The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Especially striking was the fact that for all his brazenness, Roy appeared to be operating legally or at least opportunistically within a legal void.

As absurdist and fanciful as Sealand seemed, the British took it seriously. Recently declassified U.K. documents from the late 1960s reveal that Sealand prompted considerable fretting among officers, who feared that another Cuba was being created, this time on England’s doorstep.

At least since Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was first published in 1870, people have dreamed of creating permanent colonies on or under the ocean. Typically, these projects were inspired by the view that government was a kind of kryptonite that weakened entrepreneurialism.

WOULD YOU KINDLY

Many of these projects might have made sense in theory, but they never accounted for the harsh reality of ocean life. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave, and solar energy to provide power, but building renewable-energy systems that could survive the weather and the corrosive seawater was difficult and costly. Communication options remain limited: satellite-based connections were prohibitively expensive, as was laying a fiber-optic cable or relying on point-to-point lasers or microwaves that tethered the offshore installation to land. Traveling to and from seasteads was challenging. Waves and storms could be especially disruptive.

Thiel also invested in a start-up venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California.

Over the years, the biggest threats to Sealand were not just from governments but also from people his family thought were friends.

Sealand was missing three fundamental characteristics that it needed to be considered a nation under international law: national territory, state authority, and people.

his lawyer, Gernot Pütz,

Michael also dismissed my suggestion that the coup was karmic. “No honor among thieves, right?” I asked. Sealand was born not of thievery but of conquest, he rebutted, which felt to me like a distinction without a difference. “We govern Sealand. It’s not a lawless place.”

But then the FBI called in 1997. They wanted to talk about the murder of the fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his Miami home. “By this point, we were pretty accustomed to getting bizarre phone calls related to Sealand,” Michael said. The killer, Andrew Cunanan, committed suicide on a houseboat he had broken into several days after murdering Versace. But during the investigation the owner of the boat, a man named Torsten Reineck had presented forged Sealand passports to authorities.

Investigators traced the passports and the website to Spain, where they found evidence that Achenbach had waited patiently to stage another coup, though this time from afar. Michael unpersuasively claimed to know nothing about the numerous fraudulent schemes that peddled Sealand’s name and diplomatic credentials online and in the real world.

Later that same year, the Civil Guard, Spain’s paramilitary police, arrested a flamenco nightclub owner named Francisco Trujillo for selling diluted gasoline at his Madrid filling station. Identifying himself as Sealand’s “consul,” Trujillo produced a diplomatic passport and claimed immunity from prosecution.

Whatever their motivations, these negotiations were orchestrated by a business called Sealand Trade Development Authority Limited. The Panama Papers included evidence that this company, set up by the Panama City law firm Mossack Fonseca, was tied to a vast global network of money launderers and other criminals.

He added that in 2010 he had declined a request from representatives of WikiLeaks for a Sealand passport and safe haven for the group’s founder, Julian Assange.

Since 2008, Google has been working to build offshore data centers that would use seawater to cool the servers—a green answer to cutting enormous air-conditioning costs on land.

The founders of HavenCo had big plans. To deter intruders, they would protect the servers with at least four heavily armed guards. The rooms housing the machines would be filled with a pure nitrogen atmosphere. The nitrogen was unbreathable, which meant anyone entering the room would have to wear scuba gear. An elite team of coders and online security specialists would police against hackers. To avoid network connections being disrupted by Britain or other governments that wanted to crack down on HavenCo because of the content it hosted, Sealand would have redundant internet connections to multiple countries and, as a further backup, a satellite tie. Customers’ data would be encrypted at all times so that even HavenCo employees would not know what clients were doing. Most of the plans failed.

No shit

The Bates family was certainly daring, but the secret to Sealand’s survival was its limited ambitions. Irreverent but inconsequential, Sealand was not Al-Qaeda or ISIS seeking to create a grand caliphate. In the view of its powerful neighbors, Sealand was merely a rusty kingdom, easier to ignore than to eradicate.

nine, and the Oyang 70 was thirty-eight years old. Port captains called the Oyang 70 “tender,” a euphemism for unstable. A month before it set sail, a New Zealand inspector ranked the ship as “high risk,” citing over a dozen safety violations, including one of the ship’s main doors below deck that was not watertight.

