The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

What made the specific reef we were exploring so intriguing was that its existence seemed to defy many beliefs about coral reefs. Although corals were not plants, sunlight was usually essential to their survival. They needed it to power the zooxanthellae, the microscopic algae that live inside them and make up most of their food. This is why most corals grow in shallow, clearer water. The Amazon Reef, on the other hand, was located in deep, turbid waters that were a mix of fresh and salt water.

Global warming was imperiling the world’s corals because the rising temperatures were changing the ocean’s chemistry, he explained. Corals thrive in alkaline waters, but fossil-fuel emissions were making the seas more acidic.

The scientists shot each other glances that were almost gleeful, as if they were relishing the opportunity to share a ghost story around the campfire. These were notoriously difficult waters, they told me. At its mouth, the muddy river was the color of chocolate milk and the currents were strong. Of all the freshwater that flowed into the world’s oceans, about 20 percent of it came from the Amazon. Because of their differing densities, the mix of freshwater and salt water made the underwater world here look like a layer cake. The seafloor was mud in some areas, sand in others. This further complicated the way the water moved.

Another scientist, Nils Asp, an oceanographer from the Federal University of Pará in Brazil, told me that one of the biggest challenges for drillers was simply piercing their way through thousands more feet of thick and unstable silt than was typically found elsewhere. The plume was a marauding threat, the scientists explained. It could swallow a driller’s ROV in a matter of minutes. And the front edge of the sea shelf, where most of the oil was thought to reside, routinely experienced massive underwater landslides that could topple rigs.

A six-inch-long white fish moved in and out of a hole in the seafloor. Over the radio, Hocevar noted the fish was called a slippery dick, after its reputation for escaping nets and fishermen’s hands.

SLIPPERY DICK

While forced labor exists throughout the world, nowhere is the problem more rampant than in the South China Sea, and especially in the Thai fishing fleet.

With rising fuel prices and fewer fish close to shore, maritime labor researchers predict that more boats will resort to venturing farther out to sea, making the mistreatment of migrants more likely. The work is brutal. And in this bloated, inefficient, and barely profitable national fleet, captains require crew members to simply do what they were told, when they were told.

As consumers, there is a growing sense that cell phones have become a kind of police force to counter such abuses in almost all aspects of life. If something bad is happening, it will likely be captured and posted on YouTube. But that rarely happens at sea, where indentured servitude remains a standard business practice.

At the front of the trawler, a shirtless, emaciated man huddled with a rusty metal shackle around his bruised neck and a three-foot chain anchoring the collar to a post on the deck.

Long had never intended to go to sea. Near his village outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, he met a man at a Buddhist festival who offered him a construction job in Thailand and help getting into the country.

As I waited to meet Long, I spent hours at the Stella Maris office poring through a binder full of case files. It was a horrifying catalog of cruel abuses, torture, and murder at sea.

Som Nang had worked on a type of boat known as a mother ship. Carrying everything from fuel and extra food to spare nets and replacement labor, these lumbering vessels, often over a hundred feet long, functioned as the Walmarts of the ocean—floating, all-purpose resupply stores.

Once a load of fish was transferred to a mother ship, it was combined with other catch below deck in cavernous refrigerators, and there was almost no way for port authorities to determine its provenance. It became virtually impossible to know whether it was caught legally by paid fishermen or poached illegally by shackled migrants.

The longer he worked on the boats, the lighter Long’s debt should have become for the money he owed to the captain who had paid the cost for his illegal travel across the border. Instead, time only tightened Long’s bondage. His captivity began looking like a life sentence.

The only thing more shocking than seeing the man shackled, Som Nang said, was the fact that no one else around him on the mother ship seemed surprised by it. After returning to port, Som Nang contacted Stella Maris, which began raising the 25,000 baht, roughly $750, needed to buy Long’s freedom.

In April 2014, Long’s captivity ended in the most anticlimactic of ways. On his supply ship’s next rendezvous with Long’s captors, Som Nang carried a brown paper bag full of Thai currency from Stella Maris to a meeting point in the middle of the South China Sea, roughly a week’s travel from shore.

Long’s case was extreme. Most fishing captains don’t resort to shackling their crew. Typically, debt and distance from shore are enough to keep workers captive.

Complicating the enforcement problem further, some of these officials were complicit in the fishing industry’s human trafficking, taking bribes to allow safe passage across the border. Many migrants had reported to UN officials and human rights groups of being rescued by police from one smuggler, only to be resold by police to another smuggler.

