S1 E7: Epilogue — The Spell of The Sea

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I took a trip to this tiny spit of an island called Carlos III,

which is the southernmost point of Patagonia, so way down on the bottom of the planet.

It's a strange sanctuary that the government has set aside for whale scientists to observe an assortment of different types of whales that seem, for reasons they're not entirely sure, to come to the island and nest and mate

and rest.

One night, you know, I woke up, couldn't sleep, and climbed out of my little tent and right in front of me in the bay, there were 12 to 15 sperm whales and they were sleeping.

As the whales sleep, they inhale, they begin to sink down into the water.

Sometimes they sink and float for upwards of 20 minutes.

And then they float back up to the surface

and they exhale.

And the exhale is this long geyser of mist.

I was so close that I could smell their breath.

You know, I could smell the exhale.

They're at the surface only for about six seconds, and then they sink again.

The sense of marvel I had at that moment

had a little aftertaste of dread, and it's a dread that I experienced throughout this reporting.

It's the dread of how the hell am I going to render this to people who haven't witnessed it because it's going to sound made up.

You know, just how odd and mysterious and foreign and wondrous it can be.

Episode seven

The Spell of the Sea

So I left Carlos III and headed south from the southern tip of Patagonia toward Antarctica through the southern ocean.

And to do that trip, you have to pass through this perilous zone called Drake's Passage.

If you were to fly a plane all the way around the bottom of the planet, there's no land that obstructs waves or winds, and they can build up huge speeds and size.

So, when you cross Drake's Passage, you're encountering those accumulated forces, and they're really perilous.

There's this saying about the brutality of these waters.

You know, latitudinally on the planet, below 40, there's no law, and below 50, there's no God.

In other words, you're on your own.

When you're on a ship in the middle of nowhere during a storm, you really have an out-of-body experience.

You start feeling yourself as though you're an inanimate object.

You're a ping-pong ball that's floating in a bathtub.

You're a coin in a dryer.

These boats are often either all metal or mostly metal and fiberglass.

Sometimes you're on wood boats, but if you think of those three materials, fiberglass, wood, metal, it's loud.

You know, it makes really strange, daunting sounds.

And then within the walls, there's often all sorts of loose stuff.

You know, like imagine if you dumped bolts and screws loosely into the door of your car, and then you were driving on a bumpy road,

and it just makes sort of for a house of horrors feel.

You know, at one point I got out of my seat and made my way through the ship because I wanted to get something from my cabin.

And I went through, you know, the lower deck and came across a guy in the mess hall.

And we were both holding on to the walls and railings and whatnot.

And he let go at just the wrong moment.

And the guy, it was as if like an aggressive football player of a ghost had just broadsided him.

He just flew across the room and went crashing into a bunch of canisters on the other side that had been tethered.

And he got right up, you know, and shook it off and laughed.

But just seeing the invisible force throw someone across the room, even though no one had laid hands on them,

was amazing.

One of the things I marveled at in the culture of seafarers generally was this almost existential resignation, this sort of shrugging to fate that seemed to be pervasive in the psychology and the culture of people that spend long times at sea.

And I started to understand that better when I went through a storm.

This resignation is something that you can't learn by someone describing it to you, you can't think it into existence.

It's something really that you feel.

And once you've felt it, you know it.

And no place did I feel it more intensely than in storm.

It's so hard to communicate what it's like out there.

You need to talk bigger in order to kind of just shake people, let people know, like, it's unreal out there.

I've met no shortage of colorful characters in this reporting.

And

one that really stuck out for me was Bren Smith.

My name is Bren Smith and I'm a lifelong commercial fisherman and over the years ended up as a regenerative ocean farmer here in Long Island Sound.

Bren runs this organization called Green Wave that is highly innovative in ocean farming and finding more sustainable ways to feed people.

He's a saltwater in the veins type guy and he's the embodiment of everything I came to respect and admire about seafarers.

What comes to mind when I think about the ocean and working on it is like humility, right?

As a fisherman, you have so little control over your life, how many fish you're going to catch, what the weather is going to be like.

And at any point, I mean, you know, boats go down all the time.

And

no matter how big the boat is, being in a 50-foot swell is just, you know,

the rage and the anger of and the overpowering force it just makes you feel helpless and humble and I think that's a good emotion to have I wish more people felt that level of humility when they think about other planet

one of the things I really liked about seafarer culture was this kind of gritty bluntness that you found often

captains and officers and deckhands, what they had to say were often profound, poetic, wise,

but they said it in such a straight fashion.