One of the Oyang’s unsolved problems was the man at the helm. Shin had replaced the previous captain, who fell overboard in a drunken stupor and drowned. When the ship cast its first net that day, Shin had been at the helm for nine months. Former crew members referred to him as an “angry man”—sullen, prone to screaming, and almost always carrying a bottle of clear liquid that he swigged.

In many of the outlaw ocean stories I covered, one consistent theme was how the vastness of the seas made it difficult to chase down bad actors—finding the criminals in the first place was often impossible.

As the crew struggled with the net on August 18, everyone on board knew it was more fish than the boat could handle. No one knew by how much, though, because there were no batteries in the net’s weight sensors. The cost of replacing the ship’s trawl net was more than $150,000.

Other captains would later testify that this catch was more than double the size of a “bag” that they would have been willing to pull onto a ship of its size. Behind the ship, the bloated net began dragging the Oyang 70’s rudder deep underwater, jutting its bow awkwardly toward the inky sky.

But the list remained, and water began rushing in through the open “offal chute,” a port-side door for expelling fish guts and heads into the ocean. At the same time, dead fish and debris clogged the ship’s scuppers, trapping on board the water that should have drained off. The door to the engine room below, which also should have been sealed, was open. So, too, was the fish hold.

The ability of a boat to flush its decks is as essential as humans’ ability to breathe. Water always needs to be leaving the vessel faster than it’s entering. When it’s not, problems multiply quickly.

What had been obvious before was now unavoidable: the Oyang 70 was going down. Chaos overtook the ship. On the bridge, Shin made a distress call on the VHF radio. Men began leaping into the sea. Only the Korean officers wore life jackets.

The ship had sixty-eight survival suits, designed to insulate against the cold—more than enough for the fifty-one men on board. None of the crew put one on. It’s unclear whether any of them knew how.

Greed, not water, sank the Oyang 70. The ship had tried to swallow too much fish; the ocean swallowed the ship instead.

Rescuers never recovered the captain’s body. Among the five other crew members who died, three were found frozen, floating in a lifeboat. On land, a preventable disaster like this might have spelled the end of a company. Not so on the open ocean.

In the world of deep-sea fishing, the Sajo Group is a leviathan. Founded in 1971, the group oversees a huge fleet of more than seventy fishing ships. The company’s slogan is “Nature is delicious.”

By outsourcing the recruitment, logistics, and payroll of foreign crews, the company centralized profits and decentralized liability.

But even Sajo Oyang’s deft fixer couldn’t control the publicity surrounding what happened next. Early on the cold morning of June 20, 2011, a parishioner went to her church in Lyttelton, where she discovered thirty-two Indonesian men hiding in the nave. Hemmed in by mountains that form a natural amphitheater on the eastern edge of New Zealand’s southern island, Lyttelton is a quiet port town of about twenty-two hundred residents just outside Christchurch. Shivering and distraught, the Indonesian men had fled the “model” Oyang 75 while the ship was being unloaded.

The expanse of the sea and the dictatorial power of officers over crews allow cruel and abusive behavior that is often only uncovered when a ship sinks.

Beyond the abhorrent working conditions on its ships, the Oyang fleet was putting entire ecosystems at risk with its fishing practices. One ship was impounded in Russia for illegal fishing and later fined in New Zealand for discharging thousands of gallons of used engine oil into the sea.

Workers on Sajo Oyang ships described meals speckled with dead bugs and mattresses riddled with biting mites, men hiding in closets from violent officers, and rapes that occurred in nearby bunks that they felt powerless to stop.

On one of the company’s other ships in New Zealand’s waters, a deckhand named Santoso accidentally crushed his finger under a heavy roll of rope. When it was later amputated, he was sent immediately back to work below deck, reopening his wound. He woke up at night to find roaches crawling on it, drawn by the dried blood.

Most of the crew members on the Sajo Oyang ships were from Tegal in central Java, Indonesia, recruited by labor agents and manning agencies through an intricate system of debt bondage. They had signed contracts in English, a language they did not speak. Typically, their salary was about $235 per month—a fraction of the minimum wage required under law, at least while they worked in New Zealand’s waters.

