S2 E6: The undisputed superpower of the seas (China Pt. 1)

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My name is Elamein Abdul Mahmoud, and I host a show called Commotion.

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On March 7th, 2021, Jessica Reyes' phone rang.

Jessica is an interpreter.

She lives in Montevideo, Uruguay, and she's said to be the only interpreter in the city who speaks Indonesian and Spanish.

It's pretty common to find Indonesians working as deckhands deckhands on Chinese fishing ships, so if one of them is brought to Montevideo with a medical emergency or in some sort of crisis, Jessica is usually the person who gets the call.

In this particular case, a port agent for a Chinese fishing company was on the phone.

The agent told Jessica that she needed to get to the local hospital to translate for an Indonesian deckhand.

The port agent said the deckhand had a stomachache.

For much of the past 10 years, distant water fishing vessels, mostly Chinese, have been coming to Montevideo and dropping off an average of one dead body every six weeks.

These dead are typically decans.

Their bodies often show clear signs of physical abuse, malnutrition, or illness.

They're the casualties of a brutal supply chain that reaches from the most remote waters on the planet to processing plants largely in China and finally to consumers around the world.

I had heard about this statistic that Montevideo sees one dead body every six weeks.

So I went there to investigate and that's when I met Jessica.

She told me that she'd interpreted for hundreds of decans in need.

Often by the time they were brought to the hospital and she saw them, it was already too late.

She described one deckhand who died from a tooth infection because his captain wouldn't bring him to shore.

She told me of another case where someone fell ill and the agency neglected to take the guy to the hospital.

Instead, they kept him in a hotel room while his condition deteriorated.

He eventually died.

So, on this particular particular night in March 2021, Jessica got to the hospital and quickly realized that the situation was a lot more serious than a stomachache.

The deckhand's name was Daniel Ertenong, and he was in really bad shape.

Jessica showed me photos that she'd taken of Daniel when he was at the hospital.

He was covered in bruises.

He had ligature marks around his neck.

His feet and hands were kind of grotesquely swollen.

He had black eyes and he was barely conscious.

Daniel was a young Indonesian man.

He'd been working on a Chinese squid jigger called the Zen Fa 7.

He'd been brought to Montevideo port by this small skiff and dumped on the dock at 2 in the morning.

Daniel could barely talk, but he managed to mumble to Jessica that he'd been beaten and that he'd had a rope tied around his neck and that he hadn't eaten in days.

The doctors told Jessica to leave the hospital room and for her to wait in the hall.

When she left, Daniel was crying and shaking.

Daniel asked Jessica where his friends were.

He told her he was scared.

I'm Ian Urbina, and this is the Outlaw Ocean.

The organization I run run is called the Outlaw Ocean Project, and it focuses on human rights and environmental abuses and other crimes at sea.

And so you can't have that be your journalistic focus and not reckon with China.

Over the past several decades, China has become the undisputed superpower of seafood.

It has more ships in more places, and it's fishing the world's oceans more aggressively than any other country.

I spent the past four years working with my team to investigate the global seafood supply chain and how it bottlenecks in China, both on the country's ships and in its processing plants.

We tracked the world's seafood from bait to plate and discovered a brutal realm where deaths like that of Daniel Erchenong are shockingly common.

It's a realm where health and human safety are secondary to meeting quotas and where forced labor and human rights abuses are rampant.

One striking thing about China's empire at sea is its size.

And if you just look at the number of ships, you run into two revelations.

First, it's huge.

Second, it's opaque.

By opaque, I mean no one actually knows how big the fleet is.

The Chinese government says they have 2,700 distant water fishing vessels.

Some think tanks put that number around 17,000.

My team calculated it as being closer to 6,500.

The next largest distant water fishing fleet on the planet is under 300 vessels.

So whatever your metric is, the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is bigger than everyone else's.

Another noteworthy thing about China's power and seafood is its onland presence.

China runs terminals or full ports in 90 locations around the world.

So, when it comes to the landing place for all of the seafood, China has a stranglehold on that as well.

And then, the last way in which China has a monopoly on the supply chain is in the processing infrastructure.

All this seafood has to be cleaned and processed and frozen, and that all largely goes through Chinese plants.

China really runs the world's processing infrastructure.

So, we spent four years investigating this global fleet.

Our hope was that we could answer some pretty big questions.

How and why and where is China growing and exerting its power on the water around the world?

How is it extending its business reach?

How is it ensuring that it will have unfettered control over a key source of protein for its population?