And I really valued that.

All I wanted to be growing up was a fisherman.

I didn't want to be an astronaut or anything else.

I just, you know, I wanted to be like my neighbors.

People owned their own boats.

They succeeded and failed on their own terms.

They didn't have a boss.

And they had this pride of feeding the community.

And that was just something I wanted.

I wanted one of these jobs that people write and sing songs about.

Like, you know, there are coal workers, farmers, steel workers, and fishermen that people there are all these shanties and folk songs about.

And there aren't any good songs about lawyers and Facebook employees, right?

But there are songs about these folks that build power and feed the country.

So that's who I wanted to be.

So I dropped out of high school when I was 14 and headed out to sea.

I fished in Lynn, Gloucester.

I was doing lobster tuna.

So you name it.

I fished it.

And

it was the best job I ever had, ever will have.

There's this release that happens in the sea where like the walls disappear, the people watching you disappear, like you just feel so boxed in in your land.

And then you come in the ocean and it's just endless expanse as far as you can see.

And your heart opens up and like you kind of stand straighter.

At least I do.

I just feel like this weight lifted off of me.

And I just feel like I can do whatever the fk I want.

There's this feeling.

There's like, yeah, they got rules, but those rules,

they can't catch me out here, right?

They can't do anything to me.

Like, I'll see them coming.

And so there is this feeling like you, you, like, you won't get busted.

That either brings out, I found, the best in people or the worst in people.

Like, there's no middle ground out in the ocean.

It's, it's a world of extremes one way or the other.

And that, I, you know, go back to what makes fishermen different is I just like

other people don't get to taste that level of freedom and there is, there's just nothing, nothing like it.

There were, throughout the reporting, so many deckhands that had experienced such awful things, abandonment, rape, murder, beatings, you name it.

And almost to a man, these guys, after recounting to me what they went through would finish up by saying that they intend to go back out and I was always baffled by that at some level and the simplistic explanation for it is desperation poverty need and I think that's surely one factor But it's not the only or even the most significant factor.

I think what really draws these folks back, it's this changed outlook and emotional status that happens when you spend time out there and you want to get back to it.

You'll hear people talk about the draw of the sea and it's a spell, the spell that it casts on you and stuff like that.

And that that's really really true.

I mean the moment moment I headed out on the fishing boats, my entire life has been about returning to the ocean.

I've been pushed off where the cod stocks crash, when I tried to, you know, salmon, farming, things like that.

There has been only one place where I ever wanted to be in any job I wanted.

And

it was, you know, floating around on a boat working.

That pace.

I just...

It's hard to describe.

It's the pacing of the work that makes it so engaging.

And you you have that much silence, and you're doing the same thing for years and years at a time, same sort of activity.

You're just there's a depth that comes to your life, and you get to think about it a lot.

You get to think about your life and just be still, and uh, yeah, that's good for humans.

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Before I became a journalist, I was an anthropologist.

I was in a doctoral program.

I was sort of grinding my way through,

decided I wanted to step away from doctoral work and do something very different for a little while just to clear my head.

And so I decided I'm going to go get a job as an anthropologist working on a research vessel for three, six, nine months.

I had not spent any time at sea ever before.

They became riveted by this sort of transient diaspora tribe of people

that share a culture, language, and lore, and humor, and superstitions.

The stories these guys would tell just captivated me, and I thought, wow, how have I not read about this stuff before?

It's just striking.

And I couldn't ever put that fascination away.

This reporting is definitely the most physically demanding, emotionally demanding reporting I've ever done.

I never, growing up, spent time on boats, so I had no initial awareness of whether I would be more or less susceptible to seasickness.

Much to my delight, I found out early on during the reporting that I was unusually immune to seasickness.

And a doctor later told me that it's some strange quirk of my inner ear or whatever, but it was a great luxury because where other folks were getting sick, I rarely, if ever, did.

The big

downside of that was that while I didn't get sick at sea, I did get sick on land with something called land sickness, the opposite of seasickness or sway.

This was essentially this funny thing, well studied and documented, where some people have an inner ear that allows them to acclimate quickly at sea, but then the pendulum won't switch back.

