Moby-Duck (41 page)

“It was in January,” Gouig began. “January and February are the bad months for typhoons. We were sailing from Japan to L.A. The last port we visited was Yokohama. We were watching the storm on the weather maps, plotting two charts, one for the storm and one for the ship. A typhoon can go in two directions. Either it goes up toward China”—he drew invisible maps on the table with his fingers and pantomimed the storm, his hand cutting a line past the west coast of a coffee mug up into the China Sea—“or it brushes past Japan and spins out across the Pacific.” His fist swept toward the table's edge.

“All the predictions were saying this typhoon was headed this way, to China. But our first mate knew something was wrong. At Yokohama they stuck us at the dock and made us wait three days. This mate, he said, ‘All hands on deck! Double-lash all the containers, tighten every twistlock, batten down all the hatches.' We had all the ABs out there”—all the able-bodied seamen.

“We left at around four in the morning. By eight or nine o'clock we were getting hammered. After ten hours we tried to turn back. Eventually you don't care where it was you were supposed to be going. You're just trying to get out of the way. We kept sailing south. A little farther and we would have made it to Hawaii. This was an eight-hundred-foot container ship, and that storm blew us four days off course. We keep making the ships bigger, but we're fooling ourselves if we think they're safe from the sea. Big ships still sink.” He took a sip of coffee, then continued.

“I was up on the bridge. We were in autopilot, and we were getting hammered. We did three or four 50-degree rolls, buried the bow three times. Waves swept all the lifeboat ladders off deck. I said to the captain, ‘These wave crests are getting far apart.' That's basically why you're up there, to watch for synchronous rolling. Suddenly everything on the bridge just goes
voom.
”

The ship's captain did exactly what all captains are trained to do: he hove to, immediately turning into the oncoming waves and slowing down, letting the ship ride up and over. “All the books say that you've got only two minutes to break that cycle. You've got to make a hard turn and get the bow up on a wave or down into a trough. Another thirty seconds and I think we would have rolled right over.”

The crew were all amazed, Gouig said, that no containers had been lost. “Spills happen all the time,” he said, again. Then he told me the story of what he believed to be the most famous case of synchronous rolling, the case of the APL
China
.

Two days ago, in the Tsugaru Strait, the snow let up, and through the fog could be glimpsed the mountains of Hokkaido to the north, the mountains of mainland Japan to the south, their black ridges striped with snow. Claire and Bob came bustling into the bridge to peep at them through binoculars, she exclaiming breathlessly, “Oh, aren't they just breathtaking!” The next land we'd see would be American.

The weather service recommended the Great Circle route after all. We're now way out in the Graveyard of the Pacific, and you can tell, you can feel the giant swell moving under the hull. Not sure exactly how much we're rolling, but it feels like a lot—enough to make a port glass in my cabinet slip loose from the rack and go tinkling rhythmically around:
tink,
roll,
tink
, roll,
tink
. Last night, it woke me up—it and the wind howling at my portholes.

This evening, I ran into the captain as he was returning from an inspection of the outer decks, dressed in a red jumpsuit, carrying a flashlight and walkie-talkie. “A little snow,” he told me, smiling his courteous, gap-toothed smile, “is nothing to worry about.” Feeling cabin-feverish, I decided to see what it felt like to walk among the containers in a snowstorm. Gave myself something of a scare.

Back inside the
Ottawa
's eight-story house, the habitable part of the ship, I learned from an oiler named Joel Nipales that solitary nocturnal circumambulations of the main deck are strictly forbidden. If an officer or deckhand has to go out at night, he alerts the bridge, puts on foul-weather gear, and brings a walkie-talkie. It wouldn't have taken much to knock me overboard: a stumble, a snowy gust. No one would have discovered my absence until morning. Cast away in dark, cold water four miles deep, deeper even than the deep water I swam in off the coast of Hawaii, I would have watched the
Ottawa
's running lights appear and disappear beyond the crests, as if blinking on and off, dwindling and dimming into the swirling snow.