Thailand’s fishing fleet consists mostly of bottom trawlers, which drag a wall of mesh behind them. Purse seiners use more rudimentary circular nets that are dropped to target fish closer to the water’s surface, hauled upward, then constrained at the top like a drawstring coin purse.

The hygienic conditions on the Thai purse seiner with the Cambodian crew that I boarded were among the worst I’d seen. This was apparent in the sheer number of roaches of all sizes and colors crawling on virtually every surface.

Common in the developing world, especially in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and the sex industries, debt bondage is particularly pervasive and abusive at sea because these workers are so isolated. In Thailand, boat captains historically paid large up-front sums in advance to deckhands so that these workers could sustain their families during their long absences. However, because more of the deckhands were migrant workers, captains no longer paid the up-front money to the men themselves. Instead, these captains paid this money to the smugglers who snuck the deckhands into the country.

Thailand’s sea slavery problem is also connected to the emergence of the country’s middle class. Among Asia’s “tiger economies,” Thailand’s gross domestic product grew in the late 1980s by an average rate of 9 percent annually, peaking at 13 percent in 1988. Its exports also expanded by an average of 14 percent each year. Wages on land rose, making Thai nationals even less inclined to take jobs offshore. As of 2016, Thailand had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world—generally less than 1 percent.

The shortage was worse because the industry resisted investing in laborsaving technologies, relying instead on gear like purse seines that require large crews.

In fisheries and conservation biology, the catch per unit effort, or CPUE, is an indirect measure of the abundance or scarcity of a target species. In both the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, on Thailand’s western side, the CPUE on fishing boats fell by more than 86 percent between the mid-1960s and the early years of the twenty-first century, making Thai waters among the most overfished on the planet.

As strong as that odor was, my fatigue was stronger, and I fell fast asleep immediately. But that lasted just ten minutes before a jolt of adrenaline woke me. Something scampered across my legs. Trying to sit up, I slammed into the boy just inches above me, knocking my headlamp off. Putting it back on, I turned on the light. The floor was teeming with dozens of rats.

My ego enjoyed the idea of me as some globe-trotting action hero. And yes, I faced some very real moments of risk. But they always paled in comparison to the risks faced by the people I was writing about, by the sources and in-country staff (translators, photographers, fixers) who stayed behind when I left, and by the local reporters who covered these issues long before I parachuted into their world.

Truth be told, the few times I faced real bodily harm during my many reporting expeditions were usually my fault. In Mogadishu, climbing a rope ladder to get from a police boat onto a gigantic cattle carrier whose sides were four stories tall, I nearly fell about thirty feet because I had tried to carry too much gear.

Other officers offered more helpful tips: Wear a headlamp and bright colors when on deck. If the water is cold when you fall in, clench your jaw and resist taking that first panicked gasp because it’s usually the one that drowns you. Limit heat loss by keeping your knees to your chest, they told me. Never swim against the current. Kick off heavy boots or shoes. If it’s not too cold, remove and tie off the ends of your pants or shirt to capture air in them and to use them as floatation devices. Learn “drownproofing” techniques, which are low-energy swimming methods that focus on holding air in your lungs, keeping your body vertical, relaxed, and with the minimum required effort, your head just above water.

Globally, fishing boats had to venture farther just to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60 percent of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago. Thai-flagged boats, for instance, used to fish mostly within two days’ travel from shore. By 2005, they were venturing as far as Bangladesh and Somalia, staying at sea sometimes for years.

Most deep-sea fishing ships around the world work on commission. “Crews only get paid if we catch enough,” Tang explained. This means tensions run high on the boats, and captains fear their crews as intensely as they drive them.

From what research I could find, it seemed that mutinies are not common on Thai fishing boats, but over the past decade and a half two out of every five pirate attacks worldwide took place in the South China Sea. My suspicion when I read that statistic was that it was another case of skewed data and in fact what Thai authorities categorized as piracy was actually more likely mutiny.

All of them agreed that forced labor was common and unavoidable—an unfortunate consequence of the country’s rapid economic growth over the past two decades. Every time a boat docked, they fretted that their willing workers would bolt to better-paying ships. This was also when captive migrants often made a run for it back across the border, trying to get home.

Still, as I waited to climb off the ship, one of the Cambodians mentioned in passing that his debt was bigger, his bondage more difficult to escape, because he had been held for several weeks by his trafficker at a karaoke bar before being sold to a fishing captain. This was new—I hadn’t heard before that karaoke bars played a role as a staging ground in the human-trafficking pipeline.