How is it edging out its big competitor, namely the US, by using its fishing fleet to overtake certain parts of the world's oceans?

The hope was we could do this investigation on the water and on land in person, actually getting on the vessels, getting into the plants, and follow these questions all the way through this convoluted supply chain.

Over the next few episodes, you're going to hear the results of this investigation.

Ultimately, we focused on squid ships.

That was based largely on an assessment of what portion of the Chinese distant water fishing fleet is the portion that's biggest and in some ways the most important.

The most number of people working on it, the most amount of fish being pulled out of the water and exported abroad.

And which portion of this huge fleet is in the most interesting places, globally, the most controversial places?

And the answer to all these questions was squid, calamari.

It's a globally consumed product.

Everyone knows what it is.

It's disseminated all over the world.

Americans now eat about 100,000 tons of squid each year.

But this wasn't always so.

In the US, squid was originally a delicacy and mostly eaten by immigrants.

And until the late 70s, most other Americans didn't eat squid.

They used it as fish bait.

But now it's been rebranded as calamari.

It's breaded and fried and it's a wildly popular appetizer.

Climate change and globalization have really pushed the planet's food supply to a breaking point, and seafood is the last remaining source of wild protein on Earth.

So, the demand for squid, just like many other types of seafood, continues to rise.

But few people realize where the seafood they eat actually comes from.

It's one of the most popular appetizers on the menu, and China is unequivocally the dominant power when it comes to squid fishing.

And the ships, the squid ships themselves, are notoriously some of the most brutal.

A typical distant water fishing vessel has maybe a crew of about 20 to 30 men.

Sometimes the ships are bigger, they have 50 to 60 guys on board.

Multiply that by thousands of ships, and you've got a pretty huge workforce.

Traditionally, at least before COVID, China relied heavily on foreign labor to fill these jobs.

So on the ships, you had maybe four or five officers, they were typically Chinese, but the rest of the crew tended to be foreigners, mostly Indonesians like Daniel Erchenong.

But in select areas of the planet, Chinese vessels would have Africans or Filipinos as crew.

These workers are usually recruited by what are called manning agencies, and the manning agencies tend to be based in a third country.

So the ship is Chinese, their workers are recruited, say, from Indonesia, but the manning agency might be in Singapore or South Korea.

The agency handles all the logistics of finding the workers and getting them contracted, getting them relocated, and on board the ships.

Typically, the recruiters for these manning agencies target inland rural folk because those are the workers that have the least fluency and awareness of work at sea, and they're the most desperate.

They're the easiest to bamboozle.

That makes them the most willing to sign contracts that are often pretty brutal.

Daniel Ertin grew up on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The youngest of three brothers, his friends and teachers and local villagers described him as a punctual, earnest, and tidy dresser, sort of an innocent guy, a quiet and gentle fellow.

I spoke to one of his high school teachers and she described him as a class clown who liked to flirt with the girls in class.

As a teenager, he spent his free time working on motorcycles.

His His father ran an auto body shop near his home and Daniel tinkered with rebuilding engines and patching tires.

He had a motorcycle, a small blue Yamaha, was a model called King of the Street and he liked to drag race it with his friends on the back roads.

In May 2018 Daniel graduated from high school.

He applied for jobs at the local mini market and at the nearby plastic and textile factories, but no one was hiring.

Youth unemployment in the the village at the time was over 13%.

I talked to Daniel's best friend, a young guy named Hanky.

He told me how he and Daniel saw other villagers leaving to work on foreign fishing ships and coming back with enough money to buy houses and mopeds.

So Hanky and Daniel talked it over and at one point agreed that they'd give it a try, as long as they could be assigned assigned to the same ship and stayed together.

On July 1st, 2019, Daniel and Henke headed to Tigal, which is a city in central Java, Indonesia, to look for work.

They contacted a manning agency that supplies workers to foreign ships and began the whole recruitment process, filling out the paperwork.

The two young men took medical exams, handed over their passports, handed over copies of their birth certificates and bank documents, and took headshots.

And for the next two months, Daniel and Henke waited in Tagal for a ship assignment, and they basically ran out of money.

A friend of theirs in Indonesia told us that He got a call from the two asking him if he could lend them some money.

They said they couldn't afford to buy food.

Their friend had no money and said he couldn't loan them anything and he counseled Daniel to come back home and reminded him that he didn't even know how to swim.

On September 1st, the manning agency in Tigal told Daniel and Henke that they'd been assigned to a ship and that they were supposed to fly to Busan, South Korea.