Breaching the contracts would bring economic ruin to their families. Susanto, a deckhand on the Oyang 77, put up his elementary and junior high school graduation certificates. In his small village, such records are irreplaceable. If he failed to get the papers back, he would be unemployable.

Meanwhile, the Sajo Oyang company worked to protect its brand. To try to figure out who was funneling information to Michael Field, the New Zealand reporter who continued to dominate coverage of the industry, Inwood submitted open-records requests to government agencies and the University of Auckland, seeking emails and other documents. When the U.S. ambassador on human trafficking, Luis CdeBaca, traveled to New Zealand to discuss the claims of abuse in the fishing industry, Michael Field reported that the Sajo Oyang company hired a private investigator to trail him.

The company had good reason to fight the bad publicity. The New Zealand government had begun issuing fines: the equivalent of $340,200 for the Oyang 75’s dumping of low-value catches to replace them with more valuable fish, $8,500 for illegally dumping oil at sea, and $97,600 for when the Oyang 77 tossed more than seventy-three tons of fish overboard.

In August 2014, the parliament passed a law expelling all foreign fishing vessels from its national waters. Fishing companies had two years to comply and were given the option of changing the nationality—their ships’ “flag”—to New Zealand.

Still, seafarer unions and lawyers for the fishing boat workers questioned whether the government had gone far enough. They argued that the effect of New Zealand’s law would be to push bad behavior elsewhere as the worst scofflaws simply opted to leave New Zealand’s waters and set up shop in jurisdictions that exert even less control over foreign fishing fleets.

The regulatory response to the Oyang tragedies was a textbook case of dissipated outrage. Amid the revelations of horrifying mistreatment of ship workers, the public’s shock forced lawmakers and regulators to act. But over time, the shipping industry shifted and muddied the narrative.

Storm waves in the Bering Sea have been known to grow to more than ninety feet, the stuff of apocalyptic movies. Walls of water that big can roll a ship in seconds. But the size of a wave isn’t its only deadly threat. Timing is critical. A medium-sized wave can topple an already-listing ship. Placement matters, too: Is it a broadside blow or a top-down slam? The upkeep of a vessel, especially its drainage capacity, also can determine whether it survives a good drubbing.

Kye-hwan made two stupendously bad calls. First, he ordered his men to keep working through the foul weather. “Forced overfishing” was the expression that investigators later used in faulting him for not standing down that day. Second, Kye-hwan overruled his bosun, who pleaded with him not to open the fish hold where the nets dump their load.

The wave landed on the 501 from above the hold, delivering a roaring crush of water directly inside the ship. The wave punched a hole the size of a car tire in the wooden wall of the storage area. It was among the half a dozen factors that contributed to the sinking of the ship that day.

Sajo Oyang claimed that there were seventy-four survival suits for the ship’s crew of sixty, though, once again and for unknown reasons, few of the men wore the suits when tragedy struck. Only the Russian inspector on the ship and a Korean crewman put them on. All but seven men on board the ship died that night.

The horrors that repeatedly befell the hapless crews of Sajo Oyang ships were infuriating and tragic. More important, though, they illustrated the chaotic, desultory nature of maritime regulation. A company in any other industry that tolerated repeated disasters, saw withering public scrutiny, and yet was still able to continue its business largely uninterrupted would be an international scandal.

When I met Harding in Jakarta, she was in a foul mood. She had just heard that day from an appellate court in New Zealand that back wages for workers rescued from the Oyang 70 could not come from seizing and selling other ships belonging to the company. “They expect us to force the company to get wages by selling a ship that’s sitting on the seafloor,” she said. Personally in debt more than $50,000 from the case, Harding planned to appeal the matter to New Zealand’s Supreme Court.

Culture certainly plays a role as well. Ships are masculine and military-like arenas. There is honor in hardship and the ability to endure it without complaint. Governance on board is rigidly hierarchical and decidedly undemocratic. Feedback from the rank and file is generally unwelcome.

Though it is not entirely accurate to describe the ocean as a lawless place, it is certainly a confounding knot of jurisdictions, treaties, and national laws litigated over centuries of seafaring travel and commerce. Determining whether activity at sea constitutes a crime often depends, in a sense, on where in the water it happens.