In port towns like Ranong, there was a hand-in-glove relationship between labor brokers and karaoke bar owners. Often they were the same person. Usually in the very back or upstairs at the bars, there were spare rooms where the girls lived and where men being trafficked onto fishing boats also waited during the final leg of their trip from the border to the port.

Beer at Rui’s tavern cost the equivalent of $1. Sex with a “popular” girl: $12. After a couple of days, these tabs added up to kingly sums for the tattered Burmese and Cambodian men, many of whom trekked hundreds of miles by foot, not a cent on them, hoping for work.

Of all the evil things I saw while reporting for this book, the karaoke bars in Ranong were perhaps the most sinister. Not only did these brokers and bar owners use one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, but the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children.

When deckhands fled their captains, their best hope to escape could be found in an underground railroad of anti-trafficking advocates who operate safe houses near ports. These advocates hide sea slaves and often orchestrate their clandestine passage back home across the border. Once they decided to flee, captive workers typically jumped from their boats and swam to shore, or they stowed away on mother ships that visited their captains with supplies.

The UN estimates there are over a thousand migrants who over the past decade have escaped fishing boats on the sparse but livable Kei Islands. I was surprised by the daring and desperation of Pak’s decision to jump overboard not long after having watched another man drown doing the same thing.

Local motorcycle taxis often doubled as informants for the traffickers, they explained. If they could sneak away from the port, many of the runaways tried to survive in the woods until they felt as if enough time had passed that they could safely emerge.

Drawing mostly from interviews they had done with recently escaped deckhands and by tapping local police whom they trusted, these advocates produced in forty-eight hours the list that federal authorities had not been able to compile in three weeks.

Thai authorities relied far too much on human rights advocates for information about how men were being trafficked, who the main culprits were, and what tactics were being employed to circumvent new protections.

At one point, I asked a captain if he thought any of the workers on his ship might be unhappy and want to go home. “They cannot,” he told me. “My papers are all in order.” His remark inadvertently summed up for me why these inspections seemed to miss their mark.

Terms that should have been red flags went unnoticed. Thai law required employers to pay workers monthly. Captains were not allowed to withhold wages, which they often did to keep crew from leaving before their contracts ended. In interviews, when workers mentioned their accounts having been “cut” or “cleared” after long fishing trips, a telltale sign of withheld earnings, the inspector did not stop them and dig deeper.

To get honest answers about beatings, withheld wages, hours worked, disappearances, or injuries, the bosun was precisely the wrong person to use as a translator.

We discussed two major legal hurdles. The first was Thailand’s prohibition on migrant workers joining unions. The second was the fact that while the country had a law against trafficking, it lacked one on forced labor. So if workers took jobs willingly but were then abused or held captive, the government had little recourse to prosecute.

Judd also described how far Thailand had come in just two years. He pointed out that the government had imposed a thirty-day limit on how long a ship could stay at sea and banned transshipment—transferring goods at sea between ships—for its overseas fleet. The government was trying to register all commercial fishing ships with unique numbers, like license plates, and requiring them to have VMS, which is an electronic tracking system for onshore monitoring.

These were genuine accomplishments. For all the critical attention focused on Thailand, most other countries in the region, including Indonesia, which had been widely praised by the environmental community for its fisheries management, lacked any of the labor protections or spot checks that Thailand had implemented.

When the Thai Ministry of Labor conducted over fifty thousand inspections of fishing crews in 2016, it found not a single instance of laws being broken on matters such as conditions and hours of work, wages, and treatment on board. On the other hand, when the ILO interviewed the same types of workers from the same period, it revealed a very different picture. Nearly half of the workers had illegal deductions being taken from their wages, less than half the workers could recall having signed a contract, and about 16 percent had their identification documents taken away by employers to ensure they stayed on the boats.

There was, in fact, no unified Thai government approach to combating sea slavery. Different agencies were committed to differing degrees. The Foreign Ministry and the prime minister seemed genuinely dedicated to reform; the department of labor, not so much; the fisheries agency and much of the police force were somewhere in between.

Though he had been acquitted on trafficking charges, Liam allegedly committed over a dozen murders, dating back to the 1990s, typically shooting, stabbing, or beating migrant workers to death, occasionally in front of multiple eyewitnesses, before throwing their bodies into the Trang River, according to EJF and Thai police records. And yet, while the allegations against Liam were clear and well documented, Thai authorities had never prosecuted him.