They arrived the next day.

They had assumed that they'd be working on a Korean ship, but when they got to the port, they were told to climb aboard a Chinese vessel.

It was a red and white squid jigger called the Zenfa 7.

They joined 20 Chinese crew members and eight other Indonesians.

Daniel and Henke each signed a two-year contract for roughly $3,000 a year, with a possibility of a $20 bonus for every ton of squid that they caught.

They were told that the ship would be at sea for about eight months and then returned to land where they'd be able to contact friends and family back home.

It took the Zenfa 7 three months to travel roughly 8,000 miles from Busan, South Korea to the high seas near the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador.

Daniel and Henke very quickly realized that by signing on to the Zenfa 7, they'd stepped into a world that was far more brutal and far more dangerous than they could have ever imagined.

One of the repercussions of bolstering, subsidizing, and growing this fleet, and then sending it all over the world has been that the Chinese government doesn't actually have full control over it.

There are so many ships that are so far-flung.

That several years ago, when the Chinese government decided to do a tightening of the belt, really looking at its fleet, they found that there were 100,000 ships near shore and distant water that were ghost ships.

That is, they had no name, no registration, and no permit to be fishing.

And yet they were out there on the water.

So the Chinese government is not actually totally aware of the behavior of its many ships.

The steps that China has taken to try to control its fleet are ones that mostly have to do with conservation, and that's because marine issues are easier for them to confront.

Human rights and labor issues, they don't want to touch.

So when you look closely at the brutality on these vessels and how labor is treated, what you get is a stark picture of a world that most of us thought had disappeared long ago.

I wanted to see the Chinese fleet up close, so that would entail traveling to these remote fishing grounds, which are often hundreds or thousands of miles from shore.

There are specific ones in a couple places around the planet where at any given time in the year, hundreds of these squid ships are parked and actively pulling squid ala water.

So we went to the high seas near the Falkland Islands, the high seas near the Galapagos Islands, the national waters along the North Korean sea border, and then the coast of West Africa over the course of four years.

One of the fishing grounds I really wanted to visit is called the Blue Hole.

The Blue Hole is this huge, sprawling patch of sea.

It's international waters, so it's high seas, but it's near the Falkland Islands.

During the fishing season, it typically has anywhere from 200 to 400 squid ships in a 50 to 60 mile radius.

The realm we were in is just surreal.

It's overpowering.

It's kind of shocking visually.

It's, you know, so remote and removed from land.

It feels kind of otherworldly.

That remove makes it a pretty challenging reporting process.

Could we communicate with the deckhands, with the officers, with the captain?

Might we even be able to board the ships?

They're hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from shore, so it takes quite a while to get out there.

The fishermen are not typically super pleased or accustomed to seeing outsiders.

In many instances, the Chinese fishing captains would get spooked, and the minute they saw us on radar, they'd bolt.

And in those instances, we chased them.

When you're chasing these boats, you're typically in a fast boat.

You're dealing with very serious waves.

It's a smaller skiff with an outboard motor.

You've got heavy weather on you, and you get bounced around a lot.

You can get hurt pretty easily.

There's the danger of the boats that you're pursuing, too.

So the captain could get scared, he could open fire, they could try to ram you.

Just preparing messages for the crew on the fishing vessels to take contact with them and yeah that we have probably some good thoughts.

My team and I got into a skiff, a fast boat, and we put messages in a bottle.

These are plastic water bottles weighed down with rice.

We'd put some cigarettes and hard candy in them.

We'd put a pen in them and we'd write a note with a bunch of questions.

And the note note would be written in Chinese, English, and Indonesian.

So we'd come up behind the ship.

I'd then throw the bottle onto the back of the fishing vessel that we were pursuing.

The deckhands were typically gawking at us, standing on the back of the ship.

And in some cases, they'd open the bottle, read the note, take the pen out, and quickly fill out some answers.

They'd put the note back in the bottle with their responses.

We'd have a, you know, kind of styrofoam buoy attached to the bottleneck.

They'd put the cap on, close it back up, throw it back overboard at us, and we'd fish it out of the water.

We'd go back to our ship, read the note, see what they said, and try again the next day with a different vessel.

It's a pretty slow, arduous process, but it worked.

So the first question is, what's your name?

And we've got a name.

Well we've got some phone numbers so we can call.

One of the things that we got out of the notes that were thrown back to us were phone numbers.

And the phone numbers were typically to families back home in China or Indonesia.

