The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca Gomperts. The Dutch doctor and founder of Women on Waves traverses the globe in a converted medical ship carrying an international team of volunteer doctors that provides abortions in places where it has been criminalized.

The ocean, and the opportunistic quirk in maritime law, allowed Gomperts, in her words, to help women “give themselves the license” to induce a miscarriage. More broadly, Women on Waves aims to “de-medicalize” an issue that, for Gomperts and many other women, is a matter of personal health. By taking her passengers offshore, Gomperts said she was trying to remove doctors (including herself) and the state as intermediaries between women and control over their own bodies.

In the Adelaide’s discreet comings and goings, there was also a vivid reminder of just how arbitrary, bordering on silly, some of the laws are, though with very real consequences for the lives of many.

Gomperts usually alerted local media in advance that she was coming, because one of her goals was to spur debate. This trip from Ixtapa was initially clandestine, however, because Gomperts wanted to avoid a repeat of what had occurred two weeks earlier in Guatemala. Tipped off to the group’s plans, the Guatemalan government sent police to the marina where Gomperts was docked.

In Ireland, the ship faced bomb threats. In Poland, Gomperts was met in port by protesters throwing eggs and red paint. In Morocco, she was nearly accosted by an angry mob. In Spain, opponents tried to tow her boat.

Since late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, dozens of Mexican women have been reported by family, hospital staff, or others for having an abortion and were later prosecuted for the crime. Abortion remains illegal, but an estimated one million women find clandestine ways to undergo the procedure each year.

In some areas of the country, any pregnancy that did not bring a healthy baby into the world raised suspicions about the mother. Hundreds of women have been jailed after seeking medical care due to botched abortions. Hospitals were expected to report suspicious miscarriages to the police just as they would gunshot wounds.

In April 2007, Mexico City decriminalized abortion, allowing the termination of pregnancies without restriction during the first twelve weeks of gestation. That triggered a backlash across the country. At least half of the country’s thirty-one states passed constitutional amendments declaring that life begins at conception.

Before boarding the Adelaide, I read about the case of one woman named Patricia Mendez, who miscarried in 2015 when she was twenty. Mendez later described how police and detectives were summoned to the hospital ward. She was forced to sign papers, and a nurse held the fetus to her face. “Kiss him,” she recounted being told by the nurse. “You have killed him.” Her boyfriend’s family held a funeral for the fetus, and Mendez was required to attend.

Having sailed the waters of the Caribbean, Mexico, and California, Bearden was fluent in reading maps and nautical charts. And yet, his view was that these man-made constructs were only ever works in progress and almost always serving someone’s interest.

States draw borders based on their own interests, he said. And while they might have the power to do so when it comes to maps of land and sea, Bearden said, states should not be in the business of determining the borders on women’s bodies.

Maritime borders may seem arbitrary, but their consequences can be stark. Consider the Death on the High Seas Act. Passed in 1920, this American law dictates that a lawsuit over the accidental death of a sailor on the high seas is limited to pecuniary loss, meaning his family can only seek repayment for monetary losses and not for pain, suffering, emotional distress, and other hard-to-estimate damages.

The law is a vestige of English common law that views death at sea as an act of God for which shipowners can’t possibly be held liable. In the early days of shipping, that might have been true. Today, though, advances in safety—self-righting lifeboats, emergency locator beacons, and watertight holds, for example—mean that many fatal accidents on the high seas are not unavoidable or acts of God. Instead, they are often examples of gross negligence by ship captains and the companies that oversee them.

Battered by a brutal storm in the South Atlantic in 1884, a British-flagged yacht called the Mignonette sank, but its captain and three other men escaped in a dinghy. About three weeks later, they were nearly dead from hunger and thirst. Facing certain death, the captain lunged at the seventeen-year-old cabin boy in the dinghy, slitting his throat with a penknife and killing him. The three men were rescued several days later by a passing German ship, having survived by eating much of the cabin boy, parts of whose body the Germans discovered in the boat.

Once onshore, the survivors were put on trial for murder and cannibalism. The lawyer for the accused argued two points in their defense. First, because the cabin boy was killed not on the British-flagged yacht but in a dinghy, which was floating on the high seas, neither English law nor any other applied. Second, the circumstances facing these men were so extreme that it was incongruous to think of laws applying at all.

Simpson explained that while the sailors’ lawyer was technically correct on the law, the verdict in the case had less to do with jurisprudence than with politics. The crown’s magistrates hoped to send the public a message that their authority had to be maintained even in the distant arteries connecting the British Empire.

The woman said yes, and Gomperts handed her five white pills: one mifepristone (what used to be called RU-486) and four misoprostol. “Miso,” as it is often called, has been used around the world in various ways, including to treat postpartum hemorrhages and to prevent ulcers. In many countries, it is stocked on pharmacy shelves primarily for these ailments. Women desperate to end a pregnancy often have no way of knowing that the right dosage of this readily accessible drug can also be used to trigger a miscarriage.

