maritime ignorants, beware!

Great stories, trashy analysis
WILLIAM Langewiesche’s "The Outlaw Sea" vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces – both natural and man-made – to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world’s oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India’s ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died. These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow. Langewiesche dismisses the IMO’s entire body of regulation as “a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea”, while he claims that ship registries are “rarely based in the countries whose names they carry”. He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy and “the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism” (whatever that might be). Even the long-discredited ‘al-Qaeda navy’ gets an airing. So The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, but the analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong.
Philip Simons and Patrick Neylan-Francis