We'd wait till we got back to shore and we'd call the families of these decans.

Those families would often recount that their loved ones had been gone for over a year, that they hadn't heard from them, they didn't know if they were even still alive.

Some of them would even say that they had begged them not to go to sea in the first place to take the job.

That definitely assured us that we were on to an important story and that we needed to try even harder to get on board these vessels to talk if we could directly with crew.

When we got to the blue hole, it was a pretty dazzling spectacle.

It's such a sprawling, weird, extraterrestrial place.

And in all of this kind of unique darkness of it, you had this bizarre bright light, almost like a glowing metropolis sitting along the horizon.

All the squid vessels use massive light bulbs to attract squid to the surface.

These bulbs and these ships glow so bright that you can see the fishing grounds from space.

These bulbs are the size of bowling balls.

They're extremely hot and they're about, I'd say, two to three hundred of them on a given ship.

And they're strung up on these racks that run the line of the ship.

And they're so bright that there's been studies of workers having serious damage to their eyes after spending too much time around them.

They shine so brightly that you can see a single industrial squid jigger about 70 miles away.

I know because we were 70 miles away when we first started spawning them on the horizon.

It looks from afar when you're at sea, as you approach a single squid jigger, like you're approaching a stadium that's hosting a concert at night.

And then as you get closer and closer, you feel like you're entering some weird city at sea, a city of lights.

I had higher ambitions.

I wanted to not just go out to the fishing grounds, but I also wanted to see if I could get on the ships themselves.

So how we did that was we would carefully approach individual vessels, starting with bridge-to-bridge radio conversations.

Ed O is a videographer who was with me and he speaks Chinese.

And so Ed would be on the radio and he would make contact with the captain and ask if we could approach.

And he'd say, you know, how's it going?

And sort of small talk with the captain.

And that would take hours, sometimes days, to break the ice with the captain.

How's the fishing been?

How long have you been out here?

Do you have family back home?

These sorts of things.

We would always say we were journalists and we were wanting to document the work that happens out here that no one knows about.

We would then park maybe a half mile away so the captain could see us, but not get too close that he might get spooked.

Ideally the conversation would warm up a little bit.

Then we would slowly move closer and closer and we would get off the big ship, Ed and I, and get into a smaller boat, a skiff, so that we could get within line of sight.

We'd pull up that close to the fishing vessel so that the captain could actually see us and we would wave at him.

We'd have a walkie-talkie radio in our hand and we'd be talking with him on the bridge of his ship and we'd be filming.

At the sort of last phase of the process was to ask the big question.

And the question was, can we come on board?

And the way we would frame that was, look, we'd like to sit down with you, Captain.

We'd like to break bread with you and we'd like to offer you a gift.

We have fresh fruits and vegetables and meat and all things that we knew that ship, that fishing vessel, that captain probably lacked because they'd been at sea too long.

And so we would be sure to make that explicit in our request.

We want to offer you gifts and would we be allowed to come on board?

And in some cases, the captain said yes.

I mean, shocking to us, but the captain said yes.

So then comes the logistical challenge of getting on board an enormous fishing vessel.

The side of the ship can be 20 feet tall and they're jiggers, so they have these metallic arms, maybe 70 or 80 of them, that stick out of the sides.

So getting access to the sides of the ship is very difficult because they have six to eight foot long arms stretching out with fishing lines, you know, hanging off them, going up and down into the water.

So it's very tough to get close to the ship, except for in a couple of spots, usually on the backside of the ship where there are no jigs so you can get your boat close to the backside and and then you're looking at climbing a rope ladder the rope ladder would be two to three stories tall and don't forget you're on the high seas so the ship is bouncing up and down and it's moving side to side so if you fall off the rope ladder or you don't grab it when you're jumping from the skiff to the rope ladder that's extremely dangerous because you're going to get trapped underneath the backside of the ship that's bouncing up and down, and that's not going to end well for you.

That was the one spot in all this reporting where, to be frank, I felt most at risk, this ship-to-ship transfer.

So in this case, on one particular day near the blue hole, a captain that we warmed up for a while invited us on board.

He climbed the tall rope ladder and got on the ship.

The captain seemed like a generous warm guy and you know he sent his first mate down to greet us.

Immediately everyone was offering us cigarettes because that's what everyone was doing on deck chain smoking and watching their jigs.

These squid ships are like no ships I've ever been on.

They're dirtier, grittier, and that's partially because squid almost always squirt ink when they're brought on board.

You're dealing with tens of thousands of squid coming on board and that ink is just everywhere.