 

 

The weather report on the morning of the
China
's departure from Taiwan wasn't auspicious, but it wasn't ominous either, calling for winds registering 6 or 7 on the Beaufort scale. Four days out, six hundred miles east of Tokyo, the
China
's weather-routing service recommended an easterly change of course. Two low-pressure systems following in the ship's wake had unexpectedly merged, developing into what climatologists used to call a “meteorological bomb” but which they now, far less entertainingly, call a “rapidly intensifying low.” Also unexpectedly, this weather bomb had moved in an easterly, rather than northeasterly, direction, toward the
China
instead of away from it.

Two days later, on October 26, by noon local time, the storm had drawn to within 120 nautical miles. The
China
once again changed course, veering farther south. Nine hours later it veered south yet again, onto an almost due-easterly bearing. Weirdly, instead of continuing on its track, the storm veered too, as if in pursuit, and the
China
suddenly found itself in what meteorologists call the most dangerous quarter of the storm. If the master had ignored the weather service and stayed on his original course, he might have escaped. Instead, in perfect darkness, at 3 A.M. on October 27, disaster struck.

The winds were now Beaufort force 11: “exceptionally high (30-45 ft) waves, foam patches cover sea, visibility more reduced.” Analysis of the historical weather data would eventually reveal that the conditions were even worse than Beaufort had described. The tallest of the normal, unfreakish waves likely attained heights of seventy or eighty feet. Rogue waves are by definition unlikely, but if one had arisen under these conditions, it would have been, wave-height distribution statistics suggest, 105.5 feet tall. It was an hour and a half before the fury of the storm began to subside. The sun rose on a ruin.

Exactly what happened during that nightmarish hour and a half is difficult to say. Among the cartload of legal files archived at the federal courthouse in the Southern District of Manhattan you will not find transcripts of the depositions taken from the
China
's crew, which remain sealed. I asked APL for access to them. They denied my request. I asked for access to the mariners themselves. Again, no.

One of the lawyers deposing the mariners in Seattle in November of 1998 was Bill France, of Healy & Baillee, a once venerable, now defunct New York firm hired to represent APL and its underwriters. France, who grew up miles from the sea, on a mink farm in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, is not your typical maritime lawyer. When I called him to ask about the APL
China
, the deep-voiced person who answered agreed to meet with me but, before hanging up, said there were two things I should know: First, in honor of attorney-client confidentiality, we could discuss only what was already in the public record; second, the fifty-nine-year-old person I'd be meeting was no longer a man named Bill but a tall, transgendered, “somewhat mannish woman” called Willa.

Not only is Willa France transgendered; she is a poet, a student of Jewish theology, and a certified naval architect.
²⁹
France knows about the mysticism of Buber and the prosody of Frost. She knows about the physics of waves and the applied science of engineering. I asked whether she wanted me to identify her as Willa in print, and she said yes and, in a characteristically eloquent e-mail, compared her transgendering to the change the
China
had undergone on its fateful ocean crossing. Not that it had been for her a personal disaster; quite the opposite. But it had been overwhelming, “not unlike the consequence of an elemental and unpredictable force.” Although no actual detectives were assigned to the case of the APL
China,
of all the lawyers involved, France, with her expertise in naval architecture, came closest to playing the part. She is this mystery's Sherlock.

Like the lawyers representing the cargo owners and their underwriters, France was at first skeptical about the story recounted by the
China
's crew. The details didn't make scientific sense. The ship's anemometer, which measures wind speed, had been on the fritz, so the sea conditions recorded in the logbook were estimates made in darkness, in wildly “confused seas,” by sleep-deprived, tempest-tossed mortals, and the ship had been yawing hard, off its intended course. In confused seas, the waves move every which way, and the prevailing direction is difficult to determine. It would be understandable if the officers had been wildly confused too.

“It was only after listening to four or five guys that I began to take them seriously,” France told me. Their stories all matched, and France discovered forensic evidence confirming some of the details—green water inside a running light up on the bridge, wave damage to the outermost containers in stacks still standing, a dent on the bow's protective steel bulwark. But what finally made France a believer was the testimony of the
China
's master, Parvez Guard.