You get very good at talking to yourself at sea, one seafarer had told me. Another had described these voices as “soul whispers.” Some are dark, others less so, but they all feel deeply personal. While valuable in its own right, this internal dialogue also seemed relevant to my understanding of the outlaw ocean. It hinted at why so many of the people I met around the world on this watery frontier seemed to share an independent mindedness that I rarely encountered on land.

After completing her medical training, she worked for several years as a ship’s doctor on a Greenpeace vessel called the Rainbow Warrior II. During that time, she met a woman who had been raped by a man who was supposed to help her get an abortion. Gomperts also met an eighteen-year-old girl in South America who was trying to raise her three younger siblings. Gomperts said that the girl had recently lost her mother to a back-alley abortion.

Gomperts faxed Dutch authorities a certificate saying that the clinic was not a berth on the ship but a work of art, titled A-Portable. As such, she argued, it did not need to comply with certain maritime rules.

Gomperts had initially planned on performing surgical abortions on her ship, but the permitting and logistics became insurmountable. So the group sticks to medical abortions, which entail administering pills to induce miscarriage. Others have floated similar ideas, but none have left the drawing board.

Gomperts recounted some of the distressed emails and phone calls she had received in recent years. A woman in Morocco wrote to say that she was considering drinking bleach to end her pregnancy. An American soldier serving in Afghanistan who had been raped explained that she was unable to get an abortion on or near the base. A British woman in an abusive relationship said that her boyfriend would beat her if he found out she was pregnant or that she was trying to get an abortion.

“We don’t break the law; we use it to our advantage,” she said, adding that she thinks of herself more as an artist. There was an art to finding legal loopholes, she added, and an art to provoking a public debate while protecting patients’ privacy.

One of the organization’s most successful provocations happened during Gomperts’s visit to Portugal in 2004. The group tried to visit the country’s coast but was rebuffed by the government, which sent two warships to create a blockade. In the ensuing media firestorm, Gomperts was invited on Portuguese television to defend Women on Waves. Instead, she used the airtime to explain how to end a pregnancy using miso pills. Though abortions were illegal in Portugal, miso was available in local pharmacies, she boldly pointed out to the country’s hundreds of thousands of television viewers.

Clearly, when it came to what happens at sea, some laws were enforced more aggressively than others. In my reporting, I’d seen far less effort from governments in policing minimum wage rules, limits on working hours, or catch quotas. And unlike the captains I’d watched elsewhere take fish from protected marine zones or the companies that condoned slave labor, Gomperts was not breaking the law but taking advantage of a loophole.

“Rafted” refers to a particularly ominous fate whereby a crew, discovering such uninvited guests, sets them adrift in the middle of the ocean and leaves them to die.

After nine days, the hungry, defeated men crawled out of hiding again, but this time they presented themselves to the ship’s crew. The infuriated captain locked Mndolwa and Kobelo in a room. On some ships, the crew would have just kept the stowaways detained in a cabin until they reached the next port. Not so on the Dona Liberta. The crew built a rickety raft made of empty oil drums and a wooden tabletop. Wielding a knife, one of the crewmen fetched the stowaways and marched them up to the deck, where a rope stretched down to the raft bobbing on the waves. The crewman then ordered Mndolwa and Kobelo over the railing. “Go down!” the man with the knife yelled. “Go!”

Kobelo and Mndolwa’s experience was unusual, but increasingly port authorities were refusing to allow ships to off-load stowaways on their shores, often citing security concerns and the cost of detaining them.

For the people making these crossings, few routes are as perilous. In interviews, half a dozen stowaways compared their experience to hiding in the trunk of a car for days, weeks, or months traveling to an unknown place across the most brutal of terrains.

They might have believed they had won a free ticket to a new life, but concealed corners that might at first look safe often turned deadly once ships set sail.

Maritime newsletters and shipping insurance reports offered a macabre accounting of the victims: “crushed in the chain locker,” “asphyxiated by bunker fumes,” “found under a retracted anchor.” Most often, though, death came more slowly. Vomiting from seasickness led to dehydration. People passed out from exhaustion or starvation.

“Why do you put us in jail and let the crew go?” Mndolwa recalled asking one official, referring to the crew of the Dona Liberta. “We deal with crimes on land,” the official responded. “Not on the water.”

Without irony, he added that his office had received several requests to detain the ship, but the request had nothing to do with the cruel treatment of the stowaways cast off at sea. The requests came from the ship’s foreign creditors, who were afraid of losing money on their floating investment.

To Mndolwa, who was barely literate and had never before left Africa, Kobelo’s descriptions of his time in Singapore—free hospital visits, restaurant meals, beaches where the police never shooed him away—sounded far better than life in Cape Town.

Stowaways like Mndolwa have for centuries been a nightmare for ship operators, turning the tables on the roles of captor and captured. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, Peter Rabitz has run a firm called Unicon, based in Bremen, Germany, that handles the logistics of repatriating stowaways on behalf of shipping companies and their insurers.