So there's this oozy coat of sliminess on all the walls and the deck that make it just feel like you're inside someone's nose.

It's like phlegm or oozing snot and it's everywhere.

Also, deep sea squid use ammonia for buoyancy.

So when they're pulled on on board and they're beginning to die, there's this emission of ammonia that leaves a sort of acrid scent in the air.

It's a pretty gross scene, to be honest.

So we head up the ladder, we greet the captain on the bridge, he says, you're welcome to tour the ship and go wherever you'd like.

You're our guests.

Ed stayed up on the bridge for a little while and then I left and went around trying to explore.

One of the officers, a Chinese guy, was following me everywhere and he was obviously listening in to everything I would ask.

Pretty soon Ed joined me because I needed his translation skills and we began talking to the crew.

When you look at these guys, it's pretty obvious that not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, psychologically, they're crushed.

You know, from the kind of unhealthy tone of their skin to the color of their teeth, and that's obviously partially the chain smoking, but it's also sort of a slow-motion malnutrition that's taking hold.

You can tell they're sore and pretty exhausted in the way they move.

There's this thousand-mile stare that a lot of them have where they just seem to be sort of out of body.

You know, they're staring off into space.

They kind of look like shells of humans.

It also just looks like a kind of work that is highly repetitive over many hours and many days and many weeks.

Some of the repetition is light effort, you know, pulling the line and removing the squid from the place it gets hooked on the jig.

But some of the effort is really grueling.

The guys who are in the freezers, for example, the guys who have to carry the baskets, the baskets weigh 100 pounds easily when they're full of squid.

And these guys have to carry them down the stairs to the freezer trying not to slip on the oozy ink.

They're doing that hundreds of times on any given day and you can tell that they're pretty broken from the work.

So Ed and I just wandered the ship.

What are their living conditions like?

Cramped and smelly and dank and dirty and the bathroom was just obscene.

you know, kind of a look more like a port-a-john in terms of the size of the space and not a place that had ever been cleaned.

So things had built up.

I'll just say and leave it at that.

So, you know, it was just an unusual exploration for us of a pretty Dickensian workplace.

At one point, the minder who was assigned to shadow me got called away for some reason.

And I was solo with Ed, and we took this chance to sort of hone in on those workers who, through their body language and their eye contact, seemed to want to talk, but maybe didn't seem to want to talk with the minder around.

You know, they were just shooting us looks.

So we took to these guys right away.

We targeted them.

One of them looked really young to me.

I thought the kid might be 16 years old, 15 years old.

Turns out he was 18, or at least that's what his papers said.

Another guy who was with him was 28 years old, both Chinese decans.

What those two guys told me was that they didn't want to be on the vessel, their passports had been confiscated, and they asked me, could we help them?

What they actually said was, could we rescue them?

They said that 80% of the other guys were in the same situation.

They'd leave if they could, but they were not allowed.

At one point, the younger kid waved me into this dark hallway.

He seemed to get especially spooked and didn't want to keep saying the words out loud to me.

And so he took out his phone and he began typing instead, typing a message to me.

It was the same thing.

I'm being held against my will.

Could you please rescue me?

Could you contact the embassy in Argentina, which was one of the countries that we were near?

He also typed out a phone number for his family back home.

And, you know, it was pretty shocking, this exchange.

It was a rare window.

You not often get access to workers on Chinese ships without someone looking over your shoulder.

But in this instance, we got a very quick opportunity and immediately, immediately, it became clear just how rough this work was and that people were being held against their will.

But he doesn't know how to go back.

But he would like to.

Soon thereafter, the minder came back and these two guys immediately bolted.

They left and went back to their stations and didn't even make eye contact.

The Minder was a smart guy and he read our body language and sort of saw what he thought had just gone down.

And it was almost immediately thereafter that we were gently suggested to exit the ship.

You'd never think it's going to be in your small town.

It's going to be someone you know on a missing poster.

Truer Crime Podcast is back.

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It's not what it seems.

There's word tonight of a prison riot.

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From Molly Tibbetts to the Menendez brothers, this season we're exploring what the headlines missed and the people they left behind.

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There's a real hierarchy on these kinds of distant water fishing ships and that held true on Daniel Ertenong's ship, the Zenfa 7.

Daniel and his friend Hankey were at the bottom of that hierarchy.

They were deckhands and that meant they were responsible for the most grueling jobs on the ship.

Hankey told me that he was assigned to the Zenfa 7's freezer for two years while Daniel was to work in the ship's lower hold.