So when they get back on land, their body still thinks they're at sea, and you have the equivalent of what I would say is like bed spins, drunken bed spins, but standing up.

So the world is moving, you actually feel like you're still on a ship.

Your head feels really queasy and you throw up and it gets more intense the more cases you have of it and so I was doing this reporting for years and you know it got really bad I would sometimes step back and within 12 hours of being on shore I was throwing up and it just felt like a funny metaphor for my relationship almost the abusive relationship I had with the sea where it had captured me and it was like your body holding on to the memory of a place that you'd already already left.

When I got back from these long reporting trips, I noticed changes.

I ate faster, for example.

It was not a meal, it was something to get done.

At night, I found the bed too big.

I was used to sleeping in these tiny, small cubbies, and sleeping in a big bed again felt vulnerable and exposed.

I had a different relationship with chit-chat, small talk, just the sheer quantity of words spoken, written, you know, coming at me.

I had grown accustomed to not having to deal with so much interaction and conversation.

I had sort of leaned into the silence at sea.

I have a pretty tolerant family, my son, my wife, and they all noticed that

I was more aloof, I was less able or prone to carrying myself in social settings.

I just felt

like a very different person.

And, you know, I would get back from these long trips and be exhausted and in many ways emotionally fairly

battered by much of what I'd covered.

And yet, before long, I was already thinking about when can I get back out there.

At the outset this was just another beat you know journalistic beat storyline series that I intended to do maybe year year and a half and then move on to the next topic.

But with time

with exposure it became something else entirely.

The water comes in.

Yes!

We've been here.

Yeah, it's in there but

You couldn't help become more immersed and sort of feel responsible for those people, you know, that space.

And it shows up in subtle ways, you know.

So when I'm on the ship and we're going to be there for a couple weeks and deckhands see that I have some pills, happen to be multivitamins, but they don't know that.

You know, they come to assume that I'm essentially a doctor, you know, like relative to their access to meds.

And so they're coming to me for, you know, diagnosis and treatment of this cut or that infection or that pain in their stomach or this headache or whatever, and wondering what they should do about it and do I have anything for it.

And so I sort of became almost like a...

an honorary EMT and my med kit grew you know exponentially as the years went on doing this.

These sorts of interactions, you can't be dismissive of.

You're going to be there for a while.

You owe it to them to give them an honest hearing and maybe even try to help them.

And it sort of changes your relationship to that firewall between journalists and something else.

I

realized in my core that I wanted to stick with this line of reporting.

But I was told by my editors, and for very good reason, you know, my editors at the New York Times said, Look, you've been doing it two, two and a half years.

It's time to move on.

We need to move you around.

We don't want you to sink in.

We've got a lot of other worthy targets that we need investigative reporters to be covering.

So I reached this moment where I realized that the only way I could keep doing this type of reporting is if I quit the Times and set out and created my own organization.

In what began as an award-winning series in 2015 2015 in the New York Times and a resulting book, the Outlaw Ocean is a non-profit journalism organisation that produces high-impact investigative stories about lawlessness at sea and the diversity of environmental, human rights and labour abuses occurring offshore around the world.

So is this the situation everywhere or is it in certain locations or certain types of fisheries?

Certain locations, certain countries.

My decision to leave the paper was huge.

You know, I had never worked in a newspaper other than the New York Times my whole career.

I had a kid headed to college, and I was considering leaving a pretty amazing job with a steady salary to something uncertain.

But the topic had gotten under my skin, and I wanted to keep going back out there, and I was going to change my life and my profession to make that possible.

I began on this reporting almost a decade ago, and in that time,

some things have started to improve.

For example, with the murder investigation, it took eight long, frustrating years, but this year, the captain was finally prosecuted and was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors say the suspect, a Chinese national, admitted ordering the killings while captaining the Taiwanese vessel.

The suspect has been indicted on homicide and gun control charge according to local media reports.

The killings were exposed to happen.

In the case of sea slavery in Thailand, you do have to give some credit to the government.

They are doing more at-sea and in-port inspections and they are proceeding to prosecute some of the worst offenders of human slavery.

So the Thai government and all the Thai agency concerned is quite worried about that problem.

And we are determined to work further to pursue the matter vigorously in order to rip the country of this modern slavery.

You look to a place like New Zealand, which discovered sea slavery in its own waters, and it took bold steps to kick out all the foreign vessels where this was occurring, and this was the first country that had taken such a bold stance.