A seasoned mariner from India who'd been captaining container ships for fifteen years, Guard was an exceptionally expert witness, France said. In a deposition lasting three of the six days that the
China
spent in Seattle, Guard reconstructed the voyage day by day, then, as the time of the disaster neared, hour by hour, then minute by minute, corroborating his testimony with entries in the logbook. While that testimony isn't in the public record, one very telling quote from it is. Just before the containers began to fall, the ship had suddenly become “uncontrollable,” Guard testified, “as if there were a devil in it.”

Today, a little while ago, we came as close to the site of the toy spill as we'll come, about 180 nautical miles north of the 45th parallel. The conditions were fairly calm. The sky was white, the water gray. There was a light roll to the ship. Wind out of the southeast, but we didn't know how strong because the
Ottawa
's anemometer, like that of the
China
a decade ago, is on the fritz. Fredrik Nystrom, second mate, was on watch. “You are lucky,” I told him upon entering the bridge after lunch, a bit giddy, and he looked at me with a skeptical smile. “You will be present for an exciting moment!” I said. I'd already recounted to him the legend of the rubber ducks lost at sea.

“Oh, yes?” he said. Humoring me, he calculated as precisely as possible when we would cross the longitudinal line I was waiting for, 178.1° E. For almost three years now I've been contemplating this anonymous place on the map, this nowhere, this freak coincidence of coordinates where there are no landmarks to be seen. “An event
took place
,” we say, and in taking place here, in taking this particular place, in tumbling overboard here, or near here, the toys transformed this middle of nowhere into the middle of somewhere, at least in my imagination. On a computer screen, Nystrom and I watched the degrees tick closer, 177.8, 177.9, 178.0. And then we were there.

I rushed out onto a bridge wing, then down the metal staircases, six flights, to the main deck, all the while thinking of that day—or night—sixteen years ago, all the while wondering: Which twelve containers fell? Did two columns fall? Or containers from different columns? Were they to starboard or to port? Fore? Aft?

As we steamed on at twenty-three knots, I felt as though the toys were still out there, as though the point I'd marked on my map were already slipping away, as if I were leaving the toys behind. I made my way to the
Ottawa
's stern, where
—
below the aftmost rows of containers, stacked overhead, water raining down between them—there was a great cavern. Standing at the taffrail, I studied the horizon to the southeast, the horizon toward which the
Ottawa
's wake foamed and frothed and stretched.

The containers would still have been afloat. Perhaps, standing at the taffrail of the
Ever Laurel
on that day—if it had been day still and not night—you could have seen the colorful boxes, appearing and disappearing from behind the waves. Had the one containing the toys burst open yet? Had the brown cardboard boxes inside yet escaped? Perhaps. And perhaps even one or two of the cardboard boxes had already opened. Doubtful, but possible, depending on the physics of the spill and the qualities of the glue. Perhaps the little packages had already come bobbing to the surface and begun to drift apart.

I had my own yellow duck in the pocket of my windbreaker, the duck Ebbesmeyer had given me, not the one I'd retrieved from Gore Point, and seriously considered chucking him overboard just to see with my own eyes that image I had been imagining, the image of a lone duck on the open sea. No one was around to stop me. I put my hand in my pocket. I felt the little plastic ball of its head. How easy it would be.

The movement of water along the hull of a boat is deceiving. With no fixed point, it's hard to separate the speed of the ship from the movement of the waves, which is why sailors in the past would throw a log overboard and count the knots of rope that unraveled behind it in order to calculate speed. How would the duck move across the chaos of the surface? I wondered. The
Ottawa
, big as it was, seemed hardly to move at all, but surely a little plastic duck would change the scale, making the ocean seem all the grander. Surely it would topple about, overturning and righting and overturning again, though I supposed it was possible that it might ride upright over the waves, the way we would like to picture it, sliding backward up to the crest, and then tipping as it slid down the other side, the waves moving beneath it. I withdrew my duck from my pocket, held it the way you'd hold a baseball, and leaned over the rail.