The lower hold is also freezing, but it's slightly less physically demanding as a job.

Daniel was assigned to that spot because he had experience working on engines at his father's auto body shop back home.

Daniel and Hanki were also Indonesians on a Chinese ship.

And on these sorts of ships, there's a real racial hierarchy as well.

So what that meant is Daniel and Henke were treated even rougher, even more callously than the Deccans who were Chinese.

For the Indonesians, life on the Zenfa 7 was dank, dark, and dirty.

The Chinese officers were rough with them.

The boatswain, that's the captain's second or third in command, typically would slap or punch the Indonesians anytime they made mistakes or if they just thought they were working too slowly.

Additional snacks or coffee or cigarettes were deducted from their paychecks.

The Deccans were also charged for things like band-aids and medical supplies, or for socks and gloves that they might need if they were assigned to work in the freezer.

Chinese crew members were also occasionally allowed to use the satellite phone on the ship's bridge to call home, but when Daniel or any of the other Indonesians asked to call home, the captain typically refused.

Daniel's family would go for over a year before hearing anything from him.

The norm on vessels like the Zenfa 7 is that when the workers arrive, the captain collects all the passports and keeps them on the bridge under lock and key.

This is, by most countries' standards, illegal, but it's fairly typical.

And from the captain's point of view, this is a guarantee that the Deccans are not going to jump ship in foreign countries.

But from anyone else's point of view, this is a method of holding the crew in captivity.

They're captive in the sense that the ship is in the middle of nowhere.

They're thousands of miles from land.

So they physically cannot leave.

But even when they get close to port, if they want to leave, they can't because the contracts they've signed obligate them to stay on the ship.

and they'll face heavy fines if they try to leave before their contract is up.

Leaving the ship before their contract is up also means giving up their last six months of pay, which could be financially devastating.

It also means paying their own way back home, and it means they'll be blacklisted from future work.

So, in many ways, these folks are really slaves.

So, around New Year's Day 2021, roughly 16 months after Daniel and Henke had left Busan, South Korea, the Zenfos 7 reached the waters of Chile and were rounding the southern tip of South America.

They were near a place called Punta Arenas.

They were on their way to waters near the Falkland Islands, and they got close enough to Chilean shores that they were able to get cell reception.

Many of the crew scrambled to their cell phones and tried to call home.

For Daniel, this was the first time he'd had an opportunity to talk to family in over a year.

But Daniel and Hanki didn't have minutes on their phone, and so they scrambled around and, you know, bartered cigarettes and snacks and gathered up enough money to buy five minutes of a call from the captain.

Daniel called home and his mother picked up.

He spoke with her a little bit and told her he was okay and then he asked to talk to his father.

Daniel's mother said he was resting and she didn't want to disturb him.

The truth was just a few days earlier, Daniel's father had died of a heart attack.

Daniel's mother didn't want to tell him that for fear of upsetting him.

Eventually, the Zenfal 7 dropped anchor in a squid field near the Falkland Islands.

Hankey told me that it was around this time that Daniel started to complain of a stomachache.

He was given the equivalent of aspirin, which was all they had on board, but obviously his condition didn't improve.

And after about a month, Daniel's condition had worsened to the point that Hanke asked the captain to allow him to spend more time caring for Daniel.

The captain agreed, but Daniel kept getting sicker and sicker.

And by about January, the whites of Daniel's eyes had turned yellow, his legs became became grotesquely swollen, and he couldn't walk.

Daniel had fallen ill with something called berry berry.

Berry berry is something you get often when your diet primarily consists of white rice or instant noodles, because those are things that are typically very low in B1, vitamin B1.

So on ships, what they mostly eat are instant noodles noodles and rice.

These are foodstuffs that travel well, they don't spoil.

And so on a two-year journey, you're going to have a lot of that in your diet.

What you're not going to have a lot of is fresh meat, fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and those are key sources of vitamin B1.

Beriberi is akin to scurvy.

It's a disease that should never be caught this day and age.

and it certainly shouldn't be killing folks.

It's a malnutrition disorder, so it's very slow moving and it's easy to diagnose and treat and reverse.

The symptoms are pretty obvious, extremely painful bloating in the legs, loss of muscle function, confusion, vomiting, and difficulty speaking.

It's so easily prevented with supplement pills or just adding a couple of things to your diet.

It's also incredibly reversible, so if someone has beriberi and a doctor knows it only takes about 24 hours to reverse it.

