Looking for a Ship

Read Online Looking for a Ship by John McPhee - Free Book Online Page B

Book: Looking for a Ship by John McPhee Read Free Book Online
Authors: John McPhee
Ads: Link
two thousand ships and then decline by eighty per cent. He has seen at least fifteen American shipping companies go ventral in the water. Only three major ones remain alive in international shipping: American President Lines, Sea-Land, and Lykes Brothers Steamship Company. Ship for ship, crew lists have become much shorter as well—a process known as reduced manning, which is the result of a combination of automational technology and economic constraint. Ships that might once have had fifty in the crew now have twenty-one. Some ships are so undermanned that extra people have to come out from land to help dock them.
    From No. 1 in the world in total ships, the United States Merchant Marine has dropped to No. 13, while Panama and Russia are ascendant, with Liberia not far behind. In the world competition for cargo, American-flag companies sail under heavy overheads of taxes, insurance rates, and crew costs, while ships under other flags are much less encumbered, and the Russian Merchant Marine, which often underbids everybody, is a hobby of the state. The wages of American crews are at least four times as high as the wages of crews sailing under many foreign flags. Federal construction subsidies have long since been removed. These
are not the economics of a winning bid, and the fleet continues to shrink.
    The situation long ago gave rise to open-flag registry —to the so-called flag of convenience, the convenience being that taxes could be avoided, insurance could be to a considerable extent ignored, and wages attractive to shipowners could be paid to merchant sailors drawn from any part of the world, if ships were registered in countries that would permit and fashion such a package. If you were a flagmaker, at this point you would have wanted to get out your Panamanian rectangles. As small nations catered to the balance sheets of alien shipowners, their services became known as boutique registries. Evergreen, flying the white star of Taiwan, has been described as “the leading foreign-flag company in the world,” with crews of only sixteen or eighteen and “monthly salaries roughly equivalent to the weekly pay of American sailors.” You can register a ship in the Republic of Vanuatu. A ship wholly owned in Kansas City can sail under the flag of the Sultan of Oman.
    Carnival Cruise Lines, of Miami, Florida, consists of three ships under the Liberian flag, one under the Bahamian flag, four under the Panamanian flag, and three under the Dutch flag. Great American Lines, recently bankrupt, was a hundred per cent Liberian. Great American Lines had one ship. The Connecticut Bank & Trust Company owns two ships, both Liberian. Exxon has sixty-two ships, under ten flags, including eight under the Argentine gold sun, five under the French tricolor, and twenty flying the Union Jack, which has become a flag of convenience as Britain
sells the waves. The Amoco fleet is entirely Liberian. The Chevron fleet is twenty per cent American, nine per cent British, fifteen per cent Bahamian, and fifty-six per cent Liberian. Texaco has thirteen ships, none flying the American flag. Mobil has thirty-six ships under seven flags, including the flag of South Africa.
    Three hundred and forty-one ships owned by Americans sail under foreign flags. Some of the owners patriotically refer to these ships as the Effective U.S.-Controlled Fleet, a term regarded as a risible euphemism by, among other people, the maritime unions and Captain Washburn. In his words, “a ship owned in Chicago, with a Burmese crew and Spanish officers, will not go where you want it to in an emergency.”
    The crew of Stella mutters:
    â€œLykes Brothers could go foreign-flag like the rest of them, and sail with Balearic Islanders.”
    â€œYou can hire people to chip paint and fill an oilcan, but who’s going to rebuild a Westinghouse turbogenerator?”
    â€œWe can’t compete with countries that pay sailors one dollar a day and feed them

Similar Books

Inside the CIA

Ronald Kessler

The Puppeteer

Timothy Williams

Jamintha

Jennifer Wilde

As I Am

AnnaLisa Grant

The Born Queen

Greg Keyes