So, not long ago, a graffiti artist, JR Artist, who flyposted a whole bunch of CMA CGM containers so that CMA CGM Magellan looked like this (at least until the next port where the containers had to be unloaded; I also wonder if they weren’t unloaded in the intermediate ports, what hell the crane operators […]
It all started off with this FT piece by Horatio Clare, whose book (a meditative reflection on ships and travel on the sea) was about to come out. I had just finished reading Rose George’s amazing book on her travels on a Maersk ship. And was about to read about historian Maya Jassanof’s travels on a freighter […]
I have already written about ships as workplaces, and of workers held captive on ships. Now, the NY Times reports on a massive floating refinery which is going to look for fossil fuels in the Indian Ocean. The ship is HUGE: More than 530 yards long and 80 yards wide, it was constructed with 260,000 […]
The Guardian reports that the Libyan legislature has taken refuge in a Greek car ferry: A Greek car ferry has been hired as last-minute accommodation for Libya‘s embattled parliament, which has fled the country’s civil war to the small eastern town of Tobruk. The 17,000-ton Elyros liner has been deployed, complete with its Greek crew, […]
The segment of my January/February container-ship journey I am most anticipating is passing through the Suez Canal. Here is what Horatio Clare writes about his passage through Suez: Unfinished wars lie under all our horizons. The chart on which Chris plotted our approach to the canal shows Egypt, the Sinai, the southern end of Israel an Gaza. […]
The Super Hornet bombers that dropped 8 500-pound JDAM bombs on Islamic State forces in Iraq had flown from the aircraft carrier USS George H W Bush, afloat in the Persian Gulf. It is one among at least 5 Navy ships and 3 ships belonging to the US Marines in the Gulf right now. The news struck me because […]
John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker. I would have remembered […]
Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella. A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)? A young man is given command of his first ship. He finds that the previous commander of the ship had gone mad and died. […]
Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words. A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension. Imagine, then, that this character […]
