Mohammed Aisha waited four years for a reprieve, alone aboard an abandoned ship on the coast of Egypt. Photographs of him from the time show his thin young face, shaven head, and eyebrows knotted in distress. Born in the Syrian port of Tartus, he had signed on to become the first mate of a Bahraini-flagged rust bucket named the MV Aman. Five months after he boarded Aman, in July 2017, the ship was entered into the International Labour Organization’s Abandonment of Seafarers database, a centrally maintained record of manned ships for whom their owners or charterers have abdicated all responsibility. After Aman’s insurance and safety equipment certificates had lapsed, Egyptian inspectors arrested the ship for these deficiencies in June 2017. Meanwhile, the crew were abandoned by the owner with months of pay in arrears, the captain went ashore, and an Egyptian court appointed Aisha the legal guardian of the ship. Aman’s owner, a Bahraini firm named Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, refused to help for years, while its other ships—Sanad, Jerna S, Avonmoor—were also added to the database, with dozens of seafarers stuck onboard.
In correspondences with the ILO and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the Bahraini ship registry, a division of its Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications, made excuses for Tylos. The usually phlegmatic representative of the ITF, who had worked on eight cases related to the company in the previous two years, expressed her exasperation in response:
It is of course very common for irresponsible shipowners to deny all claims made against them and portray themselves as the hapless victims of commercial disputes or unavoidable events. . . . Whilst I have no reason to doubt the explanation regarding the commercial dispute and the challenges with repairs, this is no justification for not respecting the fundamental rights that must be afforded to seafarers in line with international standards. Do we now expect seafarers to accept conditions of slavery? These are strong words, but I am frankly shocked by this defence of the indefensible.
Aisha waited onboard the ship for the court to release him, while the other seafarers left one by one. Not much longer after its arrest, Aman ran out of fuel, clean water, electricity, and food. In March 2020, a storm tore the ship from its anchorage and blew it leeward, grounding it within reach of land. This allowed Aisha to swim ashore for water and food and to charge his mobile phone; he was only allowed on land for two hours a day. In those long four years, his seafarer brother steamed by a few times on another ship. The vessels were too far apart, however, and the two brothers could only speak by phone. While Aisha waited for a resolution, his mother died, leading him to contemplate suicide.
Aisha’s shipboard captivity only ended because a behemoth freighter, Ever Given, ran aground in the southern portion of the Suez Canal in March 2021, not too far from the beached Aman and its lonely passenger. The six-day-long blockage of the Suez Canal by Ever Given brought international scrutiny to the southern terminus of the Suez Canal and, via the intercession of the ITF and Christian charity The Mission to Seafarers, to Mohammed Aisha. News outlets produced stories about him. The various authorities moved, and the court released Aisha from his burden of guardianship.
A month later, as Aisha boarded a Syrian Air flight and repatriated to Syria, the crew of Ever Given began their own wait in the Great Bitter Lake—an anchorage for convoys of ships traveling in opposite directions through the Suez Canal—where they were towed after the ship was refloated six days after faltering. Captain Krishnan Kanthavel and his crew members remained onboard while the lawyers for the insurers, UK P&I Club; the Japanese shipowner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha; and the Taiwan-based ship-charterers, Evergreen Marine, tried to negotiate down the $916 million demanded by the Suez Canal Authority for the physical damage to the canal and for losses in fees incurred because of the stoppage of the passage. The distressed Indian crew of Ever Given waited some eighteen weeks before they were allowed to go on their way to Rotterdam.
Water, Water Every Where
Because they are isolated at sea for long periods of time, waiting has always been woven into the everyday rhythms of seafarers’ work and lives aboard. In the age of sail, when all ships were fettered to weather, seafarers waited out the seasons aboard ships or at port during the monsoon, traveling only in one direction or the other according to the prevailing winds. If winds and currents were hostile, they found themselves off course, traversing far longer routes with dwindling supplies. Sailors feared the endlessness of stilled ships. The central conceit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was a cursed becalming of the winds after a sailor shot an albatross:
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.
Seafarers today still spend a great deal of time waiting. They wait at anchor for berths in congested harbors to become free. They wait to cross borders at ports. They wait in quarantines. They wait aboard ships to convoy through the Suez Canal. If they are on ships that transport commodities for the spot market, they are sometimes ordered to wait at sea for more agreeable prices for their cargo. If they are told to slow down at sea to save fuel, they wait to come to port. Seafarers’ spouses, children, and families wait endlessly for their sailor to come home; sea shanties written to the rhythms of work on ships are matched by shore songs—especially by the mariners’ womenfolk—and rituals meant to hasten their return.