So, you know, things are getting better in some places, but in many other places, in many other ways, things are getting worse.

Get your stuff on.

Suicide and depression rates for seafarers are epidemic.

There's more violence at sea than there ever was before, and there are far more weapons.

Two Koreans were killed on a Korean deep-sea fishing vessel operating in the Indian Ocean near the coast of Seychelles, located east of the African mainland.

Every week, every second week, we used to go pick up dead people.

We have been either murdered or stabbed or no one knows and we just pick them up.

The Manhattan are competing for dwindling resources, which only increases the drive towards illegality.

The Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs has demolished 31 illegal fishing boats.

left for dead on the high seas.

Over the course of my reporting, it became harder to think of this place in good guy, bad guy narratives.

You look at Somali piracy,

these are the worst kinds of pirates in the modern era.

And yet, even these guys, at least in the early stages of Somali piracy, themselves weren't just pirates.

They initially were fishermen that had been put out of work and through desperation had ended up engaging in piracy and extortion.

In extreme conditions, you rarely are going to find simple black and white dichotomies between guilty and innocent or good and evil.

I think we in the West like to think that modernity, civilization, the growth of law and state have stamped out certain things.

When you get out there, you begin to question that core assumption of modern civilization, the core assumption of whether we as humans internally have limits on how we will behave when we don't have the threat of consequences.

These core assumptions about human nature and society get a bit rattled, I'll say, out there, because you see a certain level of depravity that you thought was gone.

There's a quote by W.H.

Auden that I think encapsulates this realm.

He wrote, The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is liable to relapse.

I think there's a fine line between civilization and the lack of it.

And the exploration of this frontier is an attempt to look at how thin that line is and what's on the other side.

From CBC Podcasts and the LA Times, this series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Ryan French, editing and sound design by Michael Ward, sound recording by Tony Fowler.

Our associate producer is Margaret Parsons.

Additional production by Joe Galvin and Marcela Bele.

For CBC Podcasts, Anna Ashete is the coordinating producer and Emily Canal is the digital producer.

Additional sound mixing is by Esteban Cuevas.

Damon Fairless is senior producer.

Tanya Springer is senior manager.

And Arif Narani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For the LA Times, Jasmine Aguilera is the head of audio.

Hibba Elurbani is the executive producer of podcasts.

Brandon Sides is creative director of consumer marketing.

Kayla Bell is product marketing manager.

Lauren Rocha is the integrated media manager.

Michaela Harter and Patricia Gardner are project managers in consumer marketing.

And Darius Durakshin is the director of advertising for the LA Times.

This episode features music by Bokey, Jai Jagdish, Antarctic Wastelands, Siora's Mans, Brotho and JV, Dear Gravity, Patricia Spiro, Smoke Trees, Mellar Man, and Hiyamiro Yoshiteru.

The music in the series comes from the Outlaw Ocean Music Project.

This music is really special to me.

It's part of an effort for musicians all over the world who donated their time and talent to put a soundtrack to the recording we do.

Their music is available online at the Outlaw Ocean Music Project website and wherever you stream music.

Please, check out their work.

Additional music by Scott Coatsworth, Britt Brady, Matthew Stevens, Gamatone, and Fabio Nacimento, who is also my camera operator and all-weather travel companion and records music under the name Servano.

Thank you to all the guests who volunteered to be interviewed.

They are, in order of appearance, Duncan Copeland, Executive Director of Trick Mac Tracking, Kevin Thompson, CEO of Sextant Group, Tony Long, CEO of Global Fishing Watch, Captain Peter Hammerstedt from Seashepard, Investigative Researcher Daniel Murphy, Shannon Service, Director of Ghost Fleet, Rebecca Gompertz, founder of Women on Waves, Daniel Pauley from the University of British Columbia, Gambian reporter Mustafa Mane, chemistry professor Ahmed Manjang, Richard Udell from the U.S.

Department of Justice, Annie Leonard, Executive Director of Greenpeace US, and Bren Smith, founder of Greenwave.

A special thank you to the following organizations for providing assets for the podcast and for supporting this journalism: Sea Shepherd, Greenpeace, Global Fishing Watch, Women on Waves, TrigMap Tracking, Environmental Justice Foundation, and quite especially, National Geographic Society.

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