deep, or A narrative of the shipwreck of the brigantine
Alida and Catharine
, Joseph Bailey, master, on the 27th of December 1749. Bound from New-York for Antigua. Wherein the wonderful mercy of the divine Providence is displayed in the preservation of the said master, with all his men, from the time of the said vessel's over-setting to the time of their being taken up by a vessel bound from Boston to Surranam, on the 3d of January following; all which time, being seven nights, they were in the most imminent danger & distress.

It's snowing. At sea you can see a snowstorm from a long ways off, a white disturbance in the air. Now it's swirling all around us, accumulating on the bridge wings, dusting the corrugated tops of the stacked containers with white triangles from which you can tell the direction of the wind. Way out beyond the stacked containers, the water looks like a tarnished mirror, shiny in some patches, leaden in others. Up on the bridge, there are little icicles on the windshield wipers.

Two days out and I'm already experiencing symptoms of cabin fever. I take half-mile laps around the cargo decks, read Conrad in bed, dine with Bob and Claire at the passengers' table, visit the bridge, chat with the officer on watch, admire the 360-degree view. So far there has been little to see, other than changes of weather and light—few other vessels, no wildlife besides gulls. There is almost never more than one officer on the bridge, and most of the officers do not greet my questions as amiably as the captain.

This morning, second mate Fredrik Nystrom was at the helm, paging through the Nautical Institute's newsletter, reading the accident reports sent in by seafarers. I asked Nystrom if he had any idea what was inside all those colorful boxes out there. “We have a manifest somewhere,” he said, “but in the end it's not that interesting.”

Then he resumed his reading until, a few moments later, the VHF crackled and over the airwaves came a man's voice singing—in a language neither Nystrom nor I recognized, Japanese, presumably, or Korean—a joyous, possibly intoxicated chantey. “Not quite what you're supposed to do,” Nystrom said, smirking. Then we stopped talking and listened and gazed out into the swirling snow.

Tonight when I entered the bridge, Chief Officer Hermann Josef Bollig was standing watch, as he always does between 8 P.M. and midnight. A bearded German giant, Bollig scares me a little. He seemed to scowl when he saw who it was. At night, to maximize visibility, the bridge is kept dark. As the ship goes autopiloting along, Bollig sits there, his face lit by the lunar glow of computer screens, surveying the seas for fishing boats. If a small one should stray into our path, the
Ottawa
would plow right over it, leaving behind little but a trail of flotsam and sticks. Fully loaded, the
Ottawa
weighs more than 140 million pounds. At twenty-four knots, the forward momentum of that much weight through water is almost planetary, and difficult to stop, even with the engine in reverse.

If I've read the charts right, in three days, near the international date line, we'll come close to the site of the
China
disaster and even closer to those coordinates—44.7°N, 178.1°E—that three years ago, late one night while my pregnant wife slept in the other room, I marked in my
Atlas of the World
.

Six years after the
China
dropped its cargo into the sea, the European Space Agency spent three weeks studying winter waves via satellite. Waves of more than one hundred feet are altogether real, the research confirmed. There's evidence, in fact, that as the planet warms their numbers may be rising, and ESA scientists believe that their data may help solve unsolved maritime mysteries.

One of the most famous such mysteries is the sinking of the MS
München,
in 1978. The
München
, at the time a year-old state-of-the-art barge carrier, vanished while crossing the North Atlantic. Its disappearance has never been explained, but many nautical detectives suspect that it and its crew of twenty-seven fell victim to a
Monsterwelle.
A true
Monsterwelle
is defined not by size but by its mathematical improbability, an example of chaos theory in action. The seafarer's handbook
Heavy Weather Sailing
notes that “whilst one wave in twenty-three is over twice the height of the average wave, and one in 1,175 is over three times the average height, only one in over 300,000 exceeds four times the average height.” If the average waves in a particular sea are only three feet tall, and a twelve-foot breaker were to suddenly rear up in their midst, it would be a little monster. What really makes the fearsome
Monsterwellen
fearsome isn't size; it's the element of surprise. They can come out of nowhere, even in calm seas, overwhelming a ship before the helmsman has time to escape it.

Scientists are still trying to explain monster waves. One leading theory is that they arise when a strong current—like the Gulf Stream, or the Kuroshio, or the Alguhas, down at the Horn of Africa—collides with a countervailing storm swell, or when a deep-ocean swell collides with a shallow shelf. Another theory, called “constructive interference” or “random superposition,” holds that in chaotic seas two wave trains with identical wave periods and crest heights can ever so rarely combine into a kind of super train, producing monsters. Which might explain why such waves often seem to come in sets of three, a phenomenon known to sailors as “the three sisters.” Three sisters forty or fifty feet tall can be more dangerous than a single one-hundred-foot giant. The first monstrous sister rocks the boat mightily before plunging it into a trough so deep, one eyewitness account compares it to a “hole in the ocean.” Then the second or third wave sinks it.

Nonetheless, sailors are often mistaken when they identify monstrously large waves as freaks or rogues. The tsunamis that struck land all around the Indian Ocean in 2004 were well over a hundred feet, but they were the result of an enormous undersea earthquake, not chaotic hydrodynamics. Typhoons and hurricanes regularly whip up waves over seventy feet high, but evidence suggests that you're more likely to encounter a
Monsterwelle
in
lower
sea states than in tall ones.

The peril of the sea that modern merchant mariners are most likely to face, navigational wisdom holds, isn't a
Monsterwelle
but something known as “synchronous rolling,” so called because the natural roll period of the ship falls in sync with that of the waves. I first learned about synchronous rolling from Beau Gouig, an oiler I met on a research vessel
.
Gouig explained it to me this way: “Basically what happens is when the wave crests get far enough apart, the ship starts rolling, and with each roll it takes longer to recover, so you're going farther to starboard, and then farther to port.”

Small container spills happen all the time, Gouig told me. “Nobody really cares—except the environmentalists,” he said. The usual cause, according to him: synchronous rolling, a phenomenon he'd experienced firsthand. “I've been through two typhoons,” he said. “The last one, we almost lost the ship.” Gouig and I were in the research vessel's mess, at a Formica table bolted to the floor beneath a porthole, in swiveling plastic chairs, also bolted to the floor. I fetched a refill of coffee and took out my notebook.