Rabitz recounted a case from 2015 of a sixteen-year-old Guinean stowaway who was found aboard a Danish tanker. The stowaway refused to disembark or provide his name or country of origin. The shipping company declined to have him forcefully removed in part because it could not figure out where to send him. In a case like this, the roles of captor and captive get confusing, Rabitz said. The stowaway is trapped while also holding the ship hostage.

He added that stowaways are often savvy and skilled adversaries to captains or the shipping companies left with figuring out how to handle them. Many stowaways know, for example, that if they allege that they were assaulted by the crew, they can tie up a ship with a long investigation in port, leading to delays costing millions of dollars, Carlson said. “You have a tanker carrying $200 million worth of crude for Exxon or Mobil, tugs, supply boats, dock agents, an entire port refinery scene waiting to unload it in an extremely tight window of time before that ship needs to clear the berth,” Carlson said. “Then you have a fifteen-year-old kid who could delay the entire thing.”

When a shipping company hires Rabitz’s firm, his staff flies to the country where the ship is docked. They board the vessel and gently (he emphasized that intimidation never works) try to convince the stowaways that they are not going to receive asylum and that life in a detention center is not an attractive option for them.

The lesson here seemed to be that stowing away might start out as a mix of desperation and romanticism: a kind of hitchhiking, grabbing a ride without any cost or pain to anyone because the ships are traveling to their destinations one way or the other. But the reality was far bleaker: stowing away quite often turned into a showdown, where somebody won or lost, paying with either money or his life.

Ahmed Abu Khattala, on the other hand, was among the taken. The aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks created an entirely new realm of jurisprudence over questions of detention and interrogation not just on land but also on the high seas. Abu Khattala’s was one of those national security cases: he was not shanghaied by human traffickers like the migrant deckhands I met in Thailand and Borneo. Abu Khattala was abducted and whisked away to sea by American soldiers.

On the high seas, the legality of detention and interrogation is murky. American military ships fly the U.S. flag, of course, and as such they are under the jurisdiction of American law. This would seem to require that detainees on these vessels be read their Miranda rights. It is not clear, however, to what extent Miranda rights apply on the high seas, even to American detainees.

In pleadings before the U.S. District Court, Abu Khattala’s attorneys argued that interrogating him in such contexts made a mockery of the law. The government’s use of the high seas, they said, was little more than “well-planned lawlessness.” Testimony given by Abu Khattala at sea while tortured should be withheld, they said. In August 2017, a federal judge dismissed the request and ruled that Abu Khattala’s statements made during his detention at sea would be admissible in court.

He explained that many of the Afghans held at Guantánamo Bay had no knowledge of the ocean. To them, the sea was a fearsome beast, he said. “All that the Afghans knew was that it was a lot of water that killed and ate people,” he told me, adding that American interrogators took advantage of this. “ ‘When we finish with you here, you will be taken to the sea and you all will be thrown there,’

The ocean was not just a convenient location for holding suspects, Adayfi said. “It was also a powerful psychological tool for getting information from these same suspects.” Most of the detainees at Guantánamo were held in outdoor cells, which happened to be only a couple hundred yards from the water’s edge, but none of the detainees could see the ocean fully because the surrounding fences were covered in tarps.

The truest examples of men being detained at sea were all around me, but only after I stopped looking for them did I take notice. Time and again, I had stumbled across men on broken ships anchored far from shore. These men were abandoned but unable to leave their ships.

Having stretched their resources to the limit, cash-strapped shipowners declared bankruptcy. Cutting their losses, they disavowed their ships, stranding crew members who were usually still on board the ship far off at sea or anchored in a foreign port. Like the Flying Dutchman, these men were left to roam or sit and wait, sometimes for years.

In Athens, Greece, while exploring how ships are stolen by maritime repo men and corrupt port officials, I came across the crew of the Sofia—ten desperate Filipinos, marooned on an asphalt tanker, anchored half a dozen miles from shore, and unpaid for over five months. While in the Gulf of Oman on a floating arms depot called the Seapol One, where private maritime security guards wait in international waters between deployments on ships, I heard from half a dozen guards whose employer had stopped taking their calls. Their ship had grown rancid and overrun with vermin.

A veteran sailor, Cristof knew something was wrong from the moment he stepped on board the 370-foot Dona Liberta in June 2011 in the port of Truro, England. Cristof boarded the month after the Dona Liberta had rafted the two stowaways. When the ship arrived in the port of Truro, the operator had quickly sent its crew home and looked to hire an entirely new batch of sailors who had no role in the cruel banishment of Mndolwa and Kobelo.

Anchored in British waters, a couple miles from land near the port of Truro, the Dona Liberta was not going anywhere. Cristof said he stayed put because he had no plane ticket home and hoped the job might eventually pan out.

In situations like these, a tangle of financial ties knot the men in place. Each of the Romanians had paid more than $1,000 to the manning agency to get their jobs on the Dona Liberta. Leaving the ship would mean forfeiting any chance of recouping that deposit or collecting the wages promised to them. Acting without the owner’s consent risked being blacklisted from future work.