On land, beriberi basically no longer exists, but on ships, it's killing a lot of guys.

They're staying out there essentially too long.

They don't have the proper nutrition, and therefore, these men are slowly dying.

Between 2013 and 2021, we documented over two dozen cases of Beriberi, and at least 15 of those guys died.

Hankey told me that even as he spent more time caring for Daniel, his condition continued to worsen.

Hankey and the other Indonesian crew asked the captain if he was willing to send Daniel back to shore because he needed to see a doctor.

The captain refused.

The crew became increasingly incensed by this.

Hanke told me that the captain did not want to stop the operation.

He did not want want to stop fishing and take the time he'd need to move the ship to either shore or near another ship where he could offload Daniel.

The captain was focused on one thing, and that was catching the squid.

In February, the Zenfos 7 unloaded their catch.

They were visited by what's called a mothership, which is a refrigeration vessel that comes and picks up the catch and carries it back to port.

This would have been a relatively easy moment to transfer Daniel to shore.

The mothership was headed back to shore, and in this case, it was headed to Mauritius, where there are doctors and hospitals.

But for reasons that never really became clear to me and nor to the deckhands, the captain still refused to let Daniel go.

So Daniel got sicker and sicker, and before long, he was not able to even stand.

He was moaning in pain and sort of slipping in and out of consciousness.

The Indonesians on the Zenfa 7 reached a breaking point and confronted the captain.

They threatened to strike.

They were going to stop working altogether if the captain didn't get Daniel to a doctor.

And so finally on March 2nd, the captain acquiesced and said that he was going to unload Daniel and put him on a tanker that was nearby and that was willing to pick him up.

The tanker was called the Marlin, and that tanker was headed to Montevideo, Uruguay, which was fairly close at this point, closer than Mauricius.

So it would be a decently short trip to get Daniel to a hospital.

They unloaded Daniel onto a skiff and then moved him onto the Marlin, and the Marlin carried him back to Uruguayan waters, fairly close to port.

As Daniel was being moved over to the Marlin, He was being lowered down on a stretcher into the skiff, Hankey patted him on the shoulder and told him to be careful.

He then said a prayer that Daniel would get better.

The Marlin eventually came near land, and its crew put Daniel in yet another skiff, and that skiff brought him into port.

They didn't wait around for an ambulance or for help.

They simply dumped Daniel on the dock and turned around.

When the ambulance arrived, Daniel was in really bad shape.

He was barely conscious, and they quickly took him to the hospital.

He was covered in bruises and was murmuring that he was scared and he hadn't eaten.

He said that he had had a rope strung around his neck.

I was shown pictures of him from once he was on the hospital, Gurney, and his limbs were extremely swollen from the beriberi, and he had dark black marks on his chest and bruises on his face.

He also had clear ligature marks, rope marks around his throat.

When they get Daniel to the hospital, they put him in the ER, and that's when the translator, Jessica Reyes, first laid eyes on him.

Jessica was furious.

She had been called by a representative from the Chinese shipping agency and asked to go to the hospital to translate for an Indonesian with what had been called a stomachache.

When she got there and saw what horrible shape Daniel was in, she called the shipping agent back and berated her.

She said, This guy doesn't have a stomachache.

He's been beaten.

He's in terrible shape.

This is horrific.

The doctors struggled to get an IV into Daniel's arms.

His veins were collapsed.

And about three hours later, Daniel died.

Jessica left the hospital later that morning and filed a report with the Uruguayan port police on that same day.

She gave a detailed description of what had happened and showed the officers the photographs she'd taken of Daniel's injuries.

She told me they didn't seem very interested in the case, so Jessica went home.

She was angry.

She was angry about what happened and sad that Daniel had died alone, so far away from his family and friends.

The following day, a local coroner conducted an autopsy.

It described, quote, a situation of physical abuse, end quote.

I sent a copy of the report to a forensic pathologist.

He told me that the body showed signs of violence and that untreated Berry Berry seems to have been one of the causes of death.

Not much seemed to happen after Jessica filed the report with the port police, and the autopsy was completed.

The Indonesian consulate talked to Jessica and pressed for an investigation, but that seemed to go nowhere.

Have you ever had cases that seem suspicious?

Like there might have been physical abuse.

In March of 2022, I visited Aldo Braida, the president of the Chamber of Foreign Fishing Agents, which essentially represents companies working with foreign vessels in Uruguay.

I went to meet him at his office in Montevideo.

Well, different types, right?

There's a spectrum, right?

