The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

Though Vaisaya, who was based in Bangkok, did not want to say so on record, I knew for a fact that part of the reason murder charges had never been filed was that local police had been tacitly involved. For years, local Kantang police turned a blind eye to the dozens of bodies that washed up on the banks downriver from Boka Pier, many of them showing signs of torture and execution-style killings.

In the world of Thai sea slavery, Kantang was in a category all its own, the biggest snake pit of criminality of all the ports I had previously investigated.

Confident that Liam was likely within earshot, hiding just inside the doorway, we made a point of recounting to the wife the alleged incident involving him beating to death the man chained to a tree. “Everyone knows,” I said, telling Liam’s wife what the worker had told me. She said nothing. I then asked her if she would allow the two police officers to look inside. “You’ll need a warrant,” she replied, before ordering us to leave. In the end, nothing Jantarak or Liam’s wife said seemed surprising or especially informative. That Liam never came out of his house annoyed me more than I can describe.

Governments and legal systems the world over show the value of a human life by handing down penalties to those who abuse it. The relentless gut-punch reality for me, though, was how completely the framework of a civilized society was abandoned at sea, especially on fishing boats on the South China Sea.

The assumption was—and frankly still is for many people—that the enormity of the sea came with a limitless ability to absorb and metabolize all.

This vastness is what lends the ocean deity-like potential. And more narrowly, it is also what has provided us over the years with the license to dump virtually anything offshore. Oil, sewage, corpses, chemical effluvium, garbage, military ordnance, and even at-sea superstructures like oil rigs could disappear into the ocean, as if swallowed up by a black hole, never to be seen again.

Several feet long, the pipe stretched from a nozzle on a carbon filter pump to a water tank. Its magic trick? Making the ship’s used oil and other nasty liquids disappear. Rather than storing the highly toxic effluent and unloading it at port, as the ship was legally required to do, the pipe was secretly flushing the waste into the ocean, saving the ship’s owner, Carnival Corporation, millions of dollars in disposal fees and port delays.

The cruise industry represents a kind of gentrification of the ocean; with enough money and steel and aluminum and all-you-can-eat buffets, anyone can enjoy the very best the oceans have to offer without the unsavory parts.

Cruise liners, like most large ships, burn massive amounts of the dirtiest fuel on the market. Known as bunker, this viscous tar is more a solid than a liquid at room temperature and has to be heated for it to flow.

In subsequent court papers, Carnival called the Caribbean Princess an isolated case. But oil logs from the company’s other ships, also disclosed in court records, indicated that oil dumping was a widespread practice and that on occasion engineers on other Carnival ships tricked the monitoring equipment by pulling in the same volume of salt water to replace the liquids they dumped.

The practice of ships dumping oil and other waste at sea was perfectly legal for most of maritime history. And dump we did. After World War II, Russia, the U.K., and the United States loaded about a million tons of unexploded mustard gas bombs and other chemical munitions onto ships, which were dispatched offshore to scuttle the matériel overboard.

In 1965, a trawler near Virginia landed a bomb that detonated on board, killing eight crewmen. In 1997, a mustard gas bomb pulled up in a fishing net sent four fishermen off the Polish coast to the hospital. In 2016, the same unlucky catch of a mustard gas bomb off the Delaware coast left a clam fisherman with second-degree burns.

More than a dozen countries, including the United States, the U.K., and the Soviet Union, dumped nuclear sludge and unwanted reactors, several still containing their radioactive fuel, into the Arctic, the North Atlantic, and the Pacific Oceans. The practice was only banned in 1993, at which point the remaining business shifted to an underworld of global waste traders operating in the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and off the coast of Africa.

Airborne pollution is a less visible but even more destructive form of ocean dumping. Over the past two centuries, the concentration of mercury in the top three hundred feet of the oceans has tripled because of human activity, especially the burning of coal.

Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create carbonic acid and perilously high acidity levels across the world’s oceans. Despite the vastness of the sea, these pollutants are affecting marine life and ocean ecosystems, dissolving the shells of many creatures, and leading to hazardous mercury levels in some types of fish.

For all the attention paid to oil spills, for example, the truth is that far more oil is dumped in the water on purpose.

Many governments give big industries permission to use the ocean for waste disposal on a grand scale. Off the southwest coast of Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province near Bali, for example, a four-foot-diameter pipe runs from the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine into the Indian Ocean. The pipe spews 160,000 tons a day of a toxic sludge, consisting of heavy metals and pulverized mine cuttings, called tailings, into the ocean.

