Five years ago, a mobile phone was left behind in the back of a taxi in Fiji, and its contents triggered an extraordinary murder investigation. A video recorded on the phone showed four men flailing in the sea among wreckage of an overturned wooden boat. They are being circled by fishing boats, whose crews do nothing to help and then open fire. The helpless men are picked off one by one, and the sea around them turns red.
The story of this atrocity is told in The Outlaw Ocean, in which New York Times journalist Ian Urbina explores a parallel world, spanning two thirds of the Earth’s surface but almost entirely hidden from public scrutiny. It is a world of bandit trawlers, pirates, enslaved crews, brutality and neglect, afflicted by all the worst cruelties of life on dry land, without the redeeming hope of justice. Although the killings were witnessed by a significant number of crew members of several boats, they were not reported, and Urbina says there was not even a requirement to do so under maritime law.
The “unfortunate truth” is that “in much of the maritime world the law protects a ship’s cargo better than its crew”, he writes, tracing this all-embracing callousness back to English common law, rooted in an era of tall masted sailing ships when death at sea was viewed an act of God. In theory, the laws on board a ship are those of the nation whose flag it flies and there is a patchwork of maritime laws for the high seas. But it soon becomes evident that what laws there may be are almost never enforced. Even if a terrestrial police force could be bothered to send detectives to the scene of a murder there would be no grave to exhume. Offshore – as one investigator tells Urbina – “the dead stay gone”.
The Fijian police open and close a cursory investigation after the phone is discovered in the taxi, but ultimately the mystery is unravelled by Urbina and other journalists as well as NGOs, outraged by the cold-blooded nature of the crime. The victims turn out to be young Pakistani fishermen who came too close to Taiwanese-owned tuna ships in the Indian Ocean in August 2012. The motive for the murders is never entirely clear. The tuna ship skippers declare the Pakistanis to be pirates and have their boat rammed and the crew executed in the water. But they would have seen their victims were unarmed. Urbina speculates that the Pakistanis were killed because they were considered to be competition. At the time of the book going to print, there has been no sign of justice for the murders. One of the tuna boats involved eventually sinks, quite possibly scuttled to destroy evidence, but no one is convicted. For Urbina, it is not the inhumanity of the incident that is remarkable, but the fluke of the evidence left on the phone.
Captains of outlaw ships inflict capital punishment and fishermen frequently kill each other in brawls. Impunity is the dominant theme of this book. The high seas are crisscrossed by vessels operating outside the law – fishing in another country’s territorial waters, with crews trapped in debt to the owners or intermediaries. They are unable to jump ship or complain about the appalling conditions and lack of safety. When shipowners run short of money, ships are often anchored out of port and their crews marooned with no pay and no way of getting home. Most are desperate men from the poorest countries. Their identity cards have been taken from them when they board. If such conditions were discovered in factories on land, there would be “immediate outrage, criminal investigations and consumer boycotts”, Urbina notes. Not so at sea.
Urbina devoted five years of his life to the project, three of them at sea, hopscotching from one ocean to another, risking his life multiple times in storms, often on ropey vessels among armed and suspicious seafarers. He learned to take up as little space as possible and say almost nothing until his hosts adjusted to his presence. His rendezvous with contacts on at least one occasion was arranged for 100 miles offshore through mountainous waves, so he first had to find someone willing and able to take them there. Little wonder the stories he tells have not been told before.
He describes his journeys as an exploration of “places where the worst instincts of our human species thrived and flourished”. But he also witnesses “unparalleled beauty and true marvel” and meets “bizarre sometimes heroic actors”. Among the heroes in his tale are a small band of enforcement officers and volunteers trying to uphold the law against all odds, like doomed sheriffs in the old westerns, hopelessly outnumbered by gunslinging outlaws.
The opening adventure in the book involves Urbina teaming up with the vigilante environmentalists of Sea Shepherd, a radical offshoot of Greenpeace, in an epic 110-day, 11,550 nautical mile pursuit of a trawler illegally fishing for toothfish (sold in restaurants as Chilean sea bass) in the Antarctic ocean. Along the way, they survive horrific storms and an attempt by the rogue trawler to ram them. It is a rare victory. The fugitive ship is forced to abandon its vast nets and is eventually scuttled off the coast of west Africa. But after a short spell in custody in São Tomé, the officers are mysteriously released. Even this triumph is partial.
Urbina also recounts the efforts of the tiny Pacific archipelago nation of Palau, which tries to protect coastal fisheries the size of France with 18 police officers in a single patrol boat. The only way the authorities are able to intercept illegal fishing vessels is with the help of an environmental activist monitoring the satellite feed in an office in Virginia, and passing on directions to the patrol – a heroic endeavour. Yet the overall tone of Urbina’s book is pessimistic. Palau is beautiful but is surrounded by giant, state-subsidised poacher fleets and a plastic gyre as big as Texas.
The oceans are vast, but their bounty is finite and the outlaws are increasingly well equipped, with gadgets that tell them where the fish are. The global black market in seafood is worth more than $20bn, Urbina notes; appetites are insatiable. Consider the butchering of sharks for their fins, served at weddings around east Asia – it brings down whole ecosystems, as the massacre allows smaller reef-eating fish to proliferate. With the world’s seafood stocks in crisis, Urbina lifts the thick veil on a global criminal culture, at just the moment when the damage inflicted on the oceans is becoming terminal.
• The Outlaw Ocean is published by Bodley Head (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.