There's neglect and there's violence.

That's your spectrum.

This is, hey, this is a problem.

He dismissed the accounts of mistreatment on Chinese ships.

So we have some cases of

lies.

He said it was fake news.

Fake news.

I reached out to the company that owns the Zenfos 7.

They told me they'd conducted their own investigation and that they'd found no evidence of misconduct.

Quote, there was nothing regarding your alleged appalling incidents about abuse, violation, insults to one's character, physical violence, or withheld salaries.

End quote.

They said they'd handed the matter over to the China Overseas Fisheries Association.

I followed up with that association as well, but my questions went unanswered.

You know, you don't have to look very hard to find possible explanations for why Uruguay might not want to dig too deeply into a case like Daniel's.

China brings a lot of money into the country, not just in terms of the day-to-day business of supplying the Chinese fleet with fuel and food, but also in the form of huge infrastructure projects.

For example, in 2018, a Chinese company proposed a $200 million megaport project west of Montevideo that would include half-mile docks, a shipyard, a fueling station, and seafood storage and processing facilities.

That project failed due to widespread opposition from the public, but it gives you a sense of how much money is at play and the scale of China's ambitions.

Daniel's body was flown back to Jakarta on April 22nd.

An ambulance drove his body back to his village and soon thereafter a funeral was held.

Daniel was from a place called Bengkulu.

We have footage of the casket arriving in town and in it you can see villagers lining both sides of the road paying their respects.

Daniel's body was buried in the village cemetery.

He was laid to rest just a few feet away from his father.

Daniel never learned that his father had died.

Hankey kept a suitcase of Daniel's belongings with him on the Zenfa 7 so that he could return his things to Daniel when they were reunited.

Hankey had been at sea for over two years and finally his contract was up.

It was only then, when he was on his way back to Indonesia, that he heard that Daniel had actually died in the hospital.

There are probably more than a quarter million people working in China's offshore fishing fleet.

That's our best guess anyway.

But there's no way to know for sure.

And there's no way to know how many of them are dying the way Daniel did.

For most of the 20th century, three powers essentially dominated the oceans, the Soviet Union, Union, Japan, and Spain.

China only emerged as a growing superpower in the 1980s.

So yeah, it's important to point out that historically, what China is now doing, its aggressive pursuit of the oceans, isn't qualitatively different from what the Soviet Union, Japan, Spain, and others did in prior centuries.

But despite there being a certain hypocrisy in Western nations or Western reporters like myself criticizing China for its current behavior, there are really a couple of important ways in which the present moment is different from the past.

Three ways, to be exact.

The scale, the setting, and the stakes.

The setting is different because international laws have changed.

A century ago, when these Western powers were dominating, there were not the same laws and international rules on the books trying to control the behavior of ships.

Those laws exist now, and that means that there are rules, and China is not really playing by those rules.

The stakes are much greater because the oceans are at a breaking point.

A third of the world's fishing stocks are at or beyond the point of collapse.

Pushing the world's fishing stocks any further is potentially catastrophic.

And finally, the scale is unlike anything that came before.

And that's just in terms of sheer numbers.

The Chinese fleet is subsidized massively.

The amount of vessels, the amount of hours they work, the sophistication of the gear they use, the amount of tonnage that they pull out of the water is not like anything a century ago.

That means their impact is so much greater.

I think you see the very real effects of all these factors in Daniel Ertenong's death.

He was a textbook example of the demographic that ends up on these really difficult trips.

He was desperately poor, eager for a better life, a bit naive, and consequently, he was pretty easily bamboozled.

What happened to him - the abuse, the neglect, the overwork, the malnutrition - all led to his death.

It was, as one coroner described it to me, slow-motion murder.

Deaths like Daniel Ertinong's are all too common in the seafood industry.

But squid ships like the Zenfa 7 are only one small part of a supply chain that stretches between some of the most remote parts of the planet.

I wanted to know what happens after the squid is pulled out of the ocean and makes its way back to land.

Where is it processed?

Who's doing that work?

What are the factory conditions like?

These are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and it involves reporting in one of the hardest places on earth to do that work, mainland China.

Next time on the Atla Ocean, part two of our three-part expose on the Chinese seafood supply chain, we're heading back to shore to mainland China, where our investigation revealed state-sponsored forced labor inside Chinese processing plants.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano.

Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson.

Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh.

Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler.

For CBC podcasts, our coordinating producer is Fabiola Carletti, senior producer Damon Fairless.

The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Narani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.