But among all moments of suspension at sea, the extractive logic of capital is most insidiously responsible for seafarer abandonments, like what was inflicted upon Mohammed Aisha aboard Aman. Unscrupulous shipowners or charterers can deliver a cargo and then claim bankruptcy, refusing to pay the seafarers while pocketing the revenues from the cargo. To do so, they must evade regulations. Abandoned ships are often stranded near the shores of a country which is not a signatory to the various international treaties intended to protect seafarers—or by the coasts of countries that have signed such treaties but rarely abide by them.
Most abandoned ships fly flags of convenience. Since the loosening of the regulations around the offshore registration of shipping companies and ships themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, firms are frequently incorporated in offshore secrecy jurisdictions that hide their ownership structures. Even if a shipping company is listed in the country where the owners reside, that company can own or charter ships flagged to—or registered in—a country which has no relationship to the country of the ship’s owners or the nationality of its seafarers. The regulations of such open registries grant shipowners much leeway in their adherence to labor or environmental regulations.
As of last December, the ILO’s database had in its twenty years of existence recorded 850 abandoned ships, with a total of nearly 12,000 seafarers left with unpaid wages, fighting to find a way home. Of these ships, the vast majority are registered in open registries like Liberia and the Marshall Islands. And the country whose shores the most ships are abandoned near is the United Arab Emirates, where the government is not a signatory to international laws protecting seafarers, and labor unions are proscribed and prosecuted by the state. Thus abandoned seafarers on those inhospitable shores have to rely on charity to survive day-to-day—never mind finding a way to recuperate their unpaid wages or returning home. South Asian and African seafarers—disproportionately represented in the abandonment database—have sometimes spent months, even years, awaiting on slowly disintegrating ships, unable to leave lest they forfeit their wages.
But the state of suspension inflicted on seafarers is not only shaped by a predatory industry with opaque structures. In the course of their labor, they are also uniquely exposed to unexpected catastrophes like coronavirus, war and geopolitical conflicts, and the fearfully anticipated disasters of climate change.
A Floating Grave
Joseph Conrad’s 1917 novella The Shadow-Line drew on his own first-time experience of helming a ship in the Gulf of Siam twenty-seven years before. It is a slow-moving, claustrophobic account of a sailing vessel stuck in the doldrums, with every sailor aboard smitten with a mysterious fever resembling malaria. The narrator’s delirious first mate has visions of the previous captain of the ship haunting the decks, and the stalwart ship’s cook suffers from a weak heart. Day after day, as the crew weakens and the supplies are depleted, the windless waiting persists:
The sparkle of the sea filled my eyes. It was gorgeous and barren, monotonous and without hope under the empty curve of the sky. The sails hung motionless and slack, the very folds of their sagging surfaces moved no more than carved granite. . . . The intense loneliness of the sea acted like poison on my brain. When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave. Who hasn’t heard of ships found floating, haphazard, with their crews all dead?
In the end, a breeze and the superhuman labor of the enfeebled and febrile crew bring the ship to shore, “too tired for anxiety, too tired for connected thought,” with the fever-besieged hiatus at sea aging the narrator into a kind of weary adulthood.
The feverish solitude of the sailors in The Shadow-Line foreshadows the stories of seafarers abandoned at sea during the Covid-19 pandemic. Between January and March 2020, as the virus moved across the oceans, lockdowns ground Chinese ports to a halt. Ships carrying ore and coal, oil and gas, and containers were ordered to slow steam to their Asian destinations or wait at anchor off the shores of Chinese harbors. Ironically, while freight rates for dry cargos dropped, charter rates for crude oil tankers skyrocketed. The decline in demand for oil and a simultaneous price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia had caused a glut in the stuff. Since landside storage tanks were already full, old tankers, barges, and other vessels were brought out of mothballs to store the crude at sea, causing a spike in price of vessels, which still had to be manned.
Until leisure travelers were forcibly grounded in the first few months of 2020, the virus also circulated in the close quarters of crowded cruise ships. Affluent passengers alighted in Australia, East Asia, and North America, taking the ailment with them as they traveled home. Holland America’s Zaandam, at least a fifth of whose 1,200 passengers had tested positive for Covid and four of whom had died at sea, arrived in Port Everglades, Florida, on April 3, 2020. After the passengers had gone home, the crew remained onboard, and the ship was forced to circle the Caribbean Sea for weeks thereafter. A similar fate befell many thousands of cruise ship crews—seafarers, hospitality workers, entertainers, and others—who were not released as their passengers had been.