Much of the dumping from ships is accepted as standard industry practice. To avoid capsizing at sea, for example, cruise ships, cargo carriers, and large tankers have weighed themselves down with ballast since time immemorial. These days, this ballast consists of millions of gallons of seawater that ships suck into their tanks on their way out of one port. Later, they pump it out halfway around the world as they approach the next port. Scientists now know, however, the ruinous effect of this practice on local habitats. This purged water carries invasive species like the zebra mussels that hitched a ride to the Great Lakes from Europe.

Ships also dump inordinate amounts of human sewage. In small quantities, dilution does indeed work. But some modern cruise ships now carry thousands of people and flush more untreated waste into the sea than is handled by small-town sewage plants.

Hardly anything is more toxic than oil, which only became illegal to dump at sea in the early 1970s.

In a wildly foolhardy gambit to contain the spill, the British government had sent fighter planes to the scene to bomb the ship, intending to set the spewing oil on fire to burn it up and limit its impact on the shoreline. But the bombing campaign instead only worsened the spill, which despoiled more than 50 miles of French and 120 miles of Cornish coast.

While MARPOL was a landmark agreement, it governs only the narrow slice of pollution that results from ocean dumping. Ocean contamination comes in myriad forms, and many types of ocean pollution have no rules or regulations.

Consider the fate of offshore oil platforms once they reach retirement age. By 2020, thousands of these platforms, many of them constructed during a global building boom in the 1980s, will have to be decommissioned. Countries will have to decide whether to sink, remove, or repurpose them.

In early 2015, I became interested in these aging platforms. They intrigued me because, according to some conservationists, their disposal represented another type of dumping—beyond that of oil, sewage, mine waste, and ballast—that was occurring offshore and at the edges of the law, sometimes with government approval. At the time, the most vigorous debate about how to get rid of these platforms was playing out in Malaysia, where more than six hundred offshore oil rigs and other structures were due for immediate removal.

Like a lot of industrial facilities, drilling rigs tend to be located in remote places, where regulations are fewer (or less enforced) and the fees for drilling rights are lower.

The argument against repurposing the platforms—for scuba hotels, fish farms, solar platforms, or anything else—was that the metal on these structures, some as long and wide as a football field, corrodes and leaches dangerous pollution over time. “Oceans shouldn’t be junk yards,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation, a marine research and advocacy organization. Sinking the rigs so that they could become scaffolding for reefs was an equally bad idea, he contended. Collapsing the rigs onto the seafloor does not actually promote aquatic life; it just attracts fish, which makes them easier capture, he said.

That night, after several hours of the best sleep I’d gotten in years, I awoke in my spartan bedroom and went upstairs to wander the upper deck and to see the stars. Instead, I was startled to meet half a dozen men, clad in head-to-toe black military outfits, carrying semiautomatic weapons.

They were quick to point out that oil companies and governments weren’t the only culprits dumping offshore. Researchers and entrepreneurs did it as well, they said, typically under the guise of science. I asked for examples. All of them cited an entrepreneur and marine researcher named Russ George.

In George’s telling, the experiment is a creative and enterprising approach to solving the intractable problem of global warming, and he talks about it with an evangelist’s exuberance. By providing missing nutrients to the ocean, he claims, the iron ore was supposed to stimulate a plankton bloom, which, as it grew, would suck up carbon dioxide, much like plants on land.

Among George’s critics were fellow researchers in the geo-engineering field, who in the past had conducted smaller and sanctioned experiments with iron ore dumping, or “iron fertilization.”

Little research had been done on the idea of ocean fertilization until the 1980s, when the oceanographer John Martin published his findings, arguing that a scarcity of iron micronutrients was limiting phytoplankton growth and overall productivity in the ocean’s most “desolate” regions.

Many scientists feared, however, that George was taking things too far and too fast. They warned that conducting ocean fertilization on such a grand scale could trigger dead zones, toxic tides, and other unintended consequences.

The international agreements relating to geo-engineering were nonbinding and unenforceable.

If nothing else, George’s experiments represent an aggressive, perhaps quixotic measure in the face of a looming global crisis. As the oceans face catastrophic effects of global warming, should such wild experiments be encouraged, rather than discouraged, to respond to a catastrophe that is taking shape in our lifetimes? Did the ends justify the means?