As airports and ports closed, seafarers already on ships could not disembark. In ordinary circumstances, some 150,000 seafarers change over to and from ships each month. According to the International Maritime Organization, by September 2020, 400,000 seafarers were forsaken aboard ships wandering the oceans. In 2021, the number had reduced, but approximately 200,000 seafarers were still stranded. Some seafarers had spent two years at sea, far longer than the eleven-month cap agreed upon by the IMO and the ILO. For many embittered and anxious seafarers, their debts to recruiters and moneylenders at home accumulated in their absence. They lost family members to Covid. Some lost their homes and pieces of land. Some died aboard from illness or accidents, or by their own hands.
A psychologist at the University of Zadar, Ana Slišković, collected Covid testimonies from the Croatian seafarers who make up a significant portion of European seafarers plying the waves. They spoke of the difficulties of replenishing their food stores, of their plans for the remainder of the year having been scuttled, of depression and anxiety and uncertainty, of exhaustion. One officer enumerated the complaints of his crew members:
Work in the risk zone of infection, increased workload due to ports every day, frequent sleep breaks due to awakening to mooring lines, the employer’s requirement to renew the contract and inaction of international organizations in protecting the rights of seafarers negatively affect the psyche. Uncontrolled outbreaks of aggression, hate, depression, compulsive disorders, disruptive disorders, sleep disturbance, sudden mood swings, desire to sabotage, desire to escape, hatred for all international organizations designed to protect the rights of sailors, hatred of their profession, aversion and complete unwillingness to return to work at sea, suicidal thoughts.
While European and North American seafarers found some ports more sympathetic to their plight and employers more willing to facilitate their changeover, the quarantines at sea were more prolonged for Asian and African seafarers, who were denied disembarkation at ports and airports and disproportionately bore the costs of crew changeovers.
Any Port in a Storm
Abandonment at sea is not always unanticipated. The bewildering range of maritime insurance contracts attests to the forethought and deliberate planning for all eventualities in seaborne commerce, including war. There is, after all, plenty of precedent for its disruptions. After Israel’s surprise attack against Egypt in June 1967, its army occupied the Sinai Peninsula all the way to the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. In response, Gamal Abdel Nasser, then president of Egypt, ordered passenger ships and crude tankers to exit the Canal before scuttling barges and ships to block this major transport artery. Fifteen freighters were trapped in the Great Bitter Lake: four from Britain; two each from Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United States; and one each from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and France.
For many embittered and anxious seafarers, their debts to recruiters and moneylenders at home accumulated in their absences.
Not long after the end of the Six-Day War, Israel and Egypt would again come into conflict in the War of Attrition. Initially, as it was unclear when or how this confrontation would end, the shipping companies maintained the crew aboard the ships in the Great Bitter Lake. But when, after three months, it was apparent that no end was in sight, the first round of crew was relieved. Subsequently, seafarers were rotated out at three-month intervals. After two years, some of the ships were moored to one another, and the seafarers assigned were reduced from two hundred in total across all ships to a skeleton crew of fifty. The shipping companies continued to pay for Egyptian chandlers to deliver food and drinks to the ships, which carried industrial cargoes like steel and specialist sand used for sandpapers, but also perishables. On a forum dedicated to maritime history, one seafarer recalled seeing such cargo thrown overboard. “I can remember the lake having millions of apples bobbing around and we dumped 200 tons of rice,” he wrote, the jettisoned sacks “moving with insect life.”
As time passed, Saharan sand settled on the vessels, earning them the sobriquet the “Yellow Fleet.” The seafarers aboard the ships formed the Great Bitter Lake Association to share skills, resources, and information, and to pass on the accumulated memories and knowledge to their replacements. They planned sporting and social events, shadowing the Olympics and the World Cup. They collected wood and netting and built a football pitch aboard Port Invercargill. They used their machining skills to print postage stamps—which, poignantly, were recognized and franked by the Egyptian postal service—and produced gold medals for the Great Bitter Lake Olympics, the Polish seafarers taking the lion’s share.
The men also formed friendships across the Iron Curtain. When a year into their abeyance in the lake, Soviet tanks—with the support of Poland and Bulgaria—crushed the Prague Spring, the seafarers from all ships gathered together with their Czech friends and commiserated. Many of the seafarers chose to rotate back in multiple times, not only for the hazard pay, but also because of the camaraderie that had developed in the Association. In 1975, the Canal was reopened, but only two ships were able to sail under their own steam; the other vessels had to be towed, some to shipyards for repair and resale, and others to be scrapped. In all, three thousand seafarers had spent time aboard the Yellow Fleet, waiting to depart the Great Bitter Lake.
Ill Winds
In an ingenious essay on how work discipline in industrializing Britain created “time-thrift,” historian of the British working class E. P. Thompson argues that “in mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time.’” New habits of work have been enforced through “the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports” and “a clear demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life.’” The paradox of life aboard modern ships is that even as seafaring should be subject to nature’s own compulsion, to paraphrase Thompson, the rhythms of the winds and tides, work is nevertheless shaped by a totalizing time discipline.
The global color line also affects how waiting is apportioned and the shape that it takes.
Time spent at the helm or in the engine room is fragmented into short shifts that follow neither circadian rhythms nor conventional working hours. Meals are served at specific hours and if missed are irreplaceable. Some seafarers spend nine to eleven months at a time at sea; others only two to four months. On modern megafreighters, even times of leisure are regulated, delimited, and disciplined. Since living quarters are assigned according to one’s place in the ship’s hierarchy, lower-ranked mariners may be made to share claustrophobic cabins with four to eight colleagues, subjecting even their time of rest to vagaries of work relations.
The strict hierarchies that reproduce time-thrift on the ship work through both coercion and custom: captains are “masters” and sovereigns of the ship both legally and habitually. Seafarers’ rank defines their temporal but also spatial allowances onboard. Crew and officers eat in different mess halls. The higher a seafarer’s rank is, the larger their living quarters and the smaller the possibility of having to share it. Tables at meals are typically organized according to rank, with the captain sitting at the head of the table and the first mate and chief engineer at his (and it is still mostly “his”) elbows, and so on down the table.
Rank, place of origin, and flagging translate into unequal allocations of time, space, and wages aboard. Striated maritime wage structures and unequal working conditions, sometimes even on the same ship, all too frequently map onto the global color line, the vector of racialized exploitation described by the great African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois as distinguishing the continents from one another: “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” The global color line also affects how waiting is apportioned and the shape that it takes. When researching the Yellow Fleet, what forcefully struck me was that the trapped seafarers in the Great Bitter Lake were from the same countries where their ships were owned and whose flags they flew—all European or American. They were paid hazard wages, and their time aboard maintaining and guarding the ships was spent mostly in friendship and leisure. They did not run out of food, and all joked about the accumulation of a “mid-canal mountain of beer bottles” thrown overboard. They were able to disembark and travel through battle lines—albeit having to confirm their identity at multiple checkpoints—to finally make their way home. Some chose to return again and again.
Mohammed Aisha, by contrast, was neglected on Aman alone, prevented from going home for four years. When he was finally given a reprieve, doctors examining him determined that he was suffering from severe malnutrition and psychological distress. The dozens of Asian and African seafarers who’ve been abandoned on the shores of the UAE subsisted on rice and dhal for months on end. They had no recourse to leisure activities, as they were expected to upkeep their ships. And the length of seafarers’ quarantine on Covid-ravaged ships was determined above all by their countries of origin and their ships’ flags. The brevity of waiting time at ports granted to individual seafarers attempting entry depends on their passports. Not all waiting is created equal.
These inequalities are likely to become even more entrenched as we hurtle toward environmental catastrophe. As climate change accelerates, so do dramatic shifts in currents, winds, and tides, and so will the uncertainties and perils of waiting. Over the past year, ships traveling between Asia and Europe have had to reroute around the southern tip of the African continent to avoid the Yemeni blockade of the Red Sea, undertaken to resist the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. But vessels’ journeys around the Cape of Good Hope have been delayed by unprecedented storms, forcing the ships to shore. Ships have lost containers at sea, and accounting for them has added time to the trips.
Elsewhere, hurricanes in the Atlantic and cyclones in the Pacific are becoming more violent, causing chaos in all forms of transport. The drought-hit locks of the Panama Canal have been so bereft of water that the size of permitted ships and the frequency of their crossings have been compulsorily reduced. Scientists warn of the imminent collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could devastate Atlantic ecosystems and make traversing the ocean far lengthier and more unpredictable and dangerous.
Stormier seas, inhospitable weather, and the shifting rhythms of an angry planet will play havoc with the life of seafarers aboard. As history and experience have shown, those who will struggle to recuperate their lives and livelihoods from the maelstrom, and from the shipping companies who put them in harm’s way, will be those on the “wrong” side of the color line.