Renewable-energy firms have started planning wind farms, wave-energy converters, and floating solar panels in international waters. Who will be responsible for cleaning up the contraptions if they do not work, if their companies go bankrupt, or when they become obsolete, like the oil platforms in Malaysia?

When I met Richard Udell, the federal prosecutor who handled the Caribbean Princess magic-pipe case, he was quick to point out that unlike iron fertilization or rigs-to-reefs programs, dumping oil at sea is clearly illegal.

Authorities rarely see the dumping itself because it typically happens far out at sea, perhaps under cover of night, and cloaked in a veil of secrecy and intimidation. In those cases, it’s usually the cover-up, not the crime itself, that snags companies, Udell explained.

Some companies offer their engineers personal bonuses if they stay under budget—creating an incentive to skirt the law with magic pipes and massage the ship’s logs to cover it up.

They also take advantage of the fact that engineers hate statistical anomalies. When ship engineers pretend not to have known about the existence of a magic pipe on board their vessel, Frith said he plays dumb and tries to gently antagonize them into breaking script. “Something just doesn’t make sense here,” Frith said, reenacting what he says over and over to engineers as he confronts them with anomalies in their oil logbooks. “Either this data is sloppy, you made a mistake, or I’m not understanding something here. Help me out.”

He reported the crime in England, which does not offer bounties, rather than waiting a month longer for the ship to dock in the United States, where he would have been virtually guaranteed a reward. When I asked Keays if he considered waiting until he was in U.S. jurisdiction, he laughed and said absolutely not. “You don’t get mugged and tell the police a month later,” he said.

Sexual assaults of passengers and staff on cruise liners, for example, have been especially difficult to investigate and prosecute. Cruise ships are often registered in foreign countries, the incidents occur in international waters, and the alleged perpetrators can be foreign nationals. When Congress held hearings on this problem, lawmakers discovered that nearly a third of the reported sexual assaults on these ships were against minors.

For the hundreds of thousands of people who work on them, cruise ships are a world of extremes. These floating resorts are designed for luxury, for leisure, and to make passengers happy. But the crew, which on some ships is more than fifteen hundred people, typically live in a parallel and sometimes bleak universe, kept apart by an elaborate system of hidden stairways and floors that passengers don’t know exist.

Like English manors

The ships had strict dress codes for staff, and the in-house laundering services functioned like an extortion racket, he explained. If you didn’t pay dues to a certain someone, parts of your uniform went missing or came back with mysterious stains on them, which would get you docked or reprimanded. Such black-market services and payoffs are standard fare in prisons, of course, and not quite what I had expected in floating laps of luxury.

In the case of the Caribbean Princess, Keays, who blew the whistle about the oil dumping, was a relative outsider. As a young Scotsman with little experience, he was a different nationality and junior to his peers in the engine room.

El Diablo’s efforts to silence his Caribbean Princess crew didn’t work. Prosecutors won the case. In the final stages of the case in 2016, Udell wrote to the judge with a special request. Keays had done the right thing, Udell said, and he had done it at considerable risk to himself, for the right reasons, and with no expectation of financial gain. Might it be appropriate to bend the rules, Udell asked, and allow a bounty in this case, even though Keays did not originally report the crime directly to American authorities? The judge agreed, and Keays received roughly $1 million from the penalties paid by Carnival.

And what of the victims? Who are they? Hard to tell. Unlike with men trafficked by manning agencies or fishermen killed at sea, the waste spewed into the waves will eventually affect us all. At some point, though, dilution reaches its limits, and it is no longer the solution.

In my talk, I raised the question of whether the definition of illegal fishing should be broadened to include crimes not just against fish but also against the people doing the fishing. After all, beating crews, not paying them, and depriving them of the right to leave are practices that allow for the artificially reduced cost and competitive advantage that illicit operators have in poaching, I contended. The audience, which consisted largely of people focused on environmental issues and not human rights, reacted to the idea with polite clapping.

Other countries like New Zealand banned foreign boats from fishing in their national waters, but Indonesia was taking the extra step of sinking or blowing up the ones that it caught breaking this law.

The men cited his bravery, levelheadedness, and cooking skills as the foundation of their loyalty to him.

Every nation dealt with the problem of illegal fishing in its own way, but none had as draconian a policy as Indonesia. The reason is that the